[image: Twitter / @chloelisbette]

Remember that time when your Instagram feed was packed with whimsical AI-generated selfies of people looking like magical, ethereal characters from the distant future?

The photo editing app Lensa AI was behind that December 2022 boom and now, with enough folks morphed into sexy fairies, warriors, cyborgs, and elves behind its name, it has a few serious criticisms to knock it back down into the void from whence it came.

Prisma Labs’ artificial intelligence app’s ‘Magic Avatars’ feature is dealing with major backlash around its hyper-sexualisation, intellectual property, and privacy problems, per Business Insider.

Some of the claims have been about the overt sexualisation and racialisation of the app, despite Lensa’s rules stipulating “no nudes” and “no kids, adults only”:

Melissa Heikkilä, a reporter for MIT Technology Review, wrote in an article in December that 16 of the 100 avatars she received were topless, while an additional 14 put her in “extremely skimpy clothes and overtly sexualised poses.”

She is clearly not alone:

Lensa gave me a boob job! Thanks AI!!! pic.twitter.com/Fpwwf5bxuZ

— tamagotchi foster mom (@chloelisbette) December 5, 2022

Lensa said big boobs is all you’re good for 💀 pic.twitter.com/2tRIh7XhrM

— Lexi ⁷🤔 (@lexinlindsey) December 9, 2022

As an Asian woman, I thought I’d seen it all. But being sexualized by an AI was not something I expected, although it is not surprising. In the Algorithm newsletter, I look at how male/female filters change the way the Lensa app generates images of me. https://t.co/lwVo1Xzr4Z

— Melissa Heikkilä (@Melissahei) December 13, 2022

Whitewashing is also an issue:

#Honestly given I uploaded my most basic selfies, @lensaai has not been able to pick the features very accurately. It also #whitewashed me and placed me in European beauty stencil, which is quite insulting . #AI #aigeneratedart #aiartcommunity #lensa #stablediffusion #racistapp pic.twitter.com/KYIRXAFrTf

— sundaszahra (@SundasZahra) December 9, 2022

The problem is that Lensa creates its ‘art’ from an open-source AI model built from data the program pulls from images on the internet – a constant source of problematic content.

TechBriefly also notes that the app has come under fire for stealing content from artists:

The original avatars may have been created by artificial intelligence, but Lauryn Ipsum claims that the smaller components that went into their development—color schemes, brushstrokes, textures, and individual styles—were appropriated from other artists without their knowledge or permission.

This criticism quickly went viral:

Stable Diffusion was able to avoid copyright of thousands of images by developing their technology through non-profit means and claiming to be “ethical and legal” while the companies that use this open source model use it for profit.

— meg rae (@megraeart) December 2, 2022

I’m cropping these for privacy reasons/because I’m not trying to call out any one individual. These are all Lensa portraits where the mangled remains of an artist’s signature is still visible. That’s the remains of the signature of one of the multiple artists it stole from.

A 🧵 https://t.co/0lS4WHmQfW pic.twitter.com/7GfDXZ22s1

— Lauryn Ipsum (@LaurynIpsum) December 6, 2022

However, the legality around Lensa is murky because US copyright law “treats AI as a tool or a machine, rather than as an author or a creator”, according to Eliana Torres, an intellectual-property attorney.

Another issue is how AI technology uses our biometric data, although Lensa has assured in its updated policy that it does “not use your personal data to generally train and/or create our separate artificial intelligence/products”.

Anyway, just like the painter Agnieszka Pilat predicted, Lensa has fallen just as fast as it rose.

Classic internet stuff.

[sources:businessinsider&techbriefly]