As if nothing had happened: a bold AI art project recreating deceased icons
Would the Princess of Wales meet the world again if the cameras could freeze a moment in time? The question lingers as a fictional scenario, not a forecast. This project centers on the abilities of artificial intelligence to reimagine the visages of cultural giants who are no longer with us. Crafted by Turkish photographer Alper Yesiltaş, it uses an AI program in a multi-step workflow to generate images that resemble how late celebrities might have looked today.
The collection, titled “As if nothing had happened,” aims to bring back to life more than a dozen public figures who departed early. Among the figures imagined are legendary musicians such as Michael Jackson, Freddie Mercury, John Lennon, Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, and Tupac Shakur. The project invites viewers to contemplate not only what these artists might have become with time but also how contemporary audiences would respond to their revived presence.
Beyond musicians, the project also contemplates portraits of actors and cultural icons whose lives were cut short or altered by tragedy, including Heather Notebook, Paul Walker, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bruce Lee, and River Phoenix. Each imagined portrait is grounded in a careful, historical approach to the subject’s appearance while employing AI to project a version of the person that might exist if circumstances had been different. The intent is not to claim a definitive likeness but to explore the dream of an alternate reality where loss could be momentarily undone through technology.
In discussing the work, the creator explained that advances in artificial intelligence allow ideas that once seemed purely fictional to be rendered with surprising clarity. He noted that the mixing of technological tools with artistic vision has created opportunities to visualize possibilities that were previously inaccessible. The project is presented as an artistic exercise meant to provoke reflection on memory, fame, and the ethics of recreating likenesses of real people after death. It invites audiences to question what it means to see a familiar face restored and recontextualized in a modern digital landscape.
Yesiltaş described the process as time-consuming and iterative, involving multiple software programs and meticulous adjustments to achieve a result that feels almost real. The satisfaction, he says, comes when the observer perceives the image as authentic, as if the photograph had been captured through a contemporary lens rather than generated by machine learning. The result is a set of portraits that blur the line between documentary realism and speculative imagination, prompting discussion about both the power and the limits of current AI imaging technology. (Citation: Bored Panda project summary and accompanying posts)