Users Complains about Lensa's Fetish for Asian Women as it generates their sexualized avatars

People are complaining that the popular photo editing app Lensa AI's avatar generator sexualizes and alters their resemblances. Users also claim that the Lensa AI (Artificial Intelligence) is making their pictures appear sexual. When the photo of Asian woman is uploaded in the app to create an avatar of them as a male, Lensa frequently generates female nudes and sexualized positions but only the Asian heritage remains same which proves Lensa's fetish for Asian women.

The AI selfie generator Lensa, known for its "Magic Avatars," gained popularity on social media and reached top place in the U.S. Apple App Store charts. However, several female users expressed their displeasure with the Lensa AI app since it produced some sexualized photos of them, making them appear skinny or analysing their characteristics to an uncomfortable degree.

About Lensa AI app –

Stable Diffusion, a deep learning model that Lensa AI employs, enables the app to understand the face and produce stunning photographs with it. This technique is used by Lensa AI to generate over 200 different avatar types in 10 different artistic genres, letting the user to select one they prefer the most.

Lensa is nothing new. It was actually developed by Prisma Labs, which also has a self-titled photo-editing software, and has been available since 2018. Alexey Moiseenkov established the California-based Prisma Labs in 2016 with the help of a group of Russian programmers that included Andrey Usoltsev, Oleg Poyaganov, and Ilya Frolov. Upon Moiseenkov's departure from Prisma Labs as CEO in 2018, Usoltsev took control and was named CEO.

Prisma earned the App of the Year award from both the iOS App Store and Google Play not long after its release and quickly rose to become one of the most downloaded apps worldwide.

People's perception on Lensa AI app:

Users must upload only appropriate content that is "no nudes" and "adults only," according to Lensa's terms of service. However, several users—mostly women—have observed that the app not only creates nudes from their modest photos, but also embellishes them with cartoonishly sexualized elements like enormous breasts.

In several instances, customers have described how the AI selfie maker transformed their fully-clad original photos into utterly bare ones.

According to Olivia Snow, a writer, educator, and research fellow at UCLA's Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, "Magic Avatar" app Lensa generated nudes from her childhood photos. Despite simply posting headshots, she has received numerous fully nude results. Nearly a dozen women of colour told her that Lensa anglicised their looks and bleached their complexion in addition to sexualizing them.

While another women from MIT technology review claims that her Asian ancestry, is the only thing the AI model appeared to have noticed from her selfies. She received pictures of stereotypical Asian women who were obviously based on anime or video game characters. Or most likely porn, given the significant percentage of her avatars that were nude or exposed much skin. Several avatars seemed to be crying. Her white female colleague, meanwhile, only received a small number of sexualized photos, including a few nudes and glimpses of cleavage. She received identical findings to another of her co-workers who is of Chinese descent: reams and reams of pornographic avatars.

Concerns about using Lensa AI app:

The software links us to practises such as educating the AI, robbing artists, and predatory data-sharing. Each issue is valid, but less talked about are the more heinous offences committed by the app, including the algorithm's propensity to sexualize people to an uncomfortable and even hazardous degree. But according to its privacy statement, Lensa only uses the uploaded images it receives to apply filters and effects

Conclusion: Despite of these concerns and people are still using this app and are excited about the avatars that it generates. On other hand, some of the Asian woman are concerned about the sexualized avatars that it generates.