Lensa AI is said to take “your photos to the next level.”

Lensa AI is an image editing app that is four years old but has shot to the top of the download charts after Prisma Labs (the owner of the app) introduced a “magic avatar” feature in November. It is claimed that more than 17 million people have downloaded the app since, and images generated using this feature have repeatedly gone viral. Yet, concerns are already rife about the appropriateness of the images, as well as the terms and conditions that users must agree to. (Economic Times)

Lensa’s AI tool accomplishes these image transformations because it has been trained on millions of images and text scraped from the internet, and has learnt to create patterns and emulate creative styles.

Celebrities, and millions of other people have uploaded an image, generally a selfie, and used Lensa’s Magic Avatar feature and a text prompt from the user to convert that picture into anime-like images, or something that looks like a beautiful oil painting, or has even more surreal and fantastic qualities.

But problems abound.

Users have complained that the end result is often embarrassingly sexualized or has weird physical attributes. This happens even when the user uploaded an image only of their face.

There is even scope for mischief: It seems it is possible to morph the image of a celebrity’s head onto a topless body and thereby create what presents as a topless avatar of the actor.

The Wall Street Journal quoted a company spokesperson as follows:

“We are sincerely sorry if someone’s personal experience on the app did not turn out as expected,” the spokesperson said. “Needless to say, the end results highly depend on the quality of inputs.”

The company also said it is taking measures to address concerns about explicit content.

There is also controversy around the terms and condtions that Prisma imposes on users. By agreeing, you give it the rights to use your image for various purposes including to train its neural network algorithms.

Further, note that you would be granting Lensa a “perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully-paid, transferable, sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, distribute, create derivative works of your User Content, without any additional compensation to you and always subject to your additional explicit consent for such use where required by applicable law.”

Accordingly, it would be advisable to carefully read the terms and conditions, as well as the privacy policy, to know what you are getting into.

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Image by Amy from Pixabay