Everyone from Chance the Rapper to the intoxicated guy you chatted up at a concert seems to be posting their AI-generated images on Instagram. Lensa AI, a photo editing software, is responsible for the enhanced selfies with its “Magic Avatars” function, which creates one-of-a-kind pictures of users’ likenesses in a variety of creative styles.
Lensa is a bridge between its open-source AI engine, Stable Diffusion, and the person being shown in a photograph. In exchange for $3.99, Lensa lets you input 10-20 selfies and then generates 50 stylistic photos that appear like they were created by an eclectic digital artist group.
And you’re not crazy for seeing it everywhere. Lensa quickly climbed to the top of the free app rankings on both the Apple and Google app stores when the Magic Avatars feature came out at the end of last month. This was due to how fun it was to picture oneself as a character from anime, science fiction, or a fairy princess.
Even though Lensa might be a fantastic way to get interesting photos for a creative dating profile, its rapid growth has many worried about its potential consequences. So let’s spoil the enjoyment by opening the can of ethical worms that is new technology. Absolutely no one will criticize your brand-new profile picture.
Artists: Many digital artists and copyright holders have complained that Lensa’s developer, Prisma Labs, is not giving them credit or paying them for the use of their work in training an artificial intelligence model that the firm is then monetising. Artist Lauryn Ipsum noted that artist signature pieces may often be seen in the virtual personae. When she saw that “some are still attempting to claim it isn’t theft,” she tweeted her dismay.
Like some email writers who feel threatened by OpenAI’s new chatbot, others fear that automated art generators may devalue their visual creation talents.
People who want to keep their personal information private have said that they are worried about how Lensa uses their photos and other personal information. Prisma claims to destroy your photos after they’ve been transformed into avatars, but it uses them to train its neural networks and maintains the right to exploit personal data to enhance the product.
Take note, people who know a lot about ethics: all it takes to use Lensa to sexually harass someone is a few pictures of the victim. The program, unlike human artists, has no sense of good or wrong and can be readily coaxed into producing sexually suggestive renditions of any given picture. Tech researcher Olivia Snow even used photographs of herself as a toddler to show how Lensa sexualizes images of kids.
So, now what? To get their next set of stylized selfies, some designers have called for a boycott of Lensa and instead suggested commissioning a traditional, in-person artist. However, now that AI art tools are available, they aren’t going away, so we’ll have to figure out how to live with these mechanical artists among us.