According to anthropologist Robin Dunbar the evolutionary limit to how many meaningful relationships we can have is 150, a buffer now known as Dunbar’s limit. Interestingly, our brains can’t tell the difference though between our neighbor Bob who we spend five minutes a day corresponding with and the members of the New York Yankees with whom we spend countless hours with every night. As far as our brain is concerned these are all people that we care about and as a result both may take up residence within our limit of 150 relationships that we maintain. This is why we seem to care so deeply about celebrities, following their exploits, gossiping about them, obsessing over them. Even though we don’t really know them we feel like we do.
But celebrity culture goes much deeper than that. We just don’t want to know celebrities. We want to know what it’s like to be them. It’s why we go on reality TV shows, try out for singing competitions, make YouTube videos that we hope go viral and move to Hollywood in pursuit of our dreams of becoming a celebrity ourselves. Of course, most of us fail in those pursuits. But that doesn’t stop thousands of people from trying year after year.
So it should come as no surprise that one of the hottest apps in the world right now is an app that let’s people become celebrities. Literally. By making use of Deep Fake technology, which superimposes a person’s face onto someone else’s body, the app Zao is able to offer people the ability to put themselves into their favorite shows and movies in a quick and easy process that only requires a user to upload a single image of themselves.
As the Washington Post describes, “To use Zao, an iOS app developed by a subsidiary of Chinese developer Momo, users upload an image of themselves. Then, the program automatically transposes the image onto an actor’s face from a selection of video clips in just a few seconds. Those clips include scenes from movies and television shows with celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio, ‘Game of Thrones’ actor Kit Harington and others.”
For now there’s a limited collection of clips with which you have to choose from but eventually we may get to the point where you can place your likeness into any show or movie so that you can see yourself batting Thanos as a member of the Avengers or romancing the love of your life in a romantic comedy.
All in all, thanks to Zao you’ll be able to live out your wildest Hollywood fantasies without having to go through the hassle of actually becoming an actor. No auditions, no casting couches, no rote memorization of lines, no rejections, no heartbreak. Just all the action sequences, dramatic scenes, and larger than life moments that you can handle. For a celebrity obsessed culture it just doesn’t get any better than that.
Is Zao the Greatest Idea Ever?
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