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Lensa is the app of the moment. The Internet is currently being literally flooded with AI images. While for some there has been real hype, experts on data protection and copyright are sounding the alarm and warning.
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At first glance, Lensa looks like just another of the countless existing photo editing apps. But the app, which has been available since 2018, recently received a new function – and thus catapulted itself to the top of the App Store charts.
Lensa can create virtual avatars using artificial intelligence. The app only needs a few selfies and some computing time to achieve remarkable results and works of art with a wow effect.
More and more users publish the images generated by the AI with the hashtag #Lensa on social networks or use them as profile pictures. This brought Lensa worldwide hype and made it the most frequently downloaded app in Germany within a very short time.
Lensa is a photo app that uses artificial intelligence to create profile pictures.
How does Lensa work?
With Lensa countless results can be created, but not all of them are convincing.
If you want to create your so-called “Magic Avatar”, you feed Lensa 10-20 different selfies and pictures of yourself. The AI then needed around 20 minutes in our test to calculate the results. Depending on the package selected, up to 200 portrait images created by the artificial intelligence are then spit out.
Many results are really impressive and the work of the software can definitely impress. However, many photos are not convincing at all and have errors.
The technology and the idea behind it are not really new. Because Lensa uses the free and publicly accessible photo AI Stable Diffusion to calculate the AI portraits . Strictly speaking, Lensa only provides the computing power that is required to create the avatar. Lensa is by no means alone in this, and other tools also offer the same technology.
Although the technique – Stable Diffusion – behind Lensa is free, creating the avatars requires payment. To use the app, a subscription is required, which at around 50 euros a year is already quite significant, but can at least be tested for seven days free of charge.
Important to know: The avatar function is not included in the subscription price. You have to pay between four and seven euros extra for each conversion! Depending on the package, there are different numbers of pictures at the end.
Lots of criticism
Despite the huge hype, Lensa has some crucial snags. Aside from the fact that the AI behind the app is actually free for everyone to use, Lensa faces criticism over privacy and copyright issues.
Lensa demands extensive rights to the uploaded content in the terms of use. Among other things, the company takes the liberty of using and reselling the content created by the user as it wishes. This allows you to freely use the images you create, but so can Lensa. In addition, no one checks whether you really upload photos of yourself or someone else.
But Lensa ca n’t shine when it comes to copyright either. This is due to the fact that the AI image generator Stable Diffusion was trained for the learning process with 2.3 billion images. Of course, this also includes works by real artists whose style is copied by artificial intelligence. Sometimes even the signatures of artists are taken over 1:1. In this way, Lensa does not create new works, but merely copies them.
Lensa has also been criticized because female users in particular have increasingly received results with scantily clad or sexualized avatars. After all, the company behind the app has announced that it will make improvements here. TechCrunch magazine even managed to create adult images of people without their consent.
What alternatives are there to Lensa?
What would you have looked like 300 years ago? My Heritage’s AI Time Machine reveals.
Bild: My Heritage
Lensa builds on the AI image generator Stable Diffusion. You can also try this out completely free of charge with “Dream Studio”, for example . Alternatively, it’s worth taking a look at the Dall-E . You can use the tool to generate images based on text.
A serious – albeit paid – alternative to Lensa is the AI Time Machine from My Heritage . This is also based on Stable Diffusion and creates a time travel through the past based on its images. If you upload pictures of yourself here, you will receive yourself in different epochs. Another plus point: the images are automatically deleted after 24 hours.
