My avatars were cartoonishly pornified, while my male colleagues got to be astronauts, explorers, and inventors.

When I tried the new viral AI avatar app Lensa, I was hoping to get results similar to some of my colleagues at MIT Technology Review. The digital retouching app was first launched in 2018 but has recently become wildly popular thanks to the addition of Magic Avatars, an AI-powered feature which generates digital portraits of people based on their selfies.

But while Lensa generated realistic yet flattering avatars for them—think astronauts, fierce warriors, and cool cover photos for electronic music albums— I got tons of nudes. Out of 100 avatars I generated, 16 were topless, and in another 14 it had put me in extremely skimpy clothes and overtly sexualized poses. Read More

When Lensa, a four-year-old photo-editing app, introduced a new AI-portrait generator in November, the internet was enthralled. But concerns have mounted, particularly among women

Last week, after seeing artsy portraits popping up all over her social media feeds, Christal Luster signed up for a free trial of a photo-editing app called Lensa. She uploaded 10 of her headshots to it and paid $5.99 for 100 new images based on her inputs, which an artificial-intelligence tool produced in under an hour. 

Ms. Luster, an actress in Chicago, said the images opened her eyes to the types of characters she could portray. “There was one of them where I was like, ‘Oh I could totally see myself playing in ‘Bridgerton.’ I could learn to speak with a British accent. I could do period pieces,” she said. Others made her look like a superhero, she said: “I could be in the next ‘Black Panther.’” She shared some of the portraits in a video on TikTok, where she has more than 480,000 followers. Read More