Manifesto

The people we love don't have to fade.

Every photograph is a small act of remembering. We point a lens at something and say: this mattered enough to keep. Most of the photographs we wish we had, we don't have. The wedding when one parent was already gone. The grandparent who would have loved meeting the baby. The dog who was always under the kitchen table. The partner who lived two flights away.

For most of human history, we accepted that those photographs simply wouldn't exist. The lens wasn't there. The people weren't in the same room. Time had already moved on. AI image generation changes that equation. For the first time, it is possible to make new photographs with people who can't be physically present — including people who have died.

This is sensitive territory and we don't pretend otherwise. The technology is the same whether you're using it to put your late mother in a wedding photo or to fabricate something a person never said and never wanted. The thing that distinguishes a tool of dignity from a tool of exploitation is the rules around how it's built and used. Those rules need to be published, version-controlled, and enforced in product — not buried in a terms-of-service nobody reads.

What we will be

• A tool for honoring memory, not replacing grief.
• Honest about what we are: AI photographs, identified as such with content credentials.
• Private. Your photos and characters are encrypted, never used to train shared models, and deleted on request.
• Restrained. We refuse to generate photos of minors. We refuse to simulate speech. We refuse to market the technology as resurrection.
• Multilingual. Memorial culture is plural — Yahrzeit, Qingming, Día de los Muertos. We support 34 languages and counting.

What we will not become

• A voice cloning service.
• A chatbot pretending to be a dead person.
• A platform that generates new images of children.
• A surveillance product. We do not sell or share your reference photos.
• A growth-at-all-costs venture-backed business. Lover Snap is independently operated.

The closing line

A photograph cannot bring someone back. It was never the photograph's job to. The photograph's job is to say: you were here, and I remember. For the people we miss most — and the photographs we never got to take with them — that's enough. And that's what Lover Snap is for.

— Jiuhong Deng, founder · read bio