Lensa is Using Your Photos to Train Their AI

Photo editing app Lensa grew massively popular over the last week as social media has become flooded with people posting AI-generated selfies from the app's latest feature. For $3.99, Lensa users can upload 10-20 images of themselves and then receive 50 selfies generated by the app's artificial intelligence in a variety of art styles. But, before you slam the purchase button, a word of warning: Lensa's privacy policy and terms of use stipulate that the images users submit to generate their selfies, or rather the "Face Data," can be used by Prisma AI, the company behind Lensa, to further train the AI's neural network. An artificial neural network like the one used by Lensa, or the popular text-to-image generator Dall-E 2, studies vast quantitites of data to learn how to create better and better results. To be able to convert simple sentences into surprisingly well-crafted images, Dall-E 2 was trained on hundreds of millions of images to learn the association between different words and different visual characteristics. Similarly, Lensa's neural network is continuously learning how to more accurately portray faces.