The best AI trick yet catches our attention

Face filters and selfie apps are so compelling because they simulate unlimited interest in what we look like.

Last year ended with images flooding Instagram, Twitter and group chats - photos of us, but not exactly. They were the products of an app called Lensa AI, which can apply machine learning tools to digitize your selfies and generate portraits of you in a variety of artistic styles. This kind of thing seems to be a semi-annual trend: every few months, an app emerges to collect photos of your face and manipulate your image, reflecting it and refracting it again. There are tools to virtually makeup selfies, apply "artistic filters" imitating famous paintings, shapeshift into an animal. You could age yourself three decades; you might imagine yourself as another ethnicity; you could swap your sex; you could become thinner or bald.

Lensa's process is quite simple. You upload 10-20 selfies and pay a few bucks for a "magical avatar" pack, selecting a set of art styles from a bewildering array of options. (These include “Fairy Princess”, “Fantasy”, “Stylish”, “Light”, “Iridescent”, “Anime”, “Pop”, “Cosmic”, “Focus”, “Kawaii” and others.) Then , you wait a few minutes for the app to spit out its results, in a form that looks like trading cards: images that look like a whole selection of illustrators and commercial artists have spent their time create drawings and paintings of yourself, for movie posters or scrapbook covers or animated films about your life. (After all, the technology involved was originally trained using huge volumes of images pulled from the internet, including real works by artists.)

Digital tools can work like fun mirrors, fueling a totally private fascination with ourselves.

I spent $5.99 on a pack of 100 magical avatars, working from selfies I had taken over the past few months. (What was the original purpose of these selfies, anyway? In one, I'm showing some very red lipstick to friends; in another, I'm holding a cup of coffee and showing that I'm tired; in most of them, it's not clear what I'm doing or why I took them.) When the avatars appeared, I was surprised: I was there and I wasn't. There was something unsettling and half-human about them. Some looked almost exactly like me, though I wear, say, a golden headdress; others turned my eyes into someone else's, or gave me a nose that wasn't mine. The aesthetic, regardless of the style chosen, seemed anime-inspired, with a dose of photorealism. The portraits were, in my opinion, ugly and weird, but there was some weird precision that couldn't be denied. I couldn't help but search. Perhaps I had never experienced strangeness so directly, or at least in such a direct relationship with myself. I stared at a "Fairy Princess" version of me, crowned with flowers, eyes averted and pursed lips. Was it really me? Of course not. But also, maybe, a little, yes.

...