Lensa AI creates artistic selfies and raises ethical questions about automated art
Better Informed in just 3.1416 minutes
Get the daily email that makes learning about current tech and coding trends fun. Stay engaged and on top of your industry, for free.
From Chance the Rapper to the random dude you drunkenly talked to at a concert, seemingly everyone has taken to Instagram to flash their AI-created portraits. The souped-up selfies come from photo-editing app Lensa AI through its “Magic Avatars” feature that generates original images of users’ likeness rendered in various artistic styles.
Lensa acts as an intermediate between Stable Diffusion, the open-source AI tool that powers it, and the portrait subject. After paying $3.99 to use the feature, you upload 10–20 selfies and Lensa spits out 50 stylized portraits that look like they’re the work of an eclectic digital artist collective.
You’re not alone in seeing it everywhere: The appeal of visualizing one’s anime, sci-fi, or fairy princess alter-ego landed Lensa at the top of the charts among free apps in the Apple and Google app stores soon after the Magic Avatars feature launched late last month.
But while Lensa might be a great source of eye-catching material for an artsy dating profile, many observers are unsettled by the implications of its rise. So let’s ruin the fun and take a peek into the Pandora’s box of ethical murkiness that comes with new technology.
Who’s not impressed by your new profile pic?
Artists: Many digital artists and copyright holders say they’re not being credited or reimbursed for their artwork, which is being used to train the AI model that the company behind Lensa, Prisma Labs, is monetizing. Artist Lauryn Ipsum pointed to what she says are frequent instances where fragments of artists’ signatures are visible in the digital avatars. She tweeted her frustration at the fact that “people are still trying to argue it isn’t theft.”
Others worry about how automated art generators might devalue their skills as visual creators (similar to how certain newsletter writers are made uneasy by the writing talent of OpenAI’s new chatbot).
Privacy advocates: Some users expressed privacy concerns about how Lensa uses their photos and personal data. Prisma says it deletes your selfies after they’re turned into avatars, but it uses them to train its neural networks and reserves the right to use personal data to improve the product.
Ethicists: All it takes to use Lensa for sexually predatory purposes is a few photos of the victim. Unlike human artists, the app can’t tell right from wrong and can be easily tricked into churning out erotic stylizations of whatever images it gets fed. Technology researcher Olivia Snow went as far as using her own childhood photos to demonstrate that Lensa has no qualms about sexualizing images of children.
What’s next? Some creators have called for a boycott of Lensa, urging people to hire an old-school, flesh-and-blood artist for their next round of stylized selfies. But now that AI art tools exist, they aren’t going away and we’ll have to learn how to navigate the presence of paintbrush-wielding machines in our lives.—SK
