Lensa reignites discussion among artists over the ethics of AI art

Lensa, the AI portrait app, has reignited discussion among artists over the ethics of creating images with models that have been trained using other people’s work.

For many online, Lensa AI is a cheap, accessible profile picture generator. But in digital art circles, the popularity of artificial intelligence-generated art has raised major privacy and ethics concerns.

Lensa, which launched as a photo editing app in 2018, went viral last month after releasing its “magic avatars” feature. It uses a minimum of 10 user-uploaded images and the neural network Stable Diffusion to generate portraits in a variety of digital art styles. Social media has been flooded with Lensa AI portraits, from photorealistic paintings to more abstract illustrations. The app claimed the No. 1 spot in the iOS App Store’s “Photo & Video” category earlier this month. 

But the app’s growth — and the rise of AI-generated art in recent months — has reignited discussion over the ethics of creating images with models that have been trained using other people’s original work. 

Lensa is tinged with controversy — multiple artists have accused Stable Diffusion of using their art without permission. Many in the digital art space have also expressed qualms over AI models producing images en masse for so cheap, especially if those images imitate styles that actual artists have spent years refining.

For a $7.99 service fee, users receive 50 unique avatars — which artists said is a fraction of what a single portrait commission normally costs. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/lensa-ai-artist-controversy-ethics-privacy-rcna60242


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