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You've no doubt seen over the past few weeks how social media has been flooded with animated and illustrated versions of your friends, family and celebrities. Many people have proudly shared these fantastic versions of themselves that have been made using the artificial intelligence of the application called Lensa.
Its main selling point is the ability to build your own animated avatar with very precise facial features and use artificial intelligence to achieve amazing results.
Lensa selfie and retouched image editor claims that "you won't need a photo lab or a darkroom, as your ideal selfie will be ready in seconds" and offers a wide variety of filters to remove smudged backgrounds and make other necessary edits.
How to create your avatar with Lensa?
Lensa Artificial Intelligence for avatars, of course, download Lensa from Google Play or Apple App Store is the first step to create an animated avatar. Once the app is installed on your device, you must accept the terms and conditions presented to you because if you do not, you will not be able to use it.
Once you have accepted the privacy conditions and have the app activated, you must go to the Magic Avatars section. There you must send a request with between 10 and 20 photos, preferably taken alone and with various gestures, lighting and poses for Lensa to analyze them and provide you with an avatar.
Is Lensa free? How much does it cost?
You should note that the app is free, but if you want to use the Magic Avatars feature, you will have to pay for each set of images you create, regardless of whether you have subscribed to any of the plans they offer. That said, it is worth noting that if you take advantage of the 7-day free trial, you will then receive a 51% discount on each image pack, they may change their plans and pricing so I recommend you go to their official page to find out more about it.
Magic Avatars with Lensa
To create your Magic Avatars with Lensa, you will first be asked to upload 10-20 unique selfies of yourself. They must be selfies in which your entire face is visible; they cannot be photos in which only one or two faces are visible. When no longer in use, these photos will be deleted from Lensa's servers.
Lensa's artificial intelligence system will now review your photos and extract your facial features from them. It is necessary to get a variety of different angles in order to get a composite of your face. This process can take several minutes while all your photos are examined.
Is it safe to use Lensa?
Since its launch, the application has sparked an ongoing debate in social networks on issues related to user privacy and security.
According to the company's statements to TechCrunch, Lensa uses AWS services to process user-selected photographs. According to the company, once the artificial intelligence has been trained using the photographs, the images are immediately deleted.
They also state the following about the altered image: "We use your photos and videos to train our algorithms to work better and provide you with better results. We do our best to minimize the data we collect and not to restrict users' rights and freedoms in this regard, as we have a legitimate interest in doing so.". However, the company's privacy policy and terms leave room for maneuver, so even though the company has been clear about removing the photos, there may still be users who feel uncomfortable using the app.
Are there risks involved in generating avatars with Lensa?
As we mentioned previously, Lensa will not let you use the application if you do not agree with its privacy policy because that particular program uses technologies to collect information about users when they are online over time.
As such, using Lensa or any other application is not a bad thing because there are many others that are quite specific about the rules, although many times the user chooses not to read them and instead prefers to go straight in to get what they are looking for in the tool.
Lensa vs Artists
According to its privacy policy, Lensa's technology is based on the Stable Diffusion deep learning model, as Stable Diffusion trains its artificial intelligence using a massive network of digital art drawn from the Internet and a data source called LAION-5B. Currently, artists cannot accept or refuse to have their artwork included in the dataset and, as a result, their artwork is used to train the algorithm.
But perhaps the issue that people are most interested in is the fact of using the application to train an AI model. This helps them improve the accuracy of their artificial intelligence, so in addition to the amazing results and benefits, it could also lead to unfavorable circumstances, especially for the creative community and designers. As a result, more and more companies are using AI to create content, putting increasing pressure on the work of artists.
What do you think about this application, have you tried it? If you want to see more applications based on artificial intelligence I recommend you to check out our section of AI Applications
