is the hit Lensa worth it?

Celebrities do it, people in your timeline do it: many people are willing to pay 4 to 7 euros for artistic selfies with the help of artificial intelligence. In this edition of App of the Week, we take a look at whether Lensa is really worth it, or whether your money is better spent.

Lensa

Lensa is an app where you upload 10 to 20 selfies. The artificial intelligence ‘learns’ your face and then makes all kinds of productions with your face in fifteen minutes to an hour, a kind of selfie art. You get photos that look photorealistic of you (that you never took in real life) and a wide range of more arty images, such as with an anime theme, fantasy theme or even – especially for the holidays – a Christmas theme. Very nice and quite special that AI shakes something up so quickly.

However, that costs money. There’s a 7-day trial before you need to take out a subscription (don’t forget to cancel it through the Google Play Store), but it will cost money to get your selfies taken anyway. For 4.69 euros you have 50 and for 6.99 euros you have 100. Significantly cheaper than putting a digital artist to work, although he can of course make a work of art much more specific to your wishes that is considerably more meaningful than a whole bunch of AI pictures.

Light erotic

Lensa also sometimes makes a mess of it, or a very erotic one. Below you can see which selfies I have selected to make the ‘magic avatars’. There are no nipples to be seen, but Lensa still peeps a small pink nipple on one of the pictures. You must be very religious or underage: then it is not the intention that these kinds of photos that can be seen as a bit erotic exist without your permission. I don’t think it’s a disaster, but there are certainly people who appreciate Lensa considerably less because of this. This is probably partly because you get to choose whether you are a woman, man or X: in an earlier batch I made, the app gave me a huge cleavage in many photos.

In addition, other things don’t go quite right: the eyes often have the ‘haze’ in the wrong place and – although that is forgivable – the app also has trouble with tattoos. He sometimes makes a weird line of it that looks more like a dirty stain. Now he certainly doesn’t have to do all my tattoos line by line, but at least make the alternative tattoo look like a tattoo. A final flaw is that he regularly makes faces in which I don’t recognize myself at all: a kind of Nicole Kidman with a pointy nose, instead of my round guess. A shame, because you can’t do much with those photos. It very much depends on your selfies how Lensa processes your face, because in a previous batch with more similar selfies, the AI ​​understood my face significantly better:

Privacy concerns

Lensa is safe to some extent: it made it through the Play Store. You don’t have to create an account to use it, but you do of course send in your selfies and Lensa also takes the right to use the productions elsewhere, as can be read in the terms of use. Keep that in mind if you want to work with this app: after all, you will be sending personal photos to a company that you do not know. If privacy is important to you, then it is probably better to ignore Lensa.

I will also ignore Lensa from now on. The ‘problem’ of the app is that you do the trick with the magical avatars once or twice, and then it’s done: unless you make some kind of series in which you have a new batch made every time for, for example, a social media account, it has been fun after one or two times. It costs money, you can wonder how much you will use the avatars and you can’t use them all because of some glitches and non-appearing pictures. On the other hand, this is an app that shows how wonderful artificial intelligence is. Lensa makes every image from 0: so it’s not a filter that goes over your photos. Very impressive and just the tip of the iceberg of what the future of algorithms will bring us.

At the same time, I couldn’t resist not trying: it’s also useful to have avatars of yourself that aren’t photos. This way you can remain a little more anonymous on the internet and still be recognizable, without someone running off with your photo.

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App of the Week

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Have you already used Lensa? How did you like the result? Leave it in the comments to this article.