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Leonardo DiCaprio face-swap star took ‘8 seconds’ to find fame with Chinese app Zao – but what about his privacy?

  • Zao allows users to superimpose their faces on images of famous actors. The app sparked privacy concerns soon after its release
  • Games developer Allan Xia unwittingly became the face of the app last month after inserting himself into a Leonardo DiCaprio montage

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Games developer Allan Xia became the face of the face-swapping app Zao after inserting himself into a Leonardo DiCaprio montage.
The Guardian

“You oughta be in pictures,” goes the 1934 Rudy Vallée song. And, as of last week, pretty much anyone can be. The entry requirements for being a star fell dramatically thanks to the launch, in China, of a face-swapping app that can decant users into film and television clips.

Zao, which has quickly become China’s most downloaded free app, fuses the face in the original clip with your features. All that is required is a single selfie and the person is then transformed into a star of the mobile screen, if not quite the silver one.

In other words, anyone who yearns to be part of Titanic or Game of Thrones, The Big Bang Theory or the latest J-pop sensation can now bypass the audition and go straight to the limelight without all that pesky hard work, talent and dedication.

Zao already has its first star: the 30-year-old artist and games developer Allan Xia, who unwittingly became the face of the app last month after inserting himself into a Leonardo DiCaprio montage.

Western media outlets hadn’t paid much attention to Zao, which can only be accessed by users with a Chinese phone account, until Xia, who is based in Auckland, New Zealand, but has a Chinese number, uploaded his experiments.

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