A 'deep fake' app will make us film stars – but will we regret our narcissism?

'You oughta be in pictures," goes the 1934 Rudy Vallée song. And, as of last week, pretty much anyone can be. The entry requirements for being a star fell dramatically thanks to the launch, in China, of a face-swapping app that can decant users into film and TV clips. Zao, which has quickly become China's most downloaded free app, fuses the face in the original clip with your features. All that is required is a single selfie and the man or woman in the street is transformed into a star of the mobile screen, if not quite the silver one. In other words, anyone who yearns to be part of Titanic or Game of Thrones, The Big Bang Theory or the latest J-Pop sensation can now bypass the audition and go straight to the limelight without all that pesky hard work, talent and dedication. A whole new generation of synthetic movie idols could be unleashed upon the world: a Humphrey Bogus, a Phony Curtis, a Fake Dunaway. Zao already has its first star: the 30-year-old artist and games developer Allan Xia, who unwittingly became the face of the app last weekend after inserting himself into a Leonardo DiCaprio montage. Western media outlets hadn't paid much attention to Zao, which can only be accessed by users with a Chinese phone account, until Xia, who is based in Auckland but has a Chinese number, uploaded his experiments. After that, every media story covering the app came embedded with a clip of him strutting around in a Hawaiian shirt in Romeo Juliet, and basking in the golden sunset on deck in Titanic. How long did it take to claw himself to the top of the A-list? All I did was take a selfie, which was then ranked by the app to give me an idea of how well it would be able to generate videos based on my photo. It's looking to match your facial features to what is already there in its library of clips."