This is all thanks to Lensa, an app that uses artificial intelligence to render digital portraits based on user-submitted photos.
Lensa’s highly stylized, eye-catching portraits have taken the internet by storm, with comments from privacy experts, digital artists, and users who have noticed the app is making them paler and thinner. are also of concern.
Here’s everything you need to know about Lensa:
CNN’s Zoe Sottile generated this image by sending a selfie to Lensa’s “Magic Avatars” feature. credit: Lensa
How to get your own “magic avatar”
The pictures circulating online are from Lensa’s “Magic Avatar” feature. To try it out, you first need to download the Lensa app on your smartphone.
An annual subscription to this app, which also offers photo editing services, costs $35.99. But if you want to test it before committing, you can use the app as his one week free trial.
Generating magical avatars requires an additional fee. As long as you have a subscription or free trial, you can get 50 avatars for $3.99, 100 for $5.99, and 200 for $7.99.
Lensa recommends users submit 10-20 selfies for best results. Photos should be close-ups of faces in different backgrounds, expressions and angles. Lensa also states that it should only be used by people over the age of 13.
The app states in its privacy policy that it uses TrueDepth API technology, which states that user-provided photos, or “face data,” are used to “train algorithms to improve performance and deliver better results. used to display.
I tested the app to see what it’s like
To test the app, I picked 20 selfies that I thought were showing different facial expressions and angles, and chose 100 avatar options. It took about 20 minutes for Lensa to return the avatar. My avatars were sorted into 10 categories: fantasy, fairy princess, focus, pop, stylish, anime, light, kawaii, iridescent, and space.
Overall, I felt like the app did a decent job at generating artistic images based on selfies. I was.
It seemed to recognize and repeat certain features more than others, such as my fair skin or round nose. The others were much more stylized and artistic, so they weren’t very specific to me.
For some women, the app generates sexual images
One of the challenges I encountered with the app was described by another woman online. All the images I uploaded were fully clothed and mostly close-ups of my face, but the app returned a few images that contained implied or actual nudity.
In one of the most disorienting images, my face seemed to rest on my naked body. In some of the photos, it looked like I was naked, but had blankets strategically placed or the image was cropped to hide anything revealing. Many of the images featured sultry expressions, large cleavage, and skimpy clothing that didn’t match the photos I submitted, even when I was wearing a .
Snow said artificial intelligence techniques like the one used by Lensa could be used to create “revenge porn,” or naked images of someone without their consent.
For Snow, the output was a sign of the app’s “complete lack of content moderation.” She also called for greater regulation of her AI apps like Lensa.
Lensa did not respond to requests from CNN to comment on the app making nude or sexual images.
“Lensa is really working overtime trying to make the AI skinny,” she wrote in the caption.
CNN’s Zoe Sottile generated this image by sending a selfie to Lensa’s “Magic Avatars” feature. credit: Lensa
Digital artists say the app features their work
Lensa’s technology relies on a deep learning model called Stable Diffusion, according to its privacy policy. Stable Diffusion trains artificial intelligence using a large network of digital art collected from the Internet, a database called LAION-5B. Artists cannot currently opt-in or opt-out of having their art included in the data set and used to train algorithms.
Some of the artists expressed concern that the app could threaten their lives. Digital artists, they said at the time, couldn’t compete with the low prices and fast turnaround artificial intelligence that make digital portraits possible.
Prisma, owner of Lensa, is trying to allay concerns that the company’s technology will take jobs out of digital artists.
“The output cannot be described as an exact replica of a specific artwork.”
