Lensa Magic Avatars are all good clean fun, until someone gets hurt. Ask these questions first.
Why did I do it? Why did I shell out $8 for 50 different abstract, impressionistic, mind-bending portraits of myself? Am I that much of a narcissist? Are we all?
Our Instagram and other social feeds are currently flooded with these high-resolution interpretations of our faces and various lewks, also known as Magic Avatars. They all come courtesy of the Lensa app, an AI-image-generation engine that creates some wild and often fantasy-driven interpretations of whatever images we feed it.
There have been other, similar platforms like Reface, which let you put your face inside famous movie clips. Everyone was doing it for a while. I turned myself into Tom Cruise (opens in new tab).
The app was free (with lots of ads, if I recall) and eventually we all decided that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to upload our images to some rando app developer.
Lensa fills that space but with a product that almost demands you pay for it, first with a hard sell on a costly subscription fee and then more casually with a come-on for a pay-per-AI-image batch offer.
What’s shocking to me is just the sheer number of people that are paying to have their images digested and then spit out as striking AI artworks. The FOMO is so strong here that everyone (even this now-embarrassed reporter) is succumbing. My adult son spent almost $15 for a batch of images of his girlfriend.
Why did I do it? Two reasons. I got tired of seeing other people’s Lensa Magic Avatars on my feed and I also really needed something fresh for Instagram. I’m kind of that way about my social feeds, always trying to keep the pipe full for reasons I can hardly explain here.
Adding my AI images to Instagram’s growing legion of majestic Lensa-generated portraits wasn’t hard. The app is freely available on iOS and Android. Opening it presents you with a $49.99 subscription offer that you can “cancel anytime.” I personally hate apps like this, ones that tease you with an incredibly cool feature but demand exorbitant cash payments up front (I may also be cheap).
Like many other apps, the sub offer is kind of a front. If you ignore it, the app immediately dumps you into the pay-per-play section, where you can buy anywhere from 50 ($7.
