People Are Transforming Themselves Into Vibrant Artwork With Lensa, an AI-Powered Photo App

 

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If you’ve been on social media the past couple of weeks, you've likely noticed people sharing vibrant self-portraits that look like works of art. But there’s no artist behind these stylized images; it’s the work of Lensa, an AI-powered photo editing app that has recently dominated the Apple App Store by being the top-downloaded (free) app.

So, what does Lensa do, exactly? Once you’ve downloaded the app in either the App Store or Google Play, you can use tools like removing objects from photos as well as Face Retouch and Magic Correction to ”perfect the facial imperfections.” That won’t, however, get you the artsy portraits that have taken over the internet. It's a separate feature called Magic Avatar that only premiered in late November (Lensa has been around since 2018). Using it requires you to upload 10 to 20 photos of yourself and pay $3.99. Doing so will generate 50 images that imagine you in a range of styles, from sci-fi costumes to Pop Art portraits and more.

As with other AI art generators, Lensa, and its parent company Prisma, is not without controversy. Folks are questioning how Prisma uses the uploaded images. The company maintains that the photos help to train its AI, and it does not retain the pictures once the face has been converted to data.

Artists are also speaking out against the Magic Avatar feature. Stable Diffusion is the AI image generator on which Lensa is run, and it is trained on 2.3 billion caption images from across the internet. That is a massive amount of data and includes copyrighted works from Pinterest, Smugmug, Flickr, DeviantArt, and Art Station as well as stock image sites. Artists cannot opt in or opt out of having their artwork included in this image collection which means that their distinctive style can be mimicked and recreated by AI in mere seconds. By sharing their work online, it’s viewed as helping AI train them out of a job.

Voice actor Jenny Yokobori wrote a tweet thread reflecting on how AI generator tools like Lensa affect artists. “Looking at the results [of Magic Avatar] made me feel really sad,” she wrote, “because I could see that the images were born from the thousands and thousands of hours of practice of real artists.”

If you've recently seen artsy self-portraits appear in your Instagram feed, it might be the work of Lensa, an AI-powered photo editing app.

Lensa has dominated the Apple App Store by being the top-downloaded (free) app.

Upload 10 to 20 images of yourself and use the Magic Avatar feature. It will imagine you in a range of styles, from sci-fi costumes to Pop Art portraits and more.

For $3.99, you can generate 50 images.

 

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A post shared by Prisma (@prisma)

Some celebrities have also used the AI selfie generator.

 

Conan O'Brien

 

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Taraji P. Henson

 

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Michaela Jaé

 

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A post shared by Michaela Jaé (@mjrodriguez7)

 

Chance the Rapper

 

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A post shared by Chance The Rapper (@chancetherapper)

 

Anna Camp

 

Lilly Singh

 

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Magic Avatar, however, is not without controversy—namely that the AI it uses collects images across the internet without artists' consent and then is trained to mimic their art in mere seconds.

Lensa: Website | Instagram
h/t: [TechCrunch]

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Sara Barnes

Sara Barnes is a Staff Editor at My Modern Met, Manager of My Modern Met Store, and co-host of the My Modern Met Top Artist Podcast. As an illustrator and writer living in Seattle, she chronicles illustration, embroidery, and beyond through her blog Brown Paper Bag and Instagram @brwnpaperbag. She wrote a book about embroidery artist Sarah K. Benning titled "Embroidered Life" that was published by Chronicle Books in 2019. Sara is a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art. She earned her BFA in Illustration in 2008 and MFA in Illustration Practice in 2013.
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