Media
The Future of Memory - ArtReview
As memory and data blur, will we remember everything? And does remembering everything mean remembering nothing? "The root of men's problems is memory," states martial artist Huang Yaoshi, a character in Wong Kar-wai's arthouse classic Ashes of Time (1994). The film revolves around the dialectics of remembering and forgetting; in it an anonymous desert's shifting sandscape suggests a geological palimpsest of writing and unwriting memory at the same time. In the age of information saturation, people are entangled in the present technoscape of an attention economy that keeps altering.
Lensa, the AI portrait app, has soared in popularity. But many artists question the ethics of AI art.
For many online, Lensa AI is a cheap, accessible profile picture generator. But in digital art circles, the popularity of artificial intelligence-generated art has raised major privacy and ethics concerns. Lensa, which launched as a photo editing app in 2018, went viral last month after releasing its "magic avatars" feature. It uses a minimum of 10 user-uploaded images and the neural network Stable Diffusion to generate portraits in a variety of digital art styles. Social media has been flooded with Lensa AI portraits, from photorealistic paintings to more abstract illustrations.