Made in China: Mobile App Turns Users into Movie Stars


Zao's mobile app, which changes users’s selfies to movie stars, broke download records in the Chinese App Store in a few days. In Russia, ZAO is not yet available.

One selfie and now you are the hero with Leo DiCaprio in the Titanic, Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory anything you want.. Zao offers users a selection of popular films, TV shows, shows, video games, so you can try yourself in different roles.
How it works? You take a selfie, choose which movie or show you want to “get into,” and the Deepfake-based application processes the image for eight seconds and integrates you, for example, into Titanic.

The quality of the image is still suffering, but the developers promise to solve the problem. Perhaps this will happen very soon, because only a few days after its appearance, Zao became wildly popular! While users enthusiastically post their "star" frames on the social network, a scandal began to flare up around the new application. It turns out that the initial terms of the user agreement stated that the rights to content created using Zao pass to the developer of the Momo application. Many saw this as a threat to the personal data of users, so this item disappeared. Plus, if a user deletes his video from the application library, the service will destroy it on servers as well. It’s impossible to check, so we can only hope they tell the truth

At the same time, Tencent which owns the Chinese messenger WeChat is still banned from publishing links to videos and gifs created in Zao in its services. Why? The fact is that the application uses Deepfake - a scandalous technology, with the help of which they often create fake porn with the participation of stars. Tencent experts fear the spread of misinformation, so they imposed a ban. Meanwhile, the number of references to Zao in the Chinese analogue of Twitter (Weibo) has exceeded 8 million, and the fascination with the new application is spreading at the speed of a virus.