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Now you can take selfies with the help of AI with Lensa

If your Instagram is awash in algorithmically generated portraits of your friends, you aren't alone. After adding a new avatar generation tool based on Stable Diffusion, the photo editing app Lensa AI went viral over the last few days, with users sharing their uncanny AI-crafted avatars (and the horrible misfires) in stories and posts.

Lensa's fun, eminently shareable avatars mark the first time many people have interacted with a generative AI tool. In Lisa's case, it's also the first time they've paid for computer-generated art.

Stable Diffusion is free, and many people are playing around with it for research or fun. But Lensa and other services like it — Avatar AI and Profilepicture.AI, to name a few — are making money by selling the computing cycles required to run the prompts and spit out a set of images. That certainly changes the equation a little.

Lensa is built on Stable Diffusion's free, open-source image generator but acts as a middleman. Send Lensa 10-20 selfies and $7.99 ($3.99 if you sign up for a free trial), and the app does the heavy lifting for you behind the scenes, handing back a set of stylized portraits in an array of styles like sci-fi, fantasy, and anime. Anyone with sufficient processing power can install Stable Diffusion on a machine, download some models and get similar results. Still, Lensa's avatars are impressive and Instagram-ready enough that droves of people are more than happy to pay for the convenience.

While the tech world has celebrated the advancements of AI image and text generators this year — and artists have watched the proceedings warily — your average Instagram user probably hasn't struck up a philosophical conversation with ChatGPT or fed DALL-E absurdist prompts. That also means that most people haven't grappled with the ethical implications of free, readily available AI tools like Stable Diffusion and how they're poised to change entire industries — if we let them.

Stable Diffusion, the AI image generator that powers Lensa, was originally trained on 2.3 billion captioned images — a massive cross-section of the visual internet. Swept up in all that stuff, including watermarked images, copyrighted works, and a huge swath of pictures from Pinterest. Those images also include many thousands of photos pulled from Smugmug and Flickr, illustrations from DeviantArt and ArtStation, and stock images from sites like Getty and Shutterstock.