This app puts your face on viral GIF memes and its privacy policy is a bonus

As deepfake tech is evolving with time, the concerns over its misuse have rightly increased. Last year several deepfake videos made their way to social media following which Facebook banned 'misleading' deepfakes with malicious intent from its platform with an exception for parody clips. Another such fun application is the Doublicat that uses the deepfake tech to superimpose your face onto any GIF.

The app — available on both Android and iOS — allows users to personalise GIFs by morphing their own faces onto them. All you need to do is click a selfie, and select a GIF to replace the original face with your face. And that's it.

How does it work?

The Doublicat website describes the app as a 'face swap AI-tool' which enables you to 'make your favourite GIF memes personal with just one selfie'. The app uses RefaceAI — a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) — to do the swapping in a GIF. The technology has been previously used in a face swapping app called Reflect, which was reportedly used by Elon Musk once.

Doublicat might be one of the first apps to be released this year which uses deepfake tech to swap faces. According to earlier reports, TikTok and Snapchat both are planning to release features that use the deepfake tech.

Doublicat CEO says that the app doesn't rely on the 3D model of your face unlike the popular face swap apps like Zao, TNW reported. He says that the deepfake techniques used by Zao and others are outdated whereas Doublicat app uses 3D masks, face reconstruction, and texture blending to paste your face on to a GIF. However, Doublicat's technique is applicable only to the content which has been preprocessed previously, like viral GIF memes that are available in the app's database.

Doublicat treads well on privacy

Doublicat also differentiates itself from its peers with its privacy policy. Unlike the FaceApp that went viral for good and bad reasons, Doublicat says that its app deletes the photo of a person right away after processing and doesn't store it to use in future.

"The app processes the photos of people and deletes it right away. We store only face embeddings – vector representations of facial features – which we don't share with anyone," the publication quoted the CEO.

This means users won't have to worry they are helping build a database for some corporation while using Doublicat. On the other hand, you could be the face of the popular memes and amuse your friends with it.