Lensa AI app causes a stir with sexy “Magic Avatar” images no one wanted

Over the previous week, the smartphone app Lensa AI has turn out to be a preferred matter on social media as a result of it may possibly generate stylized AI avatars based mostly on selfie headshots that customers add. It is arguably the primary time personalised latent diffusion avatar era has reached a mass viewers.

Whereas Lensa AI has confirmed widespread amongst individuals on social media who wish to share their AI portraits, the press has extensively targeted on the app’s reported tendency to sexualize depictions of ladies when Lensa’s AI avatar function launched.

A product of Prisma Labs, Lensa launched in 2018 as a subscription app targeted on AI-powered picture modifying. In late November 2022, the app grew in recognition because of its new “Magic Avatar” function. Lensa reportedly makes use of the Stable Diffusion picture synthesis mannequin underneath the hood, and Magic Avatar seems to make use of a personalization coaching methodology much like Dreambooth (whose ramifications we recently covered). All the coaching takes place off-device and within the cloud.

In early December, ladies utilizing the app seen that Lensa’s Magic Avatar function would create semi-pornographic or unintentionally sexualized photographs. For CNN, Zoe Sottile wrote, “One of many challenges I encountered within the app has been described by different ladies on-line. Despite the fact that all the photographs I uploaded had been fully-clothed and largely close-ups of my face, the app returned a number of photographs with implied or precise nudity.”

The response within the press grew as different ladies skilled comparable issues. For instance, this is a number of headlines masking Lensa in varied publications:

In the meantime, the identical sexualization challenge did not seem in photographs of males uploaded to the Magic Avatar function. For MIT Know-how Evaluate, Melissa Heikkilä wrote, “My avatars had been cartoonishly pornified, whereas my male colleagues obtained to be astronauts, explorers, and inventors.”

This is among the risks of basing a product on Secure Diffusion 1.x, which might simply sexualize its output by default. The habits comes from the large quantity of sexualized photographs present in its picture coaching information set, which was scraped from the Internet. (Secure Diffusion 2.x attempted to rectify this by eradicating NSFW materials from the coaching set.)

The Web’s cultural biases towards the sexualized depiction of ladies on-line have given Lensa’s AI generator its tendencies. Talking to TechCrunch, Prisma Labs CEO Andrey Usoltsev stated, “Neither us, nor Stability AI may consciously apply any illustration biases; To be extra exact, the man-made unfiltered information sourced on-line launched the mannequin to the prevailing biases of humankind. The creators acknowledge the potential of societal biases. So will we.”

In response to the widespread criticism, Prisma Labs has reportedly been working to prevent the unintended era of nude photographs in Lensa AI.

On Tuesday, we experimented with Lensa AI by importing 15 photographs of a lady (and likewise 15 photographs of a person), then paid for Magic Avatar representations of every. The girl’s outcomes we noticed weren’t sexualized in any apparent method, so Prisma’s efforts to cut back the incidence of NSFW-style imagery could be working already.

This doesn’t imply that Lensa AI’s tendencies to sexualize feminine topics do not exist. It is value noting that resulting from how Secure Diffusion generates photographs, it is probably that totally different ladies will see totally different outcomes relying on how carefully their face (or enter images) resemble images of a specific actress, movie star, or mannequin within the Secure Diffusion dataset. In our expertise, that may closely dictate how Secure Diffusion renders the remainder of an individual’s physique and its context.

Utilizing Lensa AI is simple, but it surely’s a product with a yearly subscription price (at present $50 per 12 months) and a one-time price for coaching Magic Avatar photographs—$3.99 for 50 avatars, $5.99 for 100 avatars, or $7.99 for 200 avatars. Clients add 10-20 selfies taken from totally different angles after which wait roughly 20-Half-hour to see the outcomes. Customers should affirm they’re over 18 years or older to make use of the service.

These technically inclined may experiment with Dreambooth as an alternative without cost, but it surely at present requires some information of growth instruments to get working.