The main challenges facing ZAO, in addition to ethical risks and privacy protection, are video copyright, portrait rights disputes and business model problems.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Tencent deep network” (ID: qqshenwang), author Ma Guanxia.
“Only one photo is needed to play in the world.” This is the slogan of the face-shaking application of ZAO’s face-changing face in the recent days. From the red screen to the questioning, ZAO only took a day.
Questions about ZAO are mainly due to the ethical and moral risks of AI’s face-changing and the extent to which ZAO products themselves protect user privacy and related information.
“AI face change is not a new technology.” A long-time researcher on face recognition and analysis technology told Deep Web that the core technology used in AI face change is face key point detection GAN (generating Against the network model), this technology is relatively mature, ZAO’s face-changing function can be done using “deepfake” + mobile-side optimization, but it is not certain whether ZAO uses the “deepfake” open source code.
“deepfake” is an open source AI face-changing software from abroad. According to “Intelligent Things” report, in December 2017, a foreign Reddit forum user named “deepfakes” published its own AI face-changing video on the Internet for the first time. At that time, “deepfakes” replaced the heroine in the erotic movie with a Hollywood star such as Gail Plus. Due to complaints from a large number of victims, the Reddit Forum was forced to block the “deepfakes” account, but this time the “deepfakes” directly open source code for its AI face-changing project.
The female star “starred in” the actor in the erotic movie, the ethical risk of AI changing face is evident. But this is just the tip of the iceberg where ZAO is questioned.
01. User Agreement Dispute
The ethical and moral risks of AI face-changing technology have made users worry about changing face applications. The definition of personal and other portrait rights authorization in ZAO user agreement directly detonated the outside world’s doubts.
“ZAO’s user agreement is too outrageous” “It’s simply the overlord clause” that users have said after reading ZAO’s user agreement.
The portion of the ZAO User Agreement regarding the necessary authorizations for users contains the following terms:
“1) Before you upload and/or post User Content, you agree or ensure that the actual rights holder agrees to grant “ZAO” and its affiliates and “ZAO” users worldwideFully free, irrevocable, permanent, transferable, and sublicensable rights, including but not limited to the ability to modify or edit all or part of the user’s content (such as replacing a face or voice in a short video with another A person’s face or voice, etc.) and the dissemination of information about the user’s content before and after the modification, and all copyright property rights and neighboring rights enjoyed by the copyright owner as stipulated in the Copyright Law;”
“2) If you replace the face in the User Content with the face of you or someone else, you agree or ensure that the Portrait Rights Owner agrees to grant “ZAO” and its affiliates a completely free, irrevocable, permanent worldwide The right to transfer and licensable, including but not limited to: portrait rights of you or portrait rights holders contained in portraits, pictures, video materials, etc., and the use of technology for you or portrait rights holders Portrait changes in form;”
A well-known legal blogger who is certified by @法山叔 to explain his understanding of the above two legal terms. “According to the agreement, the app can use and modify your portrait for free. It is arbitrarily authorized to the third party that you want to authorize, as information for sale. So when one day, you find that your face is randomly changed and no longer belongs to you on zao or other related platforms, you want to sue zao, no Well, it will come up with this agreement to block your mouth and tell you that you have already agreed.”
“For example, if you change Yang Mi’s face to your own face, you must ensure that you permanently and irrevocably use your portrait for free, and that Yang Mi agrees that zao and affiliates use her portrait. .. to do this, because they have no money to get the authorization of the stars, infringement in the future, they can give you the pot.”
In addition, ZAO’s user agreement also contains provisions on user infringement:
“7) If you infringe on the legal rights of other people’s reputation rights, portrait rights, intellectual property rights, etc. ZAO can appeal to the administrative law enforcement agencies or the judicial authorities to investigate the corresponding legal responsibilities. If you violate this agreement or the ZAO platform If any other rules cause damage to any third party, you shall be solely responsible for the damages and shall be liable for damages; if the zao and its affiliates suffer losses, you shall also compensate them together.”
“Shen.com” consulted Xu Kai, a lawyer at Beijing Deheng Law Firm on relevant terms. Xu Kai said to “Deep Net” that “the agreement has two levels of problems.
1. The agreement is suspected of violating the three principles of lawfulness, justification and necessity established by the Cyber Security Law. Exceeding the necessary limits, the related acts of collecting and utilizing user information may lead to administrative penalties. For details, refer to the cyber security law. Articles and 64 articles.
2. The User Agreement is an online format contract. Once entered into the judicial proceedings, the clause may be invalidated for many reasons such as not explicitly explaining to the user or violating the Cyber Security Law.
Perhaps influenced by public opinion, on the morning of September 1, “Deep Network” found that ZAO had revised some of the terms of the user agreement.
02. Is there a risk of privacy breaches?
“ZAO can be dangerous… Don’t look at how happy you are today, maybe your Alipay will be stolen after a while? But it’s hard to blame ZAO, who makes you cognizant? “On August 31, Li Xiaolai said this on Weibo.”
Questioning ZAO’s risk of information disclosure is not limited to Li Xiaolai. “There are mobile phone numbers, facial images, and technical synthesis. Criminals can talk to you and your family.” Some netizens commented after using ZAO.
The fears of the outside world are not groundless. From the perspective of ZAO’s product form, in the case of real-name registration of App mobile phones, users need to upload and store FACE IDs, and considering the user’s social sharing, there is a high risk of leakage of private information.
There is a view that ZAO should probably explain the following to the user:
1. How is the user image and FACE ID transmitted and stored? What is the encryption level? How likely is it to guard against self-stealing or hacking? How to prevent it?
2, account, mobile number, password,Wered->
At the moment, ZAO faces major challenges, in addition to user and regulatory concerns about ethical risks and privacy protection, as well as product-level video rights, portrait rights disputes, and business models.
ZAO products can change the face of film and television dramas, which may involve issues such as copyright and copyright of film and television dramas.
In March 2018, the “Notice on Further Regulating the Order of Network Audiovisual Programs” issued by the former State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television stated: “Resolutely prohibit illegally crawling, tailoring and adapting audiovisual programs, and strictly manage including Similar reprogrammings uploaded by netizens do not provide channels for the distribution of audiovisual programs, such as copyright issues and content issues. This has led to a number of film and television adaptation accounts falling into copyright disputes, including well-known film and television blogger Guamo.
In order to avoid copyright disputes, ZAO said in the copyright notice of the material: “Short video and emoticon materials, except for the special statement that ZAO cooperates with the partners for copyright cooperation, all from the user’s spontaneous upload, ZAO does not. Enjoy commercial copyright of the material.”
Although ZAO declares that it does not enjoy the commercial copyright of the material, it does not completely avoid copyright disputes. Previously, the Beijing Business Daily had interviewed Zhao Hu and Zhao Hu, partners of Zhongwen Law Firm on the copyright dispute of Guamo. “The second creation on the basis of the original work should be approved by the original copyright owner. If you use the original content, it is very likely to constitute infringement.”
Xu Kai, a law firm of Beijing Deheng Law Firm, told Deepnet that “the use of actors on the Internet is suspected of infringing on the portrait rights of actors; if you copy without permission, the Internet broadcasts short videos, Infringe the copyright of the copyright of the film and television drama.”
Because ZAO products can change faces for celebrity/celebrity expression packs, in addition to copyright, ZAO also needs to pay attention to whether it is suspected of infringing the celebrity/celebrity portrait rights.
In addition, ZAO’s business model challenges are not small, because the seemingly single-function AI face is a full-fledged money-burning machine.
“When the (previous) server is too large, please try again later.” August 31, ZAOn the first day of O’s hot friend circle, some users wanted to generate a AI face-changing video, but they encountered a busy reminder of the server.
Users who have been certified as “ZAO Official Assistant” by Weibo said on Weibo last night that “the server that rented 7 million yuan this month has consumed 1/3 of it tonight. If it continues to be hot tomorrow, we only It is possible to make stricter restrictions.” From this estimate, ZAO may only spend more than a few million dollars per day on servers, and as users grow in size, spending will rise.
It is understood that the AI server used by ZAO integrates modules such as GPU/TPU/FPGA. An industry insider introduced to Deepnet that the cost of a standard network-optimized server is $88 a month, while the cheapest for a GPU-based server is $2,928.