TikTok parent company ByteDance has reportedly developed deepfake tech that scans your face so it can be inserted into other people’s videos. The video app’s coding refers to the feature as “face swap,” according to a report by TechCrunch. The face swap code was reportedly found in both TikTok, and Duoyin, its Chinese sister app.
The face swap feature reportedly asks users to take a multi-angle biometric scan of their face, choose from a selection of videos they want to add their face to, and share the video.
It’s unclear if this feature will ever be released to Douyin or TikTok users (together the apps have 1.5 billion downloads). The code was found in both apps by an Israeli research firm Watchful.ai, but TikTok reportedly told TechCrunch that the deepfake feature is “definitely not a function in TikTok, nor do we have any intention of introducing it.” TikTok later told TechCrunch that it was removing the inactive code fragments to eliminate any confusion.
