ZAO trades in the kind of AI technology that makes deepfakes-like this viral Bill Hader/Tom Cruise mashup from last month-simultaneously amazing and terrifying. #DMC5 /AdpB4DIA00- Allan Xia September 2, 2019 I guess folks might not have to spend hours during character creation? I can see streamers loving this application of AI facial replacement. Oh yeah, #Zao also works rather well with CG characters. The results, as shown in some of the tweets below, are impressively realistic. ZAO’s appeal is admittedly irresistible: Upload your selfie to the app and within seconds, your face will be inserted into scenes from movies like Titanic and shows like Game of Thrones. It hasn’t landed stateside yet, but it’s only a matter of time.
Over the weekend, another face-swapping app called ZAO launched in China and immediately became the most popular app in the country.
Petersburg-based company behind the app “irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully-paid, transferable, sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, publicly perform and display your User Content and any name, username or likeness provided in connection with your User Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed, without compensation to you,” we promptly wised up about our privacy, stopped posting our selfies, and instead settled for merely imagining what we’ll look like when we’re octogenarians by looking at pictures of our grandparents.īut it sure is tempting to see what our faces might look like with some cool tech tweaks, data concerns be damned, which is how we find ourselves back in the exact same place a few months later. It was pretty fun for a few days, but as soon as we got hip to FaceApp’s hilariously vague and expansive Terms of Service, which granted the St. But I guess we’ll have to wait and see how it goes.If you can think all the way back to the bygone days of July 2019, you’ll remember that we as a country were briefly enraptured by FaceApp, an app that used neural networks to simulate what you’d look like as an old person, just as long as you uploaded your selfie and forked over your face to shadowy Russians who then had permission to use it for possibly evil purposes in perpetuity. Unfortunately, it’s becoming harder and harder to spot deepfakes, so I wonder how Twitter and other social networks will manage to detect those that are indeed difficult to identify. Sometimes it includes creative and artistic photo manipulations, too. Instagram labels fake content but removes it only from the Explore and hashtag pages. “Satirical content” will reportedly stay on the platform, along with videos edited “solely to omit or change the order of words.” The latter could be especially tricky, in my opinion. For example, Facebook said that it would remove deepfakes and some other manipulated videos, but not all of them. All of them seem to be dealing with it differently. The same source writes that social media have faced a lot of pressure when it comes to tackling fake and deceptive content. Twitter’s head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, said: “Our focus under this policy is to look at the outcome, not how it was achieved.” He added that “the content could be removed if the text in the tweet or other contextual signals suggested it was likely to cause harm.”
This includes “any photos or videos that have been ‘significantly and deceptively altered or fabricated,’” Reuters writes.
Twitter’s new policy will apply a “false” warning label to fake content. Deepfake videos are probably the biggest problem because they can make it look like someone said something they didn’t. Ultimately, this could change the outcome of the elections. It’s expected that there will be a lot of manipulated and deepfake content intended to deceive the public and affect the voters. According to Reuters, Twitter’s efforts come right before the 2020 presidential election.