Lensa

This prompted by the article about a product called Lensa in the MIT Technology Review at reference 1. Lensa looks to be a fairly harmless picture editing tool at reference 2. But inaccessible to me as it only runs on a proper smart phone, that is to say, not mine. More important, not just the fun toy it might at first appear to be.

The bit of the product of interest is a pay-as-you-go add-on called Magic Avatars, the idea of which seems to be to turn your selfie into something from a computer game. The catch seems to be that if you are a white boy, you get to be a super-hero, an astronaut at the very least, whereas if you are a girl of vaguely Asian appearance you get a whole lot of near porn. 

The story seems to be that the images generated reflect what goes on out on the Internet at large. Reflect the libraries of images that the AI has been trained on. One complaint being that the vendors of this product have not done enough to curb the prejudices and habits which appear to have driven those goings on.

‘… Lensa generates its avatars using Stable Diffusion, an open-source AI model that generates images based on text prompts. Stable Diffusion is built using LAION-5B, a massive open-source data set that has been compiled by scraping images off the internet…’.

The huge captioned picture libraries – the sort of thing needed to train computers – produced by Laion might be open source, but I think you have to be a bit nerdy to find the front door.

The companies

There is a companion product called Prisma which appears to turn your snap into something which looks more like a painting than a photograph. This one is available in a web version that I can use on my laptop.

Prisma appears to be a member of the Palta family. But I didn’t find out anything about beneficial ownership. Palta seems to be a quite widely used name and this particular trail went cold. On me, at least. See references 2, 3 and 4.

At the other end, there appear to be lots of substantial companies providing technological and data support, for example Laion and the backers of something called stable diffusion. Plenty of decent AI people beavering away at the fascinating nuts and bolts of the business without worrying themselves too much about the consequences. See references 5, 6 and 7.

Media interest

Lots of it. Bing turns up all kinds of stuff, quite a lot of it critical. But stuff which mostly passes me by, fake 118 of reference 8 notwithstanding.

Conclusions

It all looks rather dangerous to me, and more or less unregulated. Just driven by the whims and greed of those down in the marketplace – dressed up as providing a bit of harmless fun for all the boys and girls. 

For me, more evidence that Toby Ord maybe got it right when he made runaway AI the biggest existential threat to humanity. Just beating runaway biological weapons into second place. See reference 8.

PS: I remember being rather perturbed by all the sexualised images of girls all over the Microsoft’s UK flashy new headquarters buildings in Reading, back in the early days of the new century, at about the time that Microsoft was driving hard into the computer games market. But the young lady I was with – south Asian rather than east Asian – was not bothered by them at all. At least, that is my recollection.

References

Reference 1: The viral AI avatar app Lensa undressed me—without my consent: My avatars were cartoonishly pornified, while my male colleagues got to be astronauts, explorers, and inventors – Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review – 2022

Reference 2: https://prisma-ai.com/lensa. The right prisma. Lots of Russian looking names at the top of the heap.

Reference 3: https://www.prisma-capacity.eu/. The wrong prisma.

Reference 4: https://palta.com/. Appears to have offices in London, Cyprus and Warsaw.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_Diffusion. 

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAION. A huge database of pictures with captions – giving a link between images in pixels and text in words. Much used by the AI community.

Reference 7: https://laion.ai/. 

Reference 8: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/search?q=precipice.