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Lensa AI the app making magic avatars raises red flags for artists

Kworld trend / Avatar app everyone is using download, You may have noticed a new trend taking over your Instagram feed. Your friends turn themselves into digital art with the help of an artificial intelligence-generated app called Lensa.

Lensa AI is currently the best free app in the Apple App Store, although you have to pay to use the AI art feature.

Since its launch in 2018, the Lensa app has been buried in a heap of photo editing programs available in the iOS App Store. It was one of those apps that spams you with promises of the kinds of perfectly decorated mugshots that are 100% guaranteed to disappoint Tinder dates later.

Well, at least judging by the endless stream of images tagged #lensa, it feels like the most popular app in the galaxy. The reason, I believe, is that it serves as an extraordinary vehicle for self-expression. People curate and post idealized versions of themselves, revealing their innermost desires to others like never before.

Lensa AI app

If your Instagram is full of algorithmically generated portraits of your friends, you’re not alone. After adding a new avatar generation tool based on Stable Diffusion, the photo-editing app Lensa AI went viral in recent days, with users sharing their uncanny AI-made avatars (and the terrible misfires) in stories and posts.

Lensa’s fun, eminently shareable avatars mark the first time many people have interacted with a generative AI tool. In the case of Lensa, it is also the first time they have paid for computer-generated art.

Stable Diffusion itself is free and many people play with it for research purposes or just for fun. But Lensa and other services like it — Avatar AI and Profilepicture.AI, to name a few — make money by selling the computing cycles needed to run the prompts and spit out a set of images. That of course changes the equation a bit. Avatar app everyone is using download

Lensa is built on Stable Diffusion’s free, open-source image generator, but acts as a middleman. Send Lensa 10-20 selfies and $7.99 ($3.99 if you sign up for a free trial) and the app does the heavy lifting for you behind the scenes, returning a set of stylized portraits in an array of styles such as sci-fi, fantasy and anime. Anyone with enough processing power can install Stable Diffusion on a machine, download some models and get similar results, but Lensa’s avatars are impressive and Instagram-ready enough that roads of people are more than happy to pay for the convenience.

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While the tech world has celebrated the progress of AI image and text generators this year – and artists have watched the proceedings carefully – your average Instagram user probably hasn’t had a philosophical conversation with ChatGPT or fed DALL-E absurdist prompts. That also means most people haven’t grappled with the ethical implications of free, readily available AI tools like Stable Diffusion and how they’re poised to change entire industries—if we let them.

From my experience over the weekend on Instagram, for every 10 Lensa avatars there is one Cassandra in the comments berating everyone for paying for an app that steals from artists. Those worries are not really upset. Stable Diffusion, the AI image generator that powers Lensa, was originally trained on 2.3 billion captioned images—a massive cross-section of the visual internet. Thrown up in all this are all sorts of stuff, including watermarked images, copyrighted works and a huge swath of photos from Pinterest, apparently. Those images also include many thousands of photos pulled from Smugmug and Flickr, illustrations from DeviantArt and ArtStation and stock images from sites like Getty and Shutterstock.

Individual artists have not signed up to appear in the training dataset, nor can they be chosen. According to LAION, the nonprofit that created the huge datasets to begin with, the troves of data are “just indexes for the Internet,” lists of URLs to images across the Web, paired with the alt text they describes. If you are an EU citizen and the database contains a photo of you with your name attached, you can submit a request for removal under the GDPR, Europe’s groundbreaking privacy law, but that’s about it. The horse is already out of the barn.

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We are in the earliest stages of grappling with what this means for artists. Whether they are independent illustrators and photographers or massive copyright-conscious. Corporations engaged in the AI modeling process. Some models that use stable diffusion push the problem even further. Prior to a recent update, Stable Diffusion Version 2. Anyone could create a named template designed to mimic a specific artist’s distinct visual style. And blend new images ad infinitum at a pace no human could compete with. Avatar app everyone is using download.

Andy Baio, who co-founded a festival for independent artists, has a thoughtful interview on his blog. That dives into these concerns. He spoke to an illustrator who discovered an AI model specifically designed to replicate her work. “My first reaction was that it felt invasive to have my name on this tool,” She said. “… If I had asked if they could do it, I wouldn’t have said yes.”

By September, Dungeons & Dragons artist Greg Rutkowski was so popular using a Stable. Diffusion prompt to generate images in his detailed fantasy style. That he feared his actual art would be lost in the sea of algorithmic copies. “What in a year?

I probably won’t be able to find my work there because [the Internet] will be flooded with AI art.” Rutkowski told MIT’s Technology Review.

Those concerns, reflected by many illustrators and other digital creativity. Reverberating on social media as many people encounter this thorny problem. And the existential threat they seem to pose – for the first time.

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“I know a lot of people have posted their Lensa/other AI portraits lately. I want to encourage you not to do this or, better yet, not to use the service.” Voice actress Jenny Yokobori wrote in a popular tweet

thread about Lensa. In another, Riot Games artist Jon Lam shared his own discomfort with. AI-generated art. “When AI artists steal/cooperate art from us. I don’t just see art, I see people, mentors and friends. I don’t expect you to understand.”

Personally, I was sick and stuck at home over the weekend. Where I spent more time than usual scrolling through social media. My Instagram stories were a blur of flattering digital illustrations that cost cents a piece. Lensa has clearly tapped into something special there. Appealing to both the vain impulse to effortlessly collect 50 stylish self-portraits. And the allure of asking your friends what your exact likeness is (mostly, in my experience). And what hilarious mutations you are. only a computer doing its best human impersonation could spin up.

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