Regulating deep fakes: legal and ethical considerations

Abstract

On 29 September 2019, ZaoApp was introduced in China via iOS Store. ZaoApp is a face-swapping app that uses clips from a great variety of films and TV shows, convincingly changing a character’s face by using selfies from the user’s phone.1 The results were so exciting that, within three days, ZaoApp was the most downloaded app in China. It has been the most successful adoption of the ‘deep-fake’ technology so far, allowing a video to be generated in under eight seconds from one single photo, video clip or GIF file. Soon after the release of ZaoApp, online payments operator Alipay, which has approximately 1 billion active users, released a warning that its users should ‘[r]est assured that no matter how sophisticated the current facial swapping technology is, it cannot deceive our payment apps’.2