Advertisem*nt
SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.
Supported by
SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT
It Happened Online
Images generated with Lensa AI are all over social media, but at what cost?
Have you noticed that many of your friends are suddenly fairy princesses or space travelers? Is your Instagram feed overrun with Renaissance-style paintings of people who were definitely born in the ’90s? If so, you are entitled to an explanation of what exactly is going on here (and it’s not time travel).
In the past week, users have flocked to Lensa AI, an app that uses your selfies and artificial intelligence 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 haven’t heard of Lensa AI, you’ve possibly seen its work this week. As of Wednesday, it was the most popular iPhone app in the United States in Apple’s app store. Lensa 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. Right now, you can get 50 avatars — 10 images in five styles — for $3.99 during a one-week trial period. (For $35.99 you can subscribe to Lensa AI for the year, which gets you a 51 percent discount on future avatars.) “Magic Avatars consume tremendous computation power to create amazing avatars for you,” according to Lensa’s checkout page. “It’s expensive, but we made it as affordable as possible.” Fair warning: Prices have been fluctuating as the app has gotten more and more popular and may have changed since this article was published.
How does it work?
After downloading the app, you’ll upload a bunch of selfies. (Do yourself a favor and don’t include any where your hands are touching your face unless you want to pay money 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 — A.I.-generated images with themes including “cosmic,” “fairy princess” and “anime.”
OK, but how does it really work?
Lensa uses Stable Diffusion, which is when all the horses in a barn spread out to give each other a little space. Just kidding: Stable Diffusion is a “really powerful” A.I.-based image generator, said Subbarao Kambhampati, a professor in 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,” Dr. Kambhampati said. “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.”
Advertisem*nt
SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT
