On social networks, 2022 closes in two ways: with they are fasting Wednesdaythe beautiful series by Tim Burton dedicated to the little girl of the Addams Family (and in particular to her intoxicating ballet), or with slideshows of people showing how their face has become after Lensa’s treatment. It seems impossible to escape either of these two streams of content. We are obviously talking about Lensa here.
Simplifying, it’s an app that does pretty much what Faceapp or other software does (did). able to age or rejuvenate a face starting from an image, one of those things that are used as a joke and to see the effect it has. Lensa has the same problems than those apps but somehow bigger and more serious, because it works so much better.
History
Privacy and facial recognition: an Italian startup’s adversative clothes will hide us from AIs
by Emanuele Capone
What can you do with Lensa
Lensa is new these days though it’s not really new: it has been around since 2018but it has only been talked about a lot since December, so much so that it reached first place in the Photo & Video section of the iOS App Store in the USA, which is also where they are YouTube e Instagram (dropped to positions 3 and 4 at the time). It happened because at the end of November the developers introduced the Magic Avatar feature.
Once installed, Lensa asks people to upload 10-20 personal photos, preferably headshots or profiles, and then uses the Stable Diffusion artificial intelligence algorithm (things?) to process them and create avatars of the person that look as if they were drawn by a digital artist. Which by the way is making digital artists very angry in the flesh.
All this is not free, and it’s not free even in a not exactly transparent way: when first opened, a pop-up invites you to activate the 7-day free trial to use the editing tools with AI, which, if not canceled in time, leads to the payment of $39.99 per year (29.99 euros, in Italy). One can answer no, but the free version of the app is very limited and still the Magic Avatar feature seems to be behind another paywall which is sometimes active and sometimes not: another $3.99 is needed for 50 avatars, divided into 5 variations of 10 different styles.
The question of privacy
However, the problem of cost is not the biggest one for Lensa. The important point it’s how the app uses the images it receives. Images that depict real people’s faces, which is one thing to be kept even more present in this era of deepfakes (things?)since you can do almost anything with someone’s faces.
The developers say the photos are elaborate sui server di Amazon Web Services and that the images shared by users are “deleted within 24 hours”, or in any case at the end of processing. However, they only refer to the original images, the ones from which the software starts to generate the avatars. All the others, those created artificially, but in which the person is obviously recognizable, only in the total availability of the app. As indeed it is clearly written in the section Terms of Use: “You grant us a perpetual, revocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully-paid, transferable, sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, create derivative works from and transfer your User Content, without any additional compensation to you”. Che in Italian it means that “you grant us a perpetual licenserevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully paid-up, transferable, sublicensable to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, transfer, create derivative works from your content, without further compensation to you”.
That what do they do with it, those of Lensa, of our faces? For example, they can use elaborations for advertise the app, this or others to come in the future. So that we can find ourselves, without knowing it, on display on the Google Play Store. They will surely use them for train artificial intelligence further to become even better, so that the next software are even more effective and convince even more people to use them to see the effect it has, providing other faces that will perpetuate this mechanism practically indefinitely.
The case
What is Fakeyou, the app to speak with the voice of Conte and Berlusconi
by Francesco Marino
Illegality, nudity, sexism: the other problems
This is the predictable and highly probable part of what will happen with the photos people share on Lensa, then there’s all the part that is only imaginable. Although no less likely.
For example, one should think about the illegal use that could be made of the faces, that they could be used for forge documents, perhaps by training an AI that does the opposite of what Lensa does, restoring the photos to their original appearance. Or to create character collages, animations, gifs and videos (more or less short). pornographicof which unsuspecting users of Lensa would involuntarily find themselves protagonists. Something that already happens to Hollywood actors.
The latter risk seems to be increased by the ease with which the app seems willing to strip people. Women, especially. TechCrunch colleagues managed to demonstrate how simple it is produce decidedly credible frontal nude images, while on Twitter many people have pointed out that “if you are a woman, in the set of avatars that are offered to you there are many in which you are half naked”. There are even those who have tried to register first as a male and then as a femalenoting that in the second case the percentage of sexually suggestive images was decidedly higher.
For all these reasons, Lensa should not be used lightly. Or at least not to see the effect it has, “so what do you want to happen?”.