Here is what it is advisable learn about Lensa, the AI app throughout social media

It’s all due to Lensa, an app which makes use of synthetic intelligence to render digital portraits primarily based on pictures customers submit.

Lensa’s extremely stylized, eye-catching portraits have taken over the web, however they’ve additionally been the topic of concern from privateness specialists, digital artists, and customers who’ve seen the app making their pores and skin paler or their our bodies thinner.

Here is the whole lot it is advisable learn about Lensa:

CNN’s Zoe Sottile generated this picture by submitting selfies to Lensa’s “Magic Avatars” perform. Credit score: Lensa

Learn how to get your individual ‘magic avatar’

The photographs making the rounds on-line are merchandise of Lensa’s “Magic Avatars” perform. To strive it out, you will have to first obtain the Lensa app in your cellphone.

A yearlong subscription to the app, which additionally gives picture enhancing companies, prices $35.99. However you should utilize the app for a weeklong free trial if you wish to try it out earlier than committing.

Producing the magic avatars requires an extra payment. So long as you will have a subscription or free trial, you will get 50 avatars for $3.99, 100 for $5.99, or 200 for $7.99.

Lensa recommends customers submit 10-20 selfies for the most effective outcomes. The photographs ought to be close-up of your face with quite a lot of completely different backgrounds, facial expressions, and angles. Lensa additionally stipulates it ought to solely be utilized by people who find themselves 13 and older.

The app explains in its privateness coverage they use TrueDepth API expertise, and the user-provided pictures, or “face knowledge,” are used “to coach our algorithms to carry out higher and present you higher outcomes.”

We examined out the app to see what it is like

To check out the app, I curated 20 selfies I assumed confirmed off quite a lot of expressions and angles and selected the 100 avatar choice. It took round 20 minutes for Lensa to return my avatars, which fell into 10 classes: fantasy, fairy princess, focus, pop, fashionable, animé, gentle, kawaii, iridescent, and cosmic.

Typically, I felt just like the app did a good job producing creative photographs primarily based on my selfies. I could not fairly acknowledge myself in many of the portraits, however I might see the place they have been coming from.

It appeared to acknowledge and repeat sure options, like my pale pores and skin or my spherical nostril, greater than others. A few of them have been in a extra life like fashion, and have been shut sufficient I’d suppose they have been really pictures of me if I noticed them from afar. Others have been considerably extra stylized and creative, in order that they felt much less particular to me.

For some ladies, the app produces sexualized photographs

One of many challenges I encountered within the app has been described by different ladies on-line. Regardless that all the photographs I uploaded have been fully-clothed and principally close-ups of my face, the app returned a number of photographs with implied or precise nudity.

In probably the most disorienting photographs, it seemed like a model of my face was on a unadorned physique. In a number of pictures, it seemed like I used to be bare however with a blanket strategically positioned, or the picture simply minimize off to cover something specific. And lots of the photographs, even the place I used to be totally clothed, featured a sultry facial features, vital cleavage, and skimpy clothes which didn’t match the pictures I had submitted.

Snow mentioned synthetic intelligence expertise just like the one Lensa makes use of might be used to generate “revenge porn,” i.e., making bare photographs of somebody with out their consent.

For Snow, the output was an indication of the “full lack of content material moderation” on the app. She additionally known as for larger regulation of AI apps like Lensa.

Lensa didn’t reply to a request from CNN to touch upon the app producing nude or sexualized photographs.

“Lensa is absolutely working extra time to make AI me into a skinny individual,” she wrote within the caption.

CNN’s Zoe Sottile generated this picture by submitting selfies to Lensa’s “Magic Avatars” perform. Credit score: Lensa

Digital artists say the app co-opts their work

Lensa’s expertise depends on a deep studying mannequin known as Steady Diffusion, in accordance with its privateness coverage. Steady Diffusion makes use of an enormous community of digital artwork scraped from the web, from a database known as LAION-5B, to coach its synthetic intelligence. At the moment, artists are unable to opt-in or opt-out of getting their artwork included within the knowledge set and thus used to coach the algorithm.

A number of of the artists expressed concern the apps might additionally threaten their livelihoods. Digital artists can not compete with the low costs and quick turnaround synthetic intelligence allows for a digital portrait, they mentioned on the time.

Lensa’s proprietor Prisma has tried to assuage issues about their expertise eliminating work for digital artists.

And “the outputs cannot be described as actual replicas of any explicit art work.”