Artificial intelligence can pretty terrifying for some people—until it’s a whole lot of fun.
If you spend any time on social media, you’ve no doubt seen several of your friends or people you follow showing off art that envisions them as everything from a fairly princess to an astronaut to an anime character.
This AI art comes from Lensa, an app that renders digital portraits based on photos you submit. And despite the recent rash of postings, it’s not exactly new. Lensa launched in the app store in 2018. What took so long for it to become a hit?
Some of that, of course, is the random nature of the Internet and app stores. Once a few influential people sing the praises of an app, it can take on a life of its own. But it also has something to do with the advances in AI and the launch of its avatar feature. And it’s coming to prominence at a time when self-expression is en vogue even more than usual.
While there are plenty of AI photo generating widgets making the rounds these days, part of Lensa’s appeal is its simplicity. Want to see some alternate, fantasy version of yourself (and, perhaps, show it off to friends)? Just upload 10-20 selfies, then click the yellow button at the bottom of the app. Pay the $4 (or $6 or $8, depending on how many images you’d like) and then wait. Within 20 minutes or so, the app will render 50 or more versions of yourself in various styles and poses.
Using a neural network (designed to emulate a human mind), the AI was trained on a database of images from the masters and contemporary artists. It doesn’t copy them, says Lensa’s owner Prisma, but it is influenced by them, as a human artist might be.
To date, more than 17 million people have downloaded Lensa since it added the “Magic Avatar” feature. The feature is, unquestionably, an impressive feat, whether you like your images or not.
It can be a hit or miss result, though. Some people are rewarded with idealized versions of themselves (Personally, I came out looking like the love-child of Chris Pine and Ewan McGregor—neither of whom, I wholeheartedly assure you, I resemble in the real world). Others say they don’t really recognize the person staring back at them (especially people of color).
And every once in a while, Lensa returns something that’s just plain creepy. Female users have been sexualized with exaggerated breasts and impossibly narrow waists. Subject’s weights are often adjusted, which can create body issues. And sometimes, the app returns images that include disfigured limbs.
There are reasons other than accuracy to hesitate, as well. While Lensa claims it deletes all of your selfies after using them to create the avatars, privacy experts still urge caution, as the company’s privacy policy notes it could use your photos to train its neural network algorithms and provide personalized content and information to you in relation to the app.
Additionally, some digital artists say they feel their work has been co-opted without their permission by Stable Diffusion, the Deep-learning AI that helps power Lensa.
Prisma pushed back against this in a Tweet earlier this month, writing “Whilst both humans and AI learn about artistic styles in semi-similar ways, there are some fundamental differences: AI is capable of rapidly analyzing and learning from large sets of data, but it does not have the same level of attention and appreciation for art as a human being.”
What does the company ultimately want? Subscribers. You’ll get a one-week free trial when you download Lensa (which won’t cover the cost of those magic avatars, though it will give you a discount). If you forget to cancel (or choose not to), you’ll be charged $50 for a one-year subscription that renews automatically.
Lensa is a lot more than the avatars, of course. It also uses the AI to digitally edit photos and assemble videos, often impressively. But, for the moment, the focus is squarely on the Instagram-able portraits.
And with so many people embracing them, some artists have raised the familiar fear that accompanies AI: It could, they claim, could endanger their livelihood, since it can quickly turn works of art at a price much lower than they can afford to charge.
“As cinema didn’t kill theater and accounting software hasn’t eradicated the profession, AI won’t replace artists but can become a great assisting tool,” Prisma responded in a series of Tweets. “We also believe that the growing accessibility of AI-powered tools would only make man-made art in its creative excellence more valued and appreciated, since any industrialization brings more value to handcrafted works.”
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
Image and article originally from www.nasdaq.com. Read the original article here.