Lensa AI photo editing app picks uploaded photos and creates avatars for users to turn their selfies into styled portraits of sci-fi, anime, or fantasy characters. According to a Sensor Tower report, over four million individuals across the world downloaded the app in the first five days of this month and spent around $8 million to generate different avatars of themselves.
Who created Lensa AI?
Lensa AI has been around since 2018, developed by Prisma Labs, which also has a self-named photo-editing app. Prisma Labs is based in California and was founded by Alexey Moiseenkov and a team of Russian developers, including Ilya Frolov, Oleg Poyaganov, and Andrey Usoltsev, in 2016.
Lensa AI app is available for download for iOS and Android users, with a 7-day free trial.
The annual subscription is priced at ₹2,499. However, users have to pay additionally to generate and use magical avatars. As per the screenshot of the app, users can unlock 50 unique avatars at ₹190, 200 avatars at ₹290, and 200 avatars at ₹380.
According to Prisma Labs, the app generates avatars in twenty minutes.
We at businessline tested out the app:
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Concerns
Privacy concerns surfaced claiming that the app uses uploaded photos to train its AI. The app suggests users upload 10-20 selfies — with close-up shots, facial expressions, camera angles, and various backgrounds — to generate avatars.
Lensa’s privacy policy states that the images are not used other than to apply filters and effects. A Prisma Labs spokesperson told CNET, “After the batch of avatars is created, the shared photos are deleted permanently from our servers, as well as the copy of an individually trained model. Each time a user purchases a new pack of avatars, the process repeats from scratch.”
However, according to the policy, Lensa would use data other than photos and videos to train its neural network algorithms, offer personalised content, diagnose or fix technological issues, and improve the app’s effectiveness.
Nevertheless, Lensa’s terms of use policy provide it with a “perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully-paid, transferable, sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, distribute, create derivative works of your User Content, without any additional compensation to you and always subject to your additional explicit consent for such use where required by applicable law.”
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