What is up with Lensa and its not-so-family-friendly images!

Source: APKdone

Lensa uses Stable Diffusion to create these “magic avatars”. Lensa also takes a technological leap as the AI Learns about someone’s features based on the images submitted. But users of Lensa also found something out about AI. Turns out that when women make their “magic avatar” the AI sexualizes the women. This certainly is a unique approach. Although Lensa has created quite the buzz online with Stable Diffusion which is an open-source AI deep learning model, Lensa is not the only one out there using this technology. Canva is another player who recently launched a similar feature using open-source AI.

But why do you think AI-generated art became so popular last year? The technology was in development for years but my guess would be the popularity of social media sites gave the AI-generated art tools the popularity they gained. And if I trace back the availability of this technology to the general public then I think not much was available earlier. But these technologies do come with a list of ethical problems. That might be another reason why we have not seen such apps in the past. 

Even with the popularity that Lensa has gained there are some serious issues with the app. Many reporters have pointed out that Lensa AI sexualizes women in their “magic avatars”. Remember the ethical problems I was talking about. Well,’ actually Lensa comes with a lot of ethical problems, primarily because Lensa can be used to generate nudes as well. And users have reported that Lensa sometimes generates nudes even when such an image was not requested. A research fellow at UCLA found something even more shocking. The research fellow submitted photos when she was a child but the app still produced sexualized pictures.

Prisma Labs was asked about it but the company fired back at the research fellow claiming she purposefully breached Lansa’s terms of service which clearly directed all users to not submit images of anyone under 18 years of age. Lensa also has a feature where the users need to check a box to indicate the pictures submitted are 18 years old or over. Users need to check the box every time before creating any “magic avatars”. Lensa also came under fire for perpetuating racist stereotypes. An Asian journalist shared her poor experience with the app where she was getting heavily sexualized avatars whereas her white female colleagues got comparatively fewer sexual images.

I don't know why it all feels intentional to me. But what do you think about this entire ordeal with Lensa, and will you consider using the app knowing what could be a possible outcome? Comment down below.