Lensa & The Ethical Challenges of AI
We need to change how we talk about AI-assisted creative technology because the old paradigms no longer apply.
So in the past several weeks, I’ve seen an explosion of content on my social media feeds from people posting artistic renderings of themselves using the photo app Lensa. Alongside this dramatic uptick in popularity has been a rise of thinkpieces around the wisdom of employing this app, an uptick to which I’ve reluctantly chosen to contribute.
(I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help myself. I started commenting on someone’s Facebook post, and 500 words later, I realized — this should be its own post.)
If this whole thing feels vaguely familiar, it’s because there are many similarities between what’s happening with the Lensa app and what happened in 2019 with FaceApp. With FaceApp, there were significant privacy concerns, mostly due to the fact FaceApp was a Russian startup. Questions about their proximity to the Russian intelligence apparatus spawned an FBI investigation. Similarly, Lensa was developed by Russian firm Prisma Labs, and people are asking similarly pointed questions about what the app is doing with all the selfies that people have uploaded.
But in my experience, very little of that controversy has made it into the…
