Here’s how to use Lensa, the chart-topping app that uses AI to transform your selfies into digital avatars

You might have observed a brand new pattern taking on your Instagram feed. Your mates are turning themselves into digital artwork with the assistance of a synthetic intelligence-generated app known as Lensa.

Lensa AI is presently the highest free app in Apple App Store, although you may must pay to make use of the AI paintings function.

Lensa first launched as a photograph enhancing software in 2018, however final month the corporate launched a brand new function known as “Magic Avatars.” These AI-generated digital self-portraits flip you into artworks in a wide range of themes, from pop, to fairy princesses, to anime.

You get a 7-day free trial. Subscription charges range after that, with yearly limitless entry starting from $14.99 to $49.99. To use the “Magic Avatar” software, you may pay a further $3.99 for 50 photos.

Here’s tips on how to attempt it for your self.

There has been a growth in generative AI in current months with releases like ChatGPT and Dall-E. ChatGPT, which additionally not too long ago went viral, is an AI chatbot that has quite a lot of promise. You can ask it to jot down poems and tales or use it to reply questions. Dall-E, which is created by OpenAI, the identical group as ChatGPT, is an AI-powered text-to-image generator. You kind in some phrases and it creates a picture.

Lensa operates utilizing the open-source picture generator known as Stable Diffusion. Here’s tips on how to get began.

• Download Lensa AI for iPhone or Android.
• Open the app.
• Click the ‘Photos’ tab.
• You’ll see a yellow button that claims ‘Magic Avatars.’
• It’ll warn you that there could also be inaccuracies in photos, like defects and artifacts, so it’s important to acknowledge these phrases earlier than you proceed. Some of those inaccuracies embody creating photos with a number of heads or limbs. This did not occur to me, though I did see some photos that generated two completely different eye colours.

• After you click on “continue,” you may be requested to add 10 to twenty selfies. The app recommends utilizing close-ups, photos of adults, a wide range of backgrounds and facial expressions. It advises customers to keep away from group pictures, child photos, lined faces and nude photos.
• The app says “Photos will be immediately deleted from our servers after the Avatars are ready.”

• After choosing 10-20 selfies, you may be requested to pick your gender.
• It’s time to pay. If you are a subscriber, costs are 51% off, so 50 avatars value $3.99, 100 photos value $5.99 and 200 photos value $7.99.
• After 20 minutes or so you may be notified that your avatars are prepared for viewing and saving. You’ll obtain avatars in a wide range of completely different kinds like Fantasy, Fairy Princess, Focus, Pop, Stylish, Anime, Light, Kawaii, Iridescent and Cosmic.

Here are a few of my outcomes:

Artists have accused the corporate behind the app of stealing paintings from digital creators. Jon Lam, a storyboard artist at Riot Games, defined to NBC News that AI fashions are skilled utilizing different individuals’s paintings. Worse, Lauryn Ipsum, a graphic designer famous in a Tweet on Dec. 5 that artists’ signatures are nonetheless seen, albeit scrambled, on some photos. I observed this, too.

In a Twitter thread on Dec. 6, Prisma Labs tried to deal with a few of these issues. “The AI learns to recognize the connections between the images and their descriptions, not the artworks,” it mentioned. “This way the model develops operational principles that can be applied to content generation. Hence the outputs can’t be described as exact replicas of any particular artwork.”

Some privateness consultants are involved the Lensa app may preserve the images you add, regardless that it says it would not.

“As soon as the avatars are generated, the user’s photos and the associated model are erased permanently from our servers, the company said on Twitter. “And the method would begin over once more for the subsequent request.”

But any app that collects data from a phone could lift other private data. In Pisma Labs’ terms of service, the company says it doesn’t “require or request any metadata connected to the images you add, metadata (together with, for instance, geotags) could also be related along with your images by default.” Meaning it’s unclear whether or not you’re sharing location or personal data with the app, even if you’re doing so unintentionally.

Prisma Labs, the owner of Lensa did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on the privacy and copyright concerns.

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