How is everyone making those AI selfies?

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% 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?

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" AI-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 (such as your selfies) and text prompts (such as "fantasy," one of Lensa AI's categories) to generate high-quality images that sometimes get "trippy," 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."

Cool.

It is cool! It's fun to see yourself rendered as a painting or an anime character or a little woodland elf with eyes of two very different sizes and only one hand, even if you have two IRL. (Not every image is going to be perfect.) Some users, particularly transgender and gender-nonconforming people, are even finding that using Lensa to create can offer a sense of gender euphoria.

I think some people are mad about this. Should I be mad about this, too?

Prisma Labs states on its FAQ page that "occasional sexualization is observed across all gender categories."

Thus, it's fairly simple to use the app to create lewd images of anyone you want. This week, Tech Crunch was able to create topless avatars of celebrities using images of an actor's head edited onto topless bodies. "It turns out the AI takes those Photoshopped images as permission to go wild, and it appears it disables an NSFW filter," Tech Crunch reported. Now imagine that same experiment, but through the lens of someone who is angling to make revenge porn. It gets murky in a hurry.

Andrey Usoltsev, Prisma Labs' CEO and co-founder, told TechCrunch that using Lensa AI to engage in "harmful or harassing behavior" was a breach of its terms of use.

What are users saying about the app?

Yasemin Anders, 29, decided to use Lensa AI after seeing it on social media and was particularly excited to see herself recreated into an ethereal fairy.

Other users are reporting that the app is making their skin appear lighter or whiter and is markedly altering their facial features, which Kambhampati said was an ongoing issue with generative AI tools, including Snapchat's face lenses. "If most of the images you fed the system were of white faces, then it's not surprising that when it tries to make an image that looks supposedly 'better,' it just makes it whiter," he said.

How do artists feel about Lensa?

Stable Diffusion was trained on the creations of many artists who did not explicitly consent to the use of their work for Prisma Labs's profit, Kambhampati said, adding, "If van Gogh was alive today, you'd probably need to pay van Gogh some licensing fee to make your pictures be in van Gogh's style." That is not what has happened here.

"To a lot of people, having our art stolen, they don't view it as anything personal — like, 'Oh, well, you know, it's just a style; you can't copyright a style,'" said Jonathan Lam, a storyboard artist who works in video games and animation. "But I would argue that for us, our style is actually our identity. It's is what sets us apart from each other. It's what makes us marketable to clients." Lam, who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, is one of many artists who have since spoken out on social media about the app.

He also noted that some of the works being generated by Lensa include what appear to be renderings of artists' signatures. (Several of our own Lensa-generated images had scribbles where a signature might go on an IRL painting.) "All these tech enthusiasts are saying that these generators are creating something new, but if the artist's signature is still there, it's not something new," Lam said. "It's just generating something based on the data it was fed."

Prisma Labs wrote in a Twitter thread that AI "will not replace digital artists" and pushed back against the characterization that Lensa was ripping off artists' work. "The AI learns to recognize the connections between the images and their descriptions, not the artworks," the company wrote. "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."

Are there any privacy concerns?