Lensa AI, the most talked-about application of recent days, has become the most downloaded application in the PlayStore and AppStore in many countries such as the USA, Brazil, Russia, and Canada.
Lensa AI is rapidly moving up the “Top Grossing” app list on the App Store, according to app analytics company SensorTower, which indicates that it is currently earning more money through app sales or in-app purchases than virtually any other app. Accompanying comparable, albeit slightly delayed trajectories in other nations, the Lensa AI app took less than a week to go up from position 161 to 1 in the United States.
How did Lensa AI become that popular?
Since its debut in 2018, Lensa AI has accumulated about $29 million in consumer expenditure and 22.2 million downloads worldwide. With the introduction of magic avatars, the app’s usage has significantly increased over the past month. The number of downloads for the app increased by 631% from 219,000 in October to 1.6 million in November. With 58% of customer expenditure coming from the United States, Lensa AI’s biggest market, the app is now most popular in Brazil. Brazil, where installs increased 24,450% over the month, accounted for 31% of all downloads in November.
Its innovative AI-generated “magic avatars” feature is what made it popular recently. Users can pay a nominal fee to obtain digital images of themselves transformed into a variety of quirky styles, as long as they upload 10 to 20 selfies. With millions of users on social media sharing their photos on platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, the application has become the focus of tremendous attention.
Lensa AI downloads have exploded since the last month
When we examine the Playstore and AppStore data, we see that Lensa AI is at the top of downloads in many countries. The download statistics in Lensa AI on the basis of countries are as follows:
- USA’s #1 Grossing app
- Australia’s #1 Grossing app
- France’s #1 Grossing app
- Canada’s #1 Grossing app
- Germany’s #1 Grossing app
- England’s #1 Grossing app
- Italy’s #1 Grossing app
- Turkey’s #1 Grossing app
- Russia’s #5 Grossing app
- South Korea’s #18 Grossing app
Nothing viral comes without a query
Viral photo editing applications have a dubious past because several of them have been identified as malware vectors. Users have occasionally expressed concern over what happens to the images they upload to these apps. These issues were raised in relation to the Russian-based AI editor FaceApp, which later said that, while some altered photos may be stored in the cloud for “performance and traffic reasons,” the majority of them are removed within 48 hours.
The company behind Lensa AI, Prisma Labs, revealed that it processes user photographs using AWS cloud services. Photos taken by a user are erased as soon as an AI model is trained on them.
However, these days, no popular app is free from controversy, and Lensa is no exception. Concerns range from privacy issues, potential misuse to produce NSFW photos without consent, and allegations that the app is stealing the work of artists to train its AI engine.
Is Lensa AI stealing art?
In light of Lensa AI’s meteoric rise and the expanding usage of AI tools for artistic creation, the ethics of producing images using models that are trained on other people’s work have come under fire. Lauryn Ipsum contends that while the original avatars may have been produced by artificial intelligence, the smaller elements that went into their creation—color combinations, brushstrokes, textures, and particular styles—were appropriated from other artists without those artists’ knowledge or permission. Twitter user @LaurynIpsum tweeted about the subject:
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/7GfDXZ22s1
— Lauryn Ipsum (@LaurynIpsum) December 6, 2022
The NSFW content of the app is horrifying
Despite having a “no nudes” and “adults only” policy, Prisma Labs has already run into trouble for unintentionally creating naked and cartoonishly sexualized photos, including those of children.
Andrey Usoltsev, CEO and co-founder of Prisma Lab, told that this behavior only occurred if the AI was deliberately pushed to produce this kind of content, which is a violation of the restrictions prohibiting its use.
Any tool “would have the potential to become a weapon if an individual is determined to engage in hazardous behavior,” he said. According to Twitter user @MistressSnowPhD‘s tweet:
https://twitter.com/MistressSnowPhD/status/1599061184350547970
Questionable Privacy Policy
Artists have voiced fears that the app and the mainstreaming of AI picture generators are stealing their thunder by turning creation into a tech-generated process, as is frequently discussed in discussions about artificial intelligence. Not to mention that you must pay at least $6 or subscribe for a year at a cost of $53.99 to use the Magic Avatar tool.
What exactly occurs to the photographs you upload to this app, then?
Yes, there are issues with this. Some claim that by paying for facial recognition training, you are essentially giving away your personal information. The topic of Lensa AI’s policy on users’ rights has caused a hot debate over Twitter. You may check out what users are worried about from @joestarr187‘s tweet below.
In which folks paid an AI art company money to GIVE them rights to their likeness. #lensa pic.twitter.com/1qFvDJkbJS
— Joe Starr (@joestarr187) December 5, 2022
As the popularity of Lensa AI increases many concerns about how the app works come to the surface. But all these question marks do not seem to have prevented the application from going viral. While AI art has been one of the most talked about topics in the technology world since the beginning of 2022, we wish that the applications of AI art may narrow the grip between the artists and the users within the framework of ethical rules. If you are looking for an application to use instead of Lensa AI, we suggest you take a look at our list of free Lensa AI alternatives we have prepared for you.
