What is Lensa, the artificial intelligence photo app that floods social networks?

() — If you’ve logged into any social media app this week, you’ve probably seen photos of your friends, but reimagined as fairytale princesses, anime characters, or celestial beings.

It’s all because of Lensa, an app that uses artificial intelligence to present digital portraits based on photos users submit. Lensa’s highly stylized and eye-catching portraits have taken the internet by storm, but have also caused concern among privacy experts, digital artists, and users who have noticed that the app makes their skin lighter or their bodies more complex. thin.

‘s Zoe Sottile generated this image by submitting selfies to Lensa’s “Magical Avatars” feature. (Credit: Lensa)

This is everything you need to know about Lensa:

How to get your own ‘magical avatar’

The images circulating online are products of Lensa’s “Magic Avatars” feature. To try it out, you’ll first need to download the Lensa app on your phone.

A one-year subscription to the app, which also provides photo-editing services, costs $35.99. But you can use the app on a one week free trial.

The generation of the magical avatars requires an additional fee. As long as you have a subscription or a free 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 stipulates that the service should only be used by persons over the age of 13.

Lensa is a product of Prisma, which first rose to popularity in 2016 with a feature that allows users to transform their selfies into images in the style of famous artists.

The app explains in its privacy policy that they use API TrueDepth technology, and user-provided photos, or “face data,” are used “to train our algorithms to work better and show better results.”

We tested the app to see how it works

To test the app, I selected 20 selfies that I thought showed a variety of expressions and angles and chose the 100 avatars option. It took about 20 minutes for Lensa to return my avatars, which fell into 10 categories: Fantasy, Fairy Princess, Focus, Pop, Elegant, Anime, Light, Kawaii, Iridescent, and Cosmic.

Overall, I felt that 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 came from.

It seemed to recognize and repeat certain features, like my pale skin or my round nose, more than others. Some of them were more realistic in style and similar enough that I would think they were actually photos of me if I were to see them from afar. Others were significantly more stylized and artistic, so they seemed less specific to me.

‘s Zoe Sottile generated this image by submitting selfies to Lensa’s “Magical Avatars” feature. (Credit: Lensa)

For some women, the app produces sexualized images

One of the challenges I encountered on the app has been described by other women online. Although all of the images I uploaded were fully clothed and were mostly close-ups of my face, the app returned several images with actual or implied nudity.

In one of the more disorienting images, it looked like a version of my face was on a naked body. In several photos she appeared naked but with a strategically placed blanket, or the image was cut to hide something explicit. And many of the images, even when she was fully clothed, featured a sultry facial expression, significant cleavage, and skimpy clothing that did not match the photos she had submitted.

This was surprising, but I’m not the only woman who experienced it. Olivia Snow, a researcher at UCLA’s Center for Critical Internet Research and a professional dominatrix, told that the app returned nude images in her likeness even when she sent photos of herself as a child, an experience she documented. for WIRED.

Snow said artificial intelligence technology like the one Lensa uses could be used to generate “revenge porn,” meaning making nude images of someone without their consent.

For Snow, the result was a sign of the “complete lack of content moderation” on the app. He also called for more regulation of AI apps like Lensa.

Lensa did not respond to a request for comment about the app producing nude or sexualized images.

Other users have documented different forms of bias occurring in their Lensa images, such as black users appearing “bleached” and appearing paler than they actually are. Similarly, Aubrey Gordon, a writer and fat people’s rights activist, wrote on her verified account of instagram that the app produced images that made her appear much thinner than she really is.

“Lensa is really working overtime to make me a skinny person,” she wrote in the caption.

Digital artists say the app appropriates their work

Lensa’s technology is based on a deep learning model called Stable Diffusion, according to its privacy policy. Stable Diffusion uses a massive network of digital art pulled from the internet, from a database called LAION-5B, to train its artificial intelligence. Currently, artists cannot agree or decline to have their art included in the dataset and thus used to train the algorithm.

It has raised concerns from some artists, who say Stable Diffusion relies on their artwork to make their own images, but receive no credit or compensation for this. Earlier this year, reported on several artists who were upset when they discovered that their work had been used without their consent or payment to train the neural network for Stable Diffusion.

Several of the artists expressed concern that the apps could also threaten their livelihood. Digital artists can’t compete with low prices and fast-response artificial intelligence enabling a digital portrait, they said at the time.

Lensa’s owner, Prisma, has tried to allay concerns about its technology taking the work out of digital artists.

“While both humans and AI learn about artistic styles in almost similar ways, there are some fundamental differences: AI is capable of quickly analyzing and learning from large data sets, but it doesn’t have the same level of attention and appreciation for the art. art as human being,” the company wrote on Twitter on Dec. 6.

And “the results cannot be described as exact replicas of any particular work of art.”