What is the Lensa app and why are artists worried about it?

If you’ve been anywhere near social media lately, you may have noticed some of your friends posting otherworldly digitally-animated portraits of themselves.

If you’ve been anywhere near social media lately, you may have noticed some of your friends posting otherworldly digitally-animated portraits of themselves.

Even celebrities like Chance the Rapper and Megan Fox have jumped on the bandwagon.

The portraits look like they were made by digital artists, and in a way, they sort of were. But no individual artist is getting paid for them, or even getting credit.

That’s because these works weren’t created by a human. They were created by a machine.

The Lensa AI app by Prisma Labs uses artificial intelligence to transform your selfies into customised portraits, allowing users to be whoever they choose to be.

But while it’s become a runaway hit on social media, the app has drawn the ire of digital artists, who claim the works it generates are based on stolen art.

New to the story? Here’s what you need to know.

How does Lensa work for users?

Creating these digital portraits using Lensa AI is simple and relatively inexpensive, two facts that have no doubt contributed to the app’s meteoric rise in recent weeks.

According to Statista, Lensa AI has been downloaded more than 5 million times since November, when the “magic avatar” feature was introduced.

A subscription normally costs about 100 euros per year, but users can benefit from a 7-day free trial. Accessing the “magic avatar” function, which generates 50 fantastical portraits, costs an additional 4 euros for everyone.

To get access to their portraits, users need to upload 10-20 selfies of themselves to the app.

Lensa prompts them to choose a variety of different angles and facial expressions to get the best results, and warns them that there may be “inaccuracies or defects” in the output images.

Those defects sometimes present as extra arms and legs, or heads that turn at unnatural angles.

After the app has time to run a user’s photos through its AI model (about 10 minutes), it spits out a variety of avatars. Users can then save them onto their devices and share them freely on any and all social media platforms.