A Viral Deepfake AppThat Can Turn You Into A Celeb

ZAO is a free deepfake face-swapping app that lets you replace the face of popular characters in a video clip of a scene with your own face. It’s reminiscent of FaceApp but ZAO scans your image and uses it as the new face of the fictional character in a movie or TV show scene. You can have fun pretending you’re a celebrity in a popular show with this video app.

Been There, Done That

ZAO’s technology isn’t new. As mentioned, FaceApp—which morph people’s photos into what they might look like in the future—makes use of facial recognition and an intelligent editing system to give interestingly believable results. This kind of thing might also remind you of augmented reality and Snapchat’s animated filters and lenses. Whatever the case, something like ZAO isn’t new—but what is new is the surprising speed and accuracy of how it works. Instead of photos, ZAO uses videos in animating your likeness onto the faces of the characters and that just heightens this app’s terrifying capability. 

We’re on Videos This Time

ZAO works by just scanning your image and transposing it to a character of your choice. The app fully animates your face in accordance with how the character moves, so even dialogue scenes will show you actually talking the same way the character does. Compared to other apps, this is some freaky stuff and definitely looks fun to try. However, you need to be careful, just like how people have been warned of FaceApp. ZAO received immediate backlash for how creepy and unnervingly powerful its editing technology is. The developer had to change the app’s privacy policy, too, which says a lot about how lax this app is with that. You can’t choose whatever video you’d like to have your face in, though, and there are only a few movie and TV show scenes you can use in the app, but the whole thing was enough to cause an uproar.

Playing with Fire

Regardless of the risks, ZAO is fun to try out but it really doesn’t offer much else due to the work involved in making sure selected scenes can animate your face. You’re free to try it yourself, but just like FaceApp, you’ve been warned about both the privacy issues and the lack of other features.