TikTok’s new feature — anime filter got million posts in 3 days

TikTok is an application which has been used for talking materials between teens and startups for years now. Most of time we only see how it creates from a new emerging industry instead of investigating what makes the customer retention high as 39%.

TikTok’s Chinese version, Douyin, published a new filter in its app this week. Within 3 days, they gathered millions of posts which used this filter. The filter names as “Anime Change”. The main character is to change the video into animation.

It’s not a new one to be honest, many applications have launched a similar filter before, such as B612. But the difference here is to change a video and to make the result acceptable.

The technology used behind is one called Generative Adversarial Networks, AKA GAN. GAN is used for generating a likely photograph by machine learning. It’s a concept raised by Ian Goodfellow in 2014, and became popular in 2018.

TikTok team was acutely aware of the potential behind GAN and started to develop their animation function immediately. A special team was created in September of 2019, they used months of time to generate a model and spent most of their time to optimize it, made the animation more acceptable by clients.

Finally we saw a successful case from TikTok and soon the feature will be added in the rest 30+ TikTok versions. The episode showed to us again how important the long-term operation of an application is and how hard to prolong the product life cycle. It’s still unknown how the market will be and where will TikTok heads for, but in the end clients should be happy to see more interesting apps and features to use.