How AI Brings Time Travel To Life—Alternate Realities Included!

During the holidays, I was hanging with friends when someone said something curious: “I feel like I’m in a bizarre Insta algorithm right now. I keep getting all these weird videos in my feed.”

Let’s pause here because that’s a lot to unpack.

First of all, ask yourself if that sentence would have made any sense if you had heard it in the year 2005? Definitely not. Moreover, I find it interesting that we’ve all, more or less, accepted the fact that algorithms now deeply influence the content we consume, underpinning consensual reality.

AIContentfy asks a key related question to this point: “Have you ever noticed that when you visit a website or app, you’re often presented with recommendations for content that you might be interested in? Whether it’s a movie on Netflix or a product on Amazon, these recommendations are often tailored to your individual preferences and browsing history. This is an example of personalized content recommendations, and it’s a feature that’s made possible by AI.”

Along these lines, a YouTube algorithm recently decided, for whatever reason, that I’d enjoy watching a clip of shoppers at a Kmart store in 1992.

Spoiler alert: The algorithm was onto something. I did dig that video.

It’s fascinating to journey back in time to see how people once behaved—especially before those smartphones in our pockets transformed daily life. If you haven’t already seen these types of videos, check them out. They’re what I might call the poor man’s version of time travel. No, they don’t give you all the freedom Marty McFly enjoyed interacting with the past in Back to the Future. But you do get to time travel a little. More, consuming videos of unsuspecting people living out their daily lives in a different era is mind-bending.

They offer a slice-of-life depiction of a bygone era.

The key to this phenomenon is that the video participants don’t know they are being captured for posterity. It’s found footage. The people involved do not act or pretend as you might find in a movie shot in 1992. Instead, via an innocuous voyeuristic process, viewers like you and me in 2025 can leap back in time to observe long gone people and objects as they once were.

(Sidenote: If you do watch these videos, two things will immediately stand out. One is that people used to be a lot skinnier. The other is that they paid attention to each other more without screen distractions.)

Fascinating as this cultural artifact is, there’s even more to AI time travel—byway of YouTube. Channels such as Glamourdaze provide clips of life more than 100 years ago with jaw-dropping restored footage—enabled by AI. Watching these videos is akin to the 1992 Kmart phenomenon—but supercharged. After all, many of us lived through 1992. We may have even shopped at a Kmart that year.

This makes such video viewing nostalgic.

But watching ice skaters trek across a frozen Montreal lake in 1899? Now that’s something outside of our life experiences. Unless, of course, you actually do run with geniuses like Dr. Emmett Brown and are secretly traversing the wispy strands of time. If so, drop me a line. We should talk.

Yet another YouTube favorite of mine comes from the channel NASS. It shows life in the Hollywood Hills back in the 1920s in full color. Of course, if you’ve seen color-enhanced films, such as It’s a Wonderful Life, you’re familiar with the process of upgrading black-and-white cinematic marvels.

That’s not what this is.

Why? Again, no one is acting. No one is mugging for the camera. Instead, we get the closest facsimile to real life with extant technology. It smacks of Yuval Noah Harari’s intriguing 2015 book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. In it, the AI futurist explores tech’s potential to one day enable us to literally experience another’s consciousness. We are nowhere close to possessing such abilities, but AI advancements are opening the door to them.

But there’s more head-scratching YouTube content for your algorithm to feast on. Mine recently gifted me a treasure trove from a channel provocatively titled Abandoned Films.

Marrying old Panavision stylistics with newfangled AI technology, it creates a Hegelian dialectical video output: reimaginings of shows and movies that never existed. I encourage you to check out its many haunting offerings, including a rendering of 2022’s Super Mario Bros.—with 1950s sensibilities. The calming voice of a bygone narrator from Radio Days plays over a rich color palette of the Mushroom Kingdom. Meanwhile, violin strings swoon as actors—who never existed—peel out of Old Hollywood to make fascinating cameos.

Whoever trained the AI to produce these futuristics relics nailed the sensibility of the post-World War II era. The screenwriting possesses a simpler, black-and-white depiction of good and evil almost entirely absent from today’s nuanced moviemaking. Heroes are heroes in these reboots. Bad guys are bad guys. No in-between. Also, proving their faithfulness to Panavision aesthetics, all these AI-generated videos present movie stars exhibiting stunning good looks.

Growing up, it never occurred to me that technology—especially AI—could be used to summon and reimagine the past. As I watch the Panavision fare, I am put in the mind of Philip K. Dick. Perhaps only literary sci-fi oracles like him, Kurt Vonnegut, and Ray Bradbury could conceive of a future in which the past returns to both inform and challenge our understanding of reality.

The novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald, is no one’s idea of a sci-fi pulp writer. Yet he describes our peculiar moment best with the final words of his American masterpiece, The Great Gatsby: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. … And one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”