Last year ended with images flooding Instagram, Twitter and group chats -- pictures of us, but not exactly. They were products of an app called Lensa AI, which can apply machine-learning tools to scan your selfies and generate portraits of you in a variety of artistic styles. This sort of thing seems to bea semiannual trend: Every few months, an app emerges to collect photos of your face and manipulate your image, reflecting and refracting it back to you anew. There have been tools allowing you to apply virtual makeup to selfies, to apply "art filters" imitating famous paintings, to morph into an animal. You could age yourself three decades; you could see yourself imagined as another ethnicity; you could swap your gender; you could become thinner, or bald.

This year, it feels like artificial intelligence-generated art has been everywhere. In the summer, many of us entered goofy prompts into DALL-E Mini (now called Craiyon), yielding a series of nine comedically janky AI-generated images. But more recently, there's been a boom of AI-powered apps that can create cool avatars. MyHeritage AI Time Machine generates images of users in historical styles and settings, and AI TikTok filters have become popular for creating anime versions of people. This past week, "magic avatars" from Lensa AI flooded social media platforms like Twitter with illustrative and painterly renderings of people's headshots, as if truly made by magic. These avatars, created using Stable Diffusion -- which allows the AI to "learn" someone's features based off of submitted images -- also opened an ethical can of worms about AI's application.

If you've noticed an influx of illustrated selfies--depicting people as fairy princesses, astronauts, and anime characters--popping up across social media in recent weeks, you're not alone. These AI-generated images are the product of digital editing app Lensa's new "Magic Avatars" feature, a tool that uses machine learning to create stylized portraits based on photos provided by users. Lensa has been around since 2018, but started skyrocketing in popularity when Magic Avatars launched in late November. The app saw around 13.5 million worldwide installs in the first 12 days of December, more than six times the 2 million it saw in November, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower. Consumers also spent approximately $29.3 million in the app during that 12-day period, Sensor Towers reports.

Lensa AI's popularity has had a notable impact on the App Store's Top Charts. The popular photo and video editing app recently went viral over its new "magic avatars" feature, powered by the open source Stable Diffusion model, allowing users to turn their selfies into styled portraits of themselves as sci-fi, anime, or fantasy characters, among other artistic renderings. Consumer demand for the app, and for AI edits more broadly, has now pushed numerous other "AI" apps into the U.S. App Store's Top Charts. As of Monday, the top three spots on the U.S. App Store are all held by AI photo editors, and even more AI art apps are newly ranking in the Top 100. The No. 1 spot on the U.S. App Store, however, continues to be held by Lensa AI, which saw 12.6 million global installs in the first 11 days of December, up 600% from the 1.8 million installs it saw during a similar time frame in November (November 20 through November 30), according to new data from App Store intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

If you've logged on to any social media app this week, you've probably seen pictures of your friends, but re-imagined as fairy princesses, animé characters, or celestial beings. It is all because of Lensa, an app which uses artificial intelligence to render digital portraits based on photos users submit. Lensa's highly stylized, eye-catching portraits have taken over the internet, but they have also been the subject of concern from privacy experts, digital artists, and users who have noticed the app making their skin paler or their bodies thinner. Here's everything you need to know about Lensa: How to get your own'magic avatar' The pictures making the rounds online are products of Lensa's "Magic Avatars" function. To try it out, you'll need to first download the Lensa app on your phone.

If you've logged on to any social media app this week, you've probably seen pictures of your friends, but re-imagined as fairy princesses, animé characters, or celestial beings. It is all because of Lensa, an app which uses artificial intelligence to render digital portraits based on photos users submit. Lensa's highly stylized, eye-catching portraits have taken over the internet, but they have also been the subject of concern from privacy experts, digital artists, and users who have noticed the app making their skin paler or their bodies thinner. Here's everything you need to know about Lensa: How to get your own'magic avatar' The pictures making the rounds online are products of Lensa's "Magic Avatars" function. To try it out, you'll need to first download the Lensa app on your phone.

Self-flattery is pushing AI into the mainstream. But should you join the thousands of people who are experimenting with AI portraiture? This new trend, enabled by an app called Lensa AI, raises some very difficult questions about craft, consent, and bias. How Does Lensa AI Work? Developed by Prisma Labs, the Lensa AI app (iOS/Android) launched in 2018 and offers several photo retouching features.

In the past few months, artificial intelligence image generators have thrust themselves into people's lives in unexpected and at times harrowing ways, outpacing laws and potentially hurting marginalized communities. Technology like Magic Avatars has repeatedly been accused of stealing artists' techniques without consent. Days after South Korean artist Kim Jung Gi died, his work was fed into an AI model and regurgitated. Polish artist Greg Rutkowski has seen thousands of AI-generated images using his style; so far it does not look like he will be compensated for that.

Has the stale selfie that's served as your profile picture gone a little too long without a refresh? You've likely seen friends using the Lensa AI app to create colorful, custom cartoon images of themselves as ethereal fairies or stern astronauts. Prisma Labs, the company behind Lensa, went viral back in 2016 with a similar (albeit less powerful) app that turned smartphone pics into paintings. The release of Lensa's "magic avatars" feature is a global hit for the company. Recent advancements in generative artificial intelligence allow the app to produce more impressive and varied results than its predecessor.

If you are using social media regularly, chances are you've come across some artistic renditions of other users over the past few days. That's thanks to the latest viral sensation Lensa AI, a photo-editing app using artificial intelligence to create what it calls "magic avatars". Having been fed 10 to 20 photos of any person, the app uses the open-source Stable Diffusion model to create realistic avatars of that person that look like they were made by an artist. Because there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and sure enough users eventually have to pay at least $3.99 for their own "magic avatars". There are some impressive results floating around though, which is why users are excused for being tempted into paying the fee to find out what their digital counterparts look like.