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.