Abstract
In China, deepfakes are commonly known as huanlian, which literally means “changing faces.” Huanlian content, including face-swapped images and video reenactments, has been circulating in China since at least 2018, at first through amateur users experimenting with machine learning models and then through the popularization of audiovisual synthesis technologies offered by digital platforms. Informed by a wealth of interdisciplinary research on media manipulation, this article aims at historicizing, contextualizing, and disaggregating huanlian in order to understand how synthetic media is domesticated in China. After briefly summarizing the global emergence of deepfakes and the local history of huanlian, I discuss three specific aspects of their development: the launch of the ZAO app in 2019 with its societal backlash and regulatory response; the commercialization of deepfakes across formal and informal markets; and the communities of practice emerging around audiovisual synthesis on platforms like Bilibili. Drawing on these three cases, the conclusion argues for the importance of situating specific applications of deep learning in their local contexts.
Highlights
In early September 2020, a video depicting US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo singing the patriotic song “Wo Ai Ni Zhongguo” [我爱你中国 “I Love You, China”] started circulating on Chinese social media
Using an open-source deep learning model, he generated an animation from still images of Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo based on the facial motions of himself singing “Wo Ai Ni Zhongguo,” and added a popular version of the song performed by The Voice of China contestant Ping An as the audio track
From its debut on Bilibili to its circulation on social media platforms, the video belongs to the category of huanlian [换脸, literally “changing face”], the Chinese term for this sort of face-swapping, lip-syncing, and other synthetic media generated with deep learning models
Summary
In early September 2020, a video depicting US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo singing the patriotic song “Wo Ai Ni Zhongguo” [我爱你中国 “I Love You, China”] started circulating on Chinese social media. From its debut on Bilibili to its circulation on social media platforms, the video belongs to the category of huanlian [换脸, literally “changing face”], the Chinese term for this sort of face-swapping, lip-syncing, and other synthetic media generated with deep learning models.
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