A Chinese app that put the user's face into famous film and television scenes from a single selfie, and went to the top of the App Store there within days in August 2019. Its terms of service claimed rights to users' faces in perpetuity, which was noticed within the same week. WeChat blocked its links and the terms were rewritten. The record's entry for the first deepfake app with a queue.
The record notes that the clips were pre-selected: a few dozen scenes with the face-swap already half done, waiting for a selfie. That is why it was fast and why it felt like magic on a phone.
ZAO, August to September 2019. Died of its own terms and conditions. Survived by a dozen clones with better lawyers.
September 2019: Western tech press describing it as 'the deepfake app that went viral in China', a sentence that would be repeated about a different app every year after.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
