AI art is fun, but what about ethics?

If you’ve been using social media over the past few weeks you’ve probably seen your friends post their AI-created portraits. For the small price of €3,99 the Lensa AI app will take your face and put it into images created by artificial intelligence. Sounds fun and innocent, right? Wellll maybe not so much.

Seeing yourself as a space god, mythical creature or even a lawyer is so much fun, but graphic designers and freelance artists are not happy with the popularity of these artificial images. Here’s why: to create your portraits Lensa AI uses a big database called LAION for ‘inspiration’. The portraits are then made by AI ‘Stable Diffusion’. This program is trained with the images from the LAION database, but these images are scraped off the internet without any notice for copyright infringements of privacy.

Several digital artists have found their work in the LAION database and see the use of their work without permission as a form of theft.

So now that we have the ‘stolen work’ covered, there’s another controversy surrounding the app. One person on Twitter summarized all the highlights in this thread: https://twitter.com/IBJIYONGI/…

As a company or brand, you might also think of jumping on this trend, but it is good to first ask yourself if you agree with the ethics and controversy surrounding the app and AI art. Also, the privacy debacles are good to keep in mind if you want to upload your own photos or work into the app.