ZAO put your face in a movie in eight seconds
A Chinese face-swap app went viral over the weekend and hit a privacy wall within days. China just ran the consumer deepfake experiment at scale.
Over the weekend a Chinese app called ZAO went from unknown to the top of the App Store in China. You upload a few selfies, sometimes following prompts to blink or open your mouth, pick a clip from a movie or TV show, and within seconds you’re Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic or a character in a Chinese drama. My WeChat feed on Saturday was nothing but friends’ faces in famous scenes.
Two years ago I wrote about the first deepfakes on Reddit, which needed hours of GPU training and hundreds of photos of the target. ZAO needs a few selfies and a few seconds on a phone, and the results are good enough that people are sharing them as entertainment, not as a curiosity. From what’s been reported, they likely precompute a lot on the clip side: the movie clips are a fixed library, processed in advance so the scene’s face geometry, lighting and motion are known. The user side is fast because only your face has to be fitted and swapped in. Constraining the problem that way is a smart product decision. It’s the same kind of trade we made at Amanda with a small, known set of attendees.
Within two days the backlash arrived. Users read the terms and found that ZAO claimed a free, irrevocable, worldwide license to anything you uploaded. People worried, reasonably, about face-based payment systems. Alipay lets you pay with your face in some places. WeChat started blocking ZAO links, and the company apologized and said it would change the terms and not store biometric data beyond what’s needed.
The demand is enormous. People really want to see themselves inside stories. This is the harmless version of what I was trying to build in 2013, and the market was there. It just needed the technology and a clever content library.
The privacy reaction in China was faster and louder than a lot of people in the West would expect. There’s a stereotype that Chinese users don’t care about privacy. What I saw was millions of people suddenly realizing their face is a password now, used for payments and identity checks, and that handing it to an entertainment app is a real risk.
And the gap between fun and harmful is only a consent setting. The same pipeline that puts you in Titanic can put anyone’s face anywhere if the app lets you upload photos of other people. ZAO’s product design, a fixed library of clips and a live selfie flow, limits that somewhat. The next app might not bother.