How does everyone make these A.I. Selfies?

Images generated with Lensa AI are everywhere on social media, but at what cost?

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're entitled to an explanation of exactly what's going on here (and it's not time travel).

The Last week, users 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 application generates images and controversies.

What is Lensa AI?

Even if you haven't heard of from Lensa AI, you may have seen his work this week. It was the most popular US iPhone app in the Apple App Store on Wednesday. Lensa takes your selfies, studies them, and produces original computer-generated portraits of you - or anyone you feed it.

Do I have to pay for this?

You do. Right now, you can get 50 avatars - 10 images in five styles - for $3.99 for 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.) "Magical avatars consume enormous computing power to create amazing avatars for you," according to Lensa's payment page. "It's expensive, but we've made it as affordable as possible." Fair warning: prices have fluctuated as the app has become more popular and may have changed since this article was published.

How does it work?

After downloading the app, you will download a bunch of selfies. (Do yourself a favor and don't include any places where your hands touch your face unless you want to pay to pick up a mess of pictures with phantom knuckles hanging from your mouth.) Select a gender - male, female, or another - and walk away from your phone for about half an hour, and when you come back, presto. Your face, or something like it, has been stretched and pressed over a suite of 50 to 200 - depending on the package you purchase - A.I. generated images with themes such as "cosmic", "fairy princess" and "anime ".

OK, but how does it really work?

Lensa uses stable streaming, that is- ie when all the horses of a barn spread out to give themselves some space. Just kidding: Stable Diffusion is a "really powerful" AI-based image generator, said Subbarao Kambhampati, a professor at Arizona State University's School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence. Similar to DALL-E 2 and Midjourney, Stable Diffusion uses image prompts (like your selfies) and text prompts (like "fantasy", one of Lensa AI's categories) to generate high-quality images that sometimes become "trippy", Dr Kambhampati said. “He shows you pictures that no one has taken; he's just able to put them together from all the other images he's seen.

Cool.

That's cool! It's fun to see yourself rendered as a painting or an anime character or a little wood elf with two very different sized eyes and one hand, even if you have two IRLs. (Not all images will be perfect.) Some users, especially transgender and gender non-conforming people, even find that using Lensa to create can provide a sense of gender euphoria.

I think that some people are crazy about this? Should I be mad about that too? The first is that many users report that the art sexualizes them. When we tested the app, several of the images we received after uploading selfies and selecting "female" included full-body renders, despite users being specifically instr...