It’s all thanks to Lensa, an app that uses artificial intelligence to render digital portraits based on photos submitted by users.
Lensa’s highly stylized and eye-catching portraits have taken over the internet, but they have also been the subject of concern from privacy experts, digital artists and users who have noticed that the app makes their skin paler or their bodies thinner.
Here’s everything you need to know about Lensa:
CNN’s Zoe Sottile generated this image by submitting selfies to Lensa’s “Magic Avatars” feature. Credit: Lensa
How to get your own ‘magical avatar’
Images circulating online are products of Lensa’s “Magic Avatars” feature. To try it out, you must first download the Lensa app to your phone.
A one-year subscription to the app, which also provides photo editing services, costs $35.99. But you can use the app for a one-week free trial if you want to test it out before committing.
The generation of the magic avatars requires additional costs. As long as you have a free subscription or trial, you can get 50 avatars for $3.99, 100 for $5.99, or 200 for $7.99.
Lensa recommends users submit 10-20 selfies for best results. Images should be close-ups of your face with a variety of different backgrounds, facial expressions, and angles. Lensa also states that it should only be used by people 13 and older.
The app explains in its privacy policy that it uses TrueDepth API technology, and user-provided photos, or “facial data,” are used “to train our algorithms to work better and show you better results.” .
We tested the app to see what it looks like
To test the app, I curated 20 selfies that I thought showed a variety of expressions and angles and chose the 100 avatars option. It took Lensa about 20 minutes to return my avatars, which fell into 10 categories: fantasy, fairy princess, focus, pop, stylish, animated, light, kawaii, iridescent, and cosmic.
Overall, I felt like the app did a decent job of producing artistic images based on my selfies. I couldn’t quite recognize myself in most of the portraits, but I could see where they were coming from.
He seemed to recognize and repeat certain characteristics, like my pale skin or round nose, more than others. Some of them were in a more realistic style and were close enough that I could think they were actually photos of me if I saw them from a distance. Others were much more stylized and artistic, so they seemed less specific to me.
For some women, the app produces sexualized images
One of the challenges I encountered in the app was described by other women online. Even though all of the images I uploaded were fully clothed and mostly close-ups of my face, the app returned several images with implied or actual nudity.
In one of the most disorienting images, it looked like a version of my face was on top of a naked body. In several photos, it looked like I was naked but with a strategically placed blanket, or the image just cropped out to hide anything explicit. And many of the pictures, even when I was fully clothed, featured a sultry facial expression, prominent cleavage, and skimpy clothing that didn’t match the photos I submitted.
Snow said artificial intelligence technology like that used by Lensa could be used to generate “revenge pornography”, i.e. making nude images of someone without their consent.
For Snow, the release was a sign of the “complete lack of content moderation” on the app. She also called for greater regulation of AI apps like Lensa.
Lensa did not respond to a request from CNN to comment on the app producing nude or sexualized images.
“Lensa is really working overtime to make me a slim person,” she wrote in the caption.
CNN’s Zoe Sottile generated this image by submitting selfies to Lensa’s “Magic Avatars” feature. Credit: Lensa
Digital artists say app co-opts their work
Lensa’s technology is based on a deep learning model called Stable Diffusion, in accordance with its privacy policy. Stable Diffusion uses a vast network of digital art retrieved from the Internet, from a database called LAION-5B, to train its artificial intelligence. Currently, artists cannot opt in or out of having their art included in the dataset and therefore used to train the algorithm.
Several of the artists expressed concern that the apps could also threaten their livelihoods. Digital artists can’t compete with the low prices and speed of execution that artificial intelligence allows for a digital portrait, they said at the time.
Lensa owner Prisma tried to allay concerns about their technology by eliminating the work of digital artists.
And “the releases cannot be described as exact replicas of any particular work of art”.
