Smile, You're on Lensa AI

 I haven’t done it, and probably won’t, but a number of friends have. Lensa AI is a smartphone app. Customers pay about $4, upload some selfies, and in aa few minutes, the app spits out a slew of stylized computer-generated images based on the photos. “Fairy Princess” is a popular avatar choice. I’m willing to bet that most of the app users are female.

A good friend tried it out but gave it a clear thumbs down. She said most of the images didn’t look like her at all, and she was right. But a couple were closer than others.

I have another good friend, an artist living in Florida named Beth. One of the things she has done over the years is to paint unusual portraits of clients based on the photos they send her. Naturally, she charged money for the finished product -- not a lot in the art world these days, but still enough to compensate her for her time. So, the idea that a computer can do this and turn out 50 pictures in half an hour for 4 bucks is a little disturbing to her.

I and several other friends have tried to reassure Beth that these art-bots will not replace her, or artists like her, whether they paint or do digital work. If you have an actual Beth portrait of yourself on your wall, you know that the image, painted by a talented human, is priceless. Even if you’re concerned about real monetary value, the portrait’s uniqueness will make it valuable, maybe more so in a world of bot pix.

As an aside, there are AI programs that can write now – pretty well, in fact -- for routine things. Are news stories next? If so, they’ll be messin’ with what used to be MY space, so I know how Beth feels.

By the way, when you input images to the AI app, they don’t have to be yours. Did you have permission to do it from the one in the pictures? How will you use the results?

We do have to think about these issues. But I will never be convinced that bots will replace humans. We can have all the self-driving machines we want, but there will always be situations where we need Sully to land the plane. And while Hal the computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey”  didn’t come with an on/off switch, Keir Dullea was still there to disable him when he got out of line. We’re not going anywhere.