The Lensa AI Avatar

My thoughts on the Lensa app. It’s wish fulfillment, science fiction, and WTF.

Lensa is taking the world by storm through AI based creation of digital avatars using a few of your selfies that you upload into their app.

I’d classify their outputs as three types of digital avatars. First, Wish fulfillment. Obviously, they don’t want your avatars that they create to be ungainly or awkward or ugly, right? So they smooth out some blemishes, make your cheekbones a little more noble.  Makes sense. A few of these photos are below in this post.

Then it gets more interesting.  Several of the images Lesna created for me had a real science fiction aesthetic. I’m in a space suit, I’m in a matrix-like environment, I'm in trippy utopian future image.  This is an editorial choice of Lensa’s management team.  Perhaps this is a decision to make their imagery future facing? Not sure. I’ve seen some posts that female avatars are often sexualized. My avatars didn’t have that issue, but perhaps the men are put in sci-fi environments and women become sex symbols? Either way, the Lensa team should address this stereotyping.

Then comes the WTF — my favorite group of images, the true eyebrow raisers. Look for example, at the image of a little Asian Neil Gaiman head, growing out of my own head.  This is the WTF group. 

So what does all this mean to the future of work?  Right now, Lensa is just a little bit of AI whimsey.  Overall visual AI,  like Dall-E and Midjourney, has a lot of potential for disrupting the creative industry.  I’m already seeing AI being used for storyboards, concept treatments, even full animations. But for now Lensa is just a fun thing, worth my $3.99 to check out. 

Posted: 2022-12-15