How is everyone making those AI selfies?

NEW YORK – Have you noticed that many of your friends are suddenly fairy princesses or space travellers? Is your Instagram feed overrun with Renaissance-style paintings of people who were definitely born in the 1990s? If so, you are entitled to an explanation of what exactly is going on here – and it is not time travel.

In the past few weeks, users have flocked to Lensa AI, an app that uses your selfies and artificial intelligence (AI) to create portraits in a variety of styles. Created by the company Prisma Labs, the app is generating images – and controversy.

What is Lensa AI?

Even if you have not heard of Lensa AI, you have possibly seen its work. Lensa AI takes your selfies, studies them and churns out original, computer-generated portraits of you – or anyone whose photos you feed it.

Do I have to pay for it?

You do. You can subscribe to Lensa AI for a year at $40.98 or try it out free for seven days. “Magic Avatars consume tremendous computation power to create amazing avatars for you,” according to Lensa AI’s checkout page. “It’s expensive, but we made it as affordable as possible.” Fair warning – prices have been fluctuating as the app has become more and more popular and may have changed since this article was published.

How does it work?

After downloading the app, you upload a bunch of selfies. Do yourself a favour and do not include any in which your hands are touching your face, unless you want to get back a mess of images with phantom phalanges hanging from your mouth. Select a gender – male, female, or other – and walk away from your phone for around half an hour, and when you return, presto. Your face, or something like it, has been stretched and squeezed across a suite of 50 to 200 – depending on what package you purchase – AI-generated images with themes including “cosmic”, “fairy princess” and “anime”.

Lensa AI uses Stable Diffusion, a powerful AI-based image generator, said Professor Subbarao Kambhampati from the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at Arizona State University. Similar to Dall-E 2 and Midjourney, Stable Diffusion uses image prompts – like your selfies – and text prompts – like “fantasy”, one of Lensa AI’s categories – to generate high-quality images that sometimes get “trippy”, Prof Kambhampati added. “It’s showing you pictures that nobody took; it’s just able to stitch them up from all the other images that it has seen.”

Are some people getting mad about this though?

There are a couple of reasons that some users are bristling at the images Lensa AI is spitting out. The first is that many users are reporting that the art is sexualising them. When The New York Times tested the app, several of the images we received after uploading selfies and selecting “female” included full-body renderings, despite the fact that users are instructed to upload only close-up selfies. One image featured our avatar in a metallic bikini, a la Princess Leia in Return Of The Jedi (1983). Another included only half a face atop a scantily clad body.

Prisma Labs states on its FAQ page that “occasional sexualisation is observed across all gender categories”.

Thus, it is fairly simple to use the app to create lewd images of anyone you want. This week, TechCrunch was able to create topless avatars of celebrities using images of an actor’s head edited onto topless bodies. “It turns out the AI takes those Photoshopped images as permission to go wild, and it appears it disables an NSFW (not safe for work) filter,” TechCrunch reported. Now imagine that same experiment, but through the lens of someone who is angling to make revenge porn. It gets murky in a hurry.

Mr Andrey Usoltsev, Prisma Labs’ chief executive officer and co-founder, told TechCrunch that using Lensa AI to engage in “harmful or harassing behaviour” was a breach of its terms of use.

What are users saying about the app?

Ms Yasemin Anders, 29, decided to use Lensa AI after seeing it on social media and was particularly excited to see herself re-created into an ethereal fairy.

She was, however, ultimately disappointed to see that Lensa AI had given her a thinner body and a slimmer face and neck. “If it’s smart enough to turn you into either a fairy or a manga figure, you would think there was some sort of smart enough software behind it to detect fat people too,” said Ms Anders, who lives in Berlin and works in marketing.

Other users are reporting that the app is making their skin appear lighter or whiter and is markedly altering their facial features, which Prof Kambhampati said was an ongoing issue with generative AI tools, including Snapchat’s face lenses. “If most of the images you fed the system were of white faces, then it’s not surprising that when it tries to make an image that looks supposedly ‘better’, it just makes it whiter,” he added.

Are there privacy concerns?

“I doubt that the whole business model is, ‘Give us $10 or $15 and we’ll send you back an AI glam shot’,” said Dr Jen King, privacy and data policy fellow at the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University.

Lensa AI’s privacy policy claims that “face data” is deleted within 24 hours after it has been processed and is not used to identify any individual user – but it also states that your photos and videos can be used to further train its algorithms. NYTIMES