If your social feeds have been inundated with glossy, anime and fairy princess portraits of your friends, you can blame Lensa AI.

Similar to Dall.E which went viral earlier this year, Lensa has made its way to the top of the App Store for generating fantastical images of people based on image prompts.

As of this week, it’s the most popular iPhone app in the App Store even though you have to pay to generate the images.

How much does Lensa AI cost?

For £32.99, you can subscribe to Lensa AI for a year (with the option of a one-week free trial), which gets you a 51 per cent discount on future avatars. However, people don’t seem to mind paying for it.

During the one-week trial period, you can get 50 avatars or 10 images in five styles for £1.79

How does Lensa AI work?

Once you sign up, you will be prompted to upload 10 selfies and select a gender.

Lensa takes your selfies, analyses them and generates ‘magic avatars’ of you in a variety of styles based on the images you feed it. The app can also be used to edit your photos, from skin retouching to blurring backgrounds, and can be used to edit videos.

‘Magic Avatars consume tremendous computation power to create amazing avatars for you,’ according to Lensa’s checkout page. ‘It’s expensive, but we made it as affordable as possible.’

After around half an hour, you’ll receive 50 to 200 images under themes including ‘cosmic’, ‘fairy princess’, ‘fantasy’ or ‘anime’.

What’s the problem with AI-generated art?

While it can be a lot of fun, like with most apps these days, privacy is a concern, especially with an app that uses your photos.

According to the app’s privacy policy, your uploaded photos are not used for anything other than applying filters and effects to them.

However, you have to be aware that Lensa can use your uploaded photos to train its AI. Its terms of use state that when you upload your photos, you’re granting Lensa 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’.

Security experts have warned that by using Lensa you will be granting permission to release ownership of the generated photo.

‘Similar to apps in the past like FaceApp that requested lots of permissions and access to data for them to function, people need to be wary of what they are allowing these apps to view, own, share or even profit from,’ said Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor for ESET.

However, if you’re not able to prove that, it reserves the right to ‘refuse granting your request’. Any approved requests could take up to 90 days to process.

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