It's been quite the year for AI art, with tools like DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion grabbing headlines thanks to their scarily impressive text-to-image capabilities. But while often impressive, AI art is also a little murky when it comes to ethics – and the latest viral app is proving the most controversial yet.
Lensa has been topping app store charts for the last few days, with its 'Magic Avatar' feature creating painterly AI selfies that your social media feed is probably awash with right now. But many are concerned that the tech, based on Stable Diffusion, is co-opting artists' work. (New to AI art? Check out out guide on how to use DALL-E 2.)
Indeed, while its foundation, Stable Diffusion, is free, Lensa costs £36.99 per year to use. Which, seeing as how the app is apparently even spitting out artworks with evidence of the original artist's signature still visible (below), is understandably galling for creatives.
I’m cropping these for privacy reasons/because I’m not trying to call out any one individual. These are all Lensa portraits where the mangled remains of an artist’s signature is still visible. That’s the remains of the signature of one of the multiple artists it stole from.A 🧵 https://t.co/0lS4WHmQfW pic.twitter.com/7GfDXZ22s1December 6, 2022
If you've recently been playing around with the Lensa App to make AI art "magic avatars" please know that these images are created with stolen art through the Stable Diffusion model. pic.twitter.com/VGrrECYVn5December 2, 2022
Friends.This Lensa app everyone's using uses the Stable Diffusion model.This uses the Laion database which is the most insidious one, containing millions of stolen artworks, medical photos and stolen/illegal intimate content.Please be mindful about these things.December 1, 2022
This is by no means the first AI art controversy we've seen in recent months. From AI art scooping first prize in an art competition to Getty banning AI-generated images from its library over copyright concerns and people using the tools to copy specific artists' styles, the tech is causing all manner of disturbance online. Indeed, even Adobe recently offered a message for creatives worried about the rise of AI art.
But there's room for fun too, as Marvel's Russo Brothers recently used AI art-generator Midjourney to create The Avengers as directed by Wes Anderson, and its a weird thing.
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