If you've scrolled through any social media platform this week -- particularly Instagram -- you've probably seen a slew of digitalized portraits shared by friends. They look animated, cartoonish, and above all, hauntingly beautiful. The portraits are generated by a new photo app, Lensa AI, which aims to make "your selfies look better than you ever could have imagined." Lensa uses artificial intelligence to digitize portraits in a variety of categories, from anime to fantasy to what they call "stylish" -- which most closely resembles an oil painting set to a bold colored or blank background. The app itself is free, but the portraits come at a cost.

Have you seen a picture of one of your friend's on social media recently where they look like a fairytale character or Renaissance painting? They may have used Lensa AI - a new app that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate a series of avatars using their selfies. While the'Magic Avatars' may look cool, there could be some hidden catches in the app's terms and conditions that unsuspecting users accepted without thinking. After uploading the selfies to the app, Lensa AI gets permission to'use' and'distribute' them indefinitely - and without'any additional compensation'. While the Lensa AI'Magic Avatars' may look cool, there could be some hidden catches in the app's terms and conditions, that unsuspecting users accepted without thinking.

So there's this app called Lensa, which was launched as a photo editing app back in 2018, by Prisma Labs. But it only went viral recently for its new AI-generated "magic avatars" feature. Users, provided they upload 10-20 selfies, can pay a small sum to receive digital portraits of themselves morphed into a range of kooky styles from "anime" to "fairy princess". It's one of those trends that launched to meteoritic popularity really fast – it's now the most downloaded photo and video app on the iOS store. Sending pictures of yourself off into the ether to get sent back more pictures of yourself seems a bit weird to me, but I am over 30.