If you've scrolled through any social media platform this week — particularly Instagram — you've probably seen a slew of digitalized portraits shared by friends. They look animated, cartoonish, and above all, hauntingly beautiful.

Made with Lensa AI

The portraits are created by a new photo app that hopes to make your selfies look better than you could have imagined.

An oil painting set to a bold colored or blank background is what Lensa calls "stylish", and it's one of the reasons why they use artificial intelligence to digitalize portraits. The app is free but the portraits are. With a seven-day "free trial," users can take up to 20 selfies and then choose from 50, 100, or 200 unique avatars. A year long subscription is $35.

The app's popularity has raised questions regarding privacy as well as the potentially harmful nature of editing apps and filters on social media.

Three years ago, New Yorker writer and author Jia Tolentino cracked down on the dark side of social media, bringing to light an increasingly popular trend in plastic surgery for young adults.

She writes that the face is of a young age. She says that it has long, cartoonish lashes and a small, neat nose. It looks at you blankly, as if the owner is considering asking you for a private jet to go to the festival.

Unlike other filters on social media and photo-editing apps, Lensa doesn't try to look real, but instead leans into a new kind of photo distortion.

I followed the instructions to use the app. The minimum number of photos is 10 and the maximum is 20. An up- close selfies is a good choice. You are on vacation but still looking at the camera.

The technology takes up to 20 minutes to generate portraits in 10 styles after the photos are selected.

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It's obvious that the portraits look like me, but there's more to it than that. I had green eyes and dark hair. It captured my somewhat awkward, closed-mouth smile that is present in so many of my photos and real life, which was unnerving.

It was made with lensa artificial intelligence.

If they played me in a Hollywood film, the girl in the portraits would look a lot like me. Despite my selection of photos only being selfies from the neck up, Lensa either animated my body to be strikingly thin and several photos showed me in halter tops and gowns, with others showcasing objectively suggestive poses, which I only later realized could be considered lucky compared to what other

It was made with lensa artificial intelligence.

A senior reporter at MIT Technology Review wrote that of the 100 avatars created, 16 were topless and 14 had her in sexy poses.

There's more than one Heikkil. ZOE SOTTILE, a reporter for CNN, had a similar experience with Lensa's nude photos. She wrote that it looked like a version of her face was on a naked body. It looked like I was naked but with a blanket strategically placed, or the image just cut off to hide anything explicit.

Men as warriors, astronauts, and something resembling a Top-Gun-like themed photoshoot can be seen in the portraits of maleavatars.

After generating my own avatars and reading about similar experiences from other women, it became clear why the app requires you to be at least 18 years old.

A person has reached out to a company.

Artists are concerned about the future of human creativity after using artificial intelligence to create art.

Privacy is a concern for users of the app. Since it uses facial recognition to generate portraits, the question looms as to how long those photos will remain in the database. According to the app's privacy policy, it uses TrueDepthAPI technology and user photos to train its algorithm to perform better and show you better results.

Some people are concerned about what happens to the data. Do you want your face on a big database? Kerry Bowman, a bioethicist at the University of Toronto, said that people need to make their own decisions about the issue.

Images are erased from the server after being generated according to the company.

As soon as the avatars are generated, the user's photos and the associated model are erased permanently from our servers. And the process would start over again for the next request.

— Prisma Labs (@PrismaAI) December 6, 2022

The ability to transform images into works of art was one of the features that made the product of Prisma a success. The "Magicavatar" feature was launched in November of 2022. Privacy and psychological repercussions of the app are not known.

FaceTune faced a class action lawsuit in Illinois that claimed the app illegally collects, stores and uses consumer data as a violation of the state's Biometrics Information Privacy Act. Lightricks, the parent company of FaceTune, is being sued by three Illinois parents who claim their children were collected from them.

The app is new and therefore a lot is not known. As for the ethical and psychological concerns posed by such photo-editing apps, legal action might be difficult, as engaging with the app at its core involves a kind of welcoming of one's visual distortion.

Is the use of artificial intelligence a risk to creativity? The answer isn't simple.

Most of the reviews for Lensa on the app store say it's the best of its kind or one user says they love the app and continue to use it. The photo limit is the most negative complaint. Some people are dissatisfied with the quality of photos that show eyes or limbs that are not normal. "I have fingers that look grotesque, eyes that are colored incorrect, one eye is larger than the other, faces that are deformed or dismembered, my head either cut off or completely missing in photos," another user wrote.

It's possible that Lensa isn't the right app for those looking for an artificial intelligence upgrade.

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