Using Magic Avatars to Edit and Edit my Face: My Experiences with Lensa and My Favorite Misdemeanors
Let’s say you’ve considered everything above and still decided to spend a couple of bucks to get a pack of “magic avatars.” After you’ve saved the colorful creations, check out the photo- and video-editing capabilities on Lensa. Is this something you want to use often or is it just another app that’ll collect digital dust on your smartphone? “Control the settings, delete after use, and exercise any and all rights that they offer you,” recommends Winters to anyone worried about data collection.
I then embarked on what I knew would be a journey through hell, and decided to use my likeness to test the app’s other restriction: “No kids, adults only.” (Some of the results are below: Please be aware that they show sexualized images of children.)
It has been used to feel violated by the internet. I have been the victim of several harassment campaigns where my image was manipulated, distorted and distributed without my consent. Because I am not face-out as a sex worker, the novelty of hunting down and circulating my likeness is, for some, a sport. Sex workers are celebrated rather than condemned because they are not perceived as deserving of basic rights by the general public. Sex work is often seen as a moral failing and our dehumanization is redundant. My face has been doctored into other women’s bodies, pictures of myself in nudity and unclothed clients have also been taken, and I have even had a word search comprised of my face, personal details and research interests. I don’t worry about Lensa.
I’m desensitized enough to the horrors of technology that I decided to be my own lab rat. I tried out a number of methods: first, only sex education and dungeon photos, and then, my most feminine photos under the “male” gender option, all of which yielded spectacularly sized breasts and nudity.
I have few photos of myself from childhood. Until my late teens and between my unruly hair, uneven teeth, and the bifocals I started wearing at age seven, my appearance could most generously be described as “mousy.” Before the advent of the phone, I grew up and any other pictures are buried away in distant relatives’ photo albums. After I saw how it transformed me from an awkward six-year-old to a fairy princess, I decided to give the app a try.
The machine seemed to recognize my child’s body in some places but didn’t add breasts. This was not a reflection of technology’s personal ethics but of the patterns it identified in my photo and it could have seen my flat chest as adult man. In other photos, the orbs in my chest that were attached to my clothing were different from nude photos my other tests had produced.
I tried with a mix of childhood photos and selfies. The naked photos of an adolescent and sometimes childish face were distinctly adult. Similar to my earlier tests that generated seductive looks and poses, this set produced a kind of coyness: a bare back, tousled hair, an avatar with my childlike face holding a leaf between her naked adult’s breasts. Many of the images were similar to a 2008 Vanity Fair shoot in which a 15-year-old Cyrus had a sheet around her nude body. What was disturbing about the image at the time was the pairing of her makeup-free, almost cherubic face with the body of someone implied to have just had sex.
Is Lensa a Facebook App? Privacy Policies and Terms of Use in the Art Industry and Future Implications for Digital Image Production and Digital Art Direction
In 2016 a function of Prisma allowed users to transform their selfies into images in the style of famous artists.
Before diving in, take a minute to browse through the privacy policy and the terms of use to get a better understanding of what the app does with your data. Every now and then we have to be aware that our data is being used for something. This data is of particular interest to you. There is a professor at the Queen Mary University of London who says that we should be more cautious with how data is being used.
Although it’s impossible to know exactly how a company is using and storing your data without an independent assessment, this statement is a move in the right direction. With that in mind, however, uploads are only a small part of the larger equation.
Any user canunsubscribe from that collection by contacting the company at Privacy@lensa-ai.com. If you want to opt out, you can do so by going into your privacy settings. To be fair, it’s not just Lensa: It’s probably true that every app on your phone collects more data than you think. If the company is acquired in the future, it is possible for the data to change hands if you decide to use Lensa. “That especially happens when it goes into bigger companies that are much more adept at bullshitting around how they talk about it,” says Ben Winters, a lead on the AI and human rights projects at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Adult sexual images of adults can be produced by Lensa. It could be a potential instance where insufficient foresight has been placed into protecting the dignity of individuals. “When technologies can harm, we’re on the hook to do all that we can to anticipate those impacts.”
Some artists are embracing the potential for generative AI to produce fascinating results. The technology’s potential ramifications are a bigger concern for others. “The commercialization of these image generators will have an impact on the ability for artists to keep sort of sustaining themselves in the long term,” says Leslie.
Although it’s a more expensive route, those who are able to should consider commissioning smaller artists to create digital pieces for their new profile picture, phone wallpaper, or portrait. Instagram and Twitter are full of artists who work in a variety of styles that you could never get from generative AI, and many of them are eager for commissions. For a nominal fee, you can get something truly unique and personal. Asking around at the community art center to support the local artist is an excellent way to do that.
Lensa-Ai App – An App to Make Your Face Art Explanation For What You’re Reading and How You Can Show Your Face
A yearlong subscription to the app, which also provides photo editing services, costs $35.99. But you can use the app for a weeklong free trial if you want to test it out before committing.
An additional fee is required for the generation of the magic avatars. As long as you have a subscription or free trial, you can get 50 avatars for $3.99, 100 for $5.99, or 200 for $7.99.
Users are urged to submit 10 selfies for the best results. The pictures should depict your face in a closeup with a variety of different colors and angles. Lensa also stipulates it should only be used by people who are 13 and older.
In general, I felt like the app did a decent job producing artistic images based on my selfies. I could see where their came from, even though I couldn’t quite identify myself in the portraits.
One of the challenges I encountered in the app has been described by other women online. The app returned several naked images of me even though all of them were full-clothed and close to my face.
In one of the most disorienting images, it looked like a version of my face was on a naked body. I looked naked in several photos, but with a blanket strategically placed or the picture was cut off to hide any explicit content. And many of the images, even where I was fully clothed, featured a sultry facial expression, significant cleavage, and skimpy clothing which did not match the photos I had submitted.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/style/article/lensa-ai-app-art-explainer-trnd/index.html
Artists may not be allowed to make their work for a digital portrait, but they can use Artificial Intelligence to improve “revenge porn”
Snow said artificial intelligence technology like the one Lensa uses could be used to generate “revenge porn,” i.e., making naked images of someone without their consent.
Some users have documented forms of bias in their images, like black users who arewhitewashed and shown as darker than they actually are. Similarly, Aubrey Gordon, a writer and fat rights activist, wrote on her verified Instagram the app produced images which made her look much thinner than she actually is.
The privacy policy of Lensa says that it uses a deep learning model called Stable Diffusion. Stable Diffusion uses a massive network of digital art scraped from the internet, from a database called LAION-5B, to train its artificial intelligence. Currently, artists are unable to opt-in or opt-out of having their art included in the data set and thus used to train the algorithm.
Stable Diffusion relies on the work of artists to make their own images, but they are not credited or paid for their work. Earlier this year, CNN reported on several artists who were upset when they found their work had been used without their consent or payment to train the neural network for Stable Diffusion.
Several of the artists expressed concern the apps could also threaten their livelihoods. Digital artists cannot compete with the low prices and fast turnaround artificial intelligence enables for a digital portrait, they said at the time.
The company said that although both humans and Artificial Intelligence are able to learn about artistic styles similar to one another, they don’t get the same amount of attention and appreciation.