Lensa is the new popular social media app
In the last week, the photo editing app Lensa has become very popular because people are posting AI-generated selfies made with the app's newest feature. For $3.99, Lensa users can upload 10–20 photos of themselves and get 50 selfies made by the app's artificial intelligence in a variety of art styles. But before you hit the buy button, here's a word of caution: Lensa's privacy policy and terms of use say that the "Face Data" that users send in to make their selfies can be used by Prisma AI, the company that makes Lensa, to train the AI's neural network even more.
An artificial neural network like the one used by Lensa or the popular text-to-image generator Dall-E 2 looks at huge amounts of data to learn how to make better and better results. Dall-E 2 was trained on hundreds of millions of images to learn the links between different words and different visual traits so that it could turn simple sentences into images that were surprisingly well-made. In the same way, Lensa's neural network is always learning how to draw faces more accurately. Apple's TrueDepth API is used to get this face data, which includes position, orientation, and face topology. This is the same technology that lets iPhone users unlock their phones by just looking at the screen with their faces. The neural network is fed this information about faces. But this information about faces is not sold to other people.
Artist Maya Kotomori recounts her experience
Maya Kotomori, a writer and former model who just uploaded her own Lensa selfies, doesn't know if these generators that are helped by AI are a problem or not. In the art world, apps like Dall-E 2 have caused a lot of debate because artists worry that they won't be able to make as much money as illustrators and that their work might be stolen to feed neural networks. Many times, people have used AI generators to make pictures in the style of certain artists without their permission or payment. Kotomori said she bought two sets of selfies because the first set made her look like a white woman, even though she has light skin and is black. When Kotomori sent in more photos and paid again, she got selfies that she liked better.
"As a black person with light skin, I think the AI made a lot of assumptions about me based on my skin color. "The second batch I got back looked more like me," Kotomori wrote in a direct message. "Then I kind of started kicking myself. Had I just helped teach a computer to understand racial nuances? In the long run, how will this help or hurt society? The answer is, "I don't know at all."
Jean Dubreil