what to know about ZAO deepfake app
September 1, 2019
In case you haven’t heard, #ZAO is a Chinese app which completely blew up since Friday. Best application of ‘Deepfake’-style AI facial replacement I’ve ever seen.
It’s already under a lot of fire for user privacy protection under their terms and conditions. So consider this my sacrifice to demonstrate so you don’t have to give up your portrait identity rights
It’s clear that #ZAO isn’t really going for “accuracy” per se, but rather a “subjective” good looking result. Similar to a beauty cam, it retains facial structure of the original actors, so the cherry picked results more or less always looks good and encourages users to share.
I can totally see this being applied in Films/ TV, imagine logging into your Netflix or Disney+ account – watching the latest TV show/ Marvel movie, where a stand-in actor’s would be auto-replaced with your own.
I’m both excited and interested from a technologist/ creator perspective and morbidly cynical from a moral one :'(
Pretty soon corporations will start advertising to you using your own face.
Before this gets too sensational – just to clarify: #ZAO app generates these vids from a preselected cherry-picked clips. I’m assuming they’ve trained an A.I. on SAID clips for generic targeting of facial features and quickly retargeting your facial features from a single photo.
It’s not able to magically recompose anyone’s face on any video immediately. In fact, it’s not doing anything that existing platforms that allow users to post selfies can’t already (or potentially) do. As cynical as I am about dangers of AI, let’s not get too conspiratorial here.
Actually since this app went viral in China, the biggest focus over the past few days has been in regards to its user privacy terms – with many social media (ie. Wechat) blocking #ZAO vids from being shared and users requesting the app to delete their account/ photos.
So no, the Chinese government isn’t trying to take over the world by hijacking your facial likeness through #ZAO, considering:
A. The app is only available in Chinese app stores and there’s pretty much already security cams in every street corner in Chinese cities.
B. For such foul-play it’s much easier to crawl existing social media for people’s selfies rather than spending all this effort to build a commercial app that only requests ‘one photo’ from users as a selling point.
https://twitter.com/AllanXia
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