It can seem like Lensa AI sprung up overnight when all of a sudden all your friends are posting artistic renderings of themselves that they generated in the app. But while the Lensa AI app has been around since 2018, its viral “magical avatars” feature launched in late November, propelling the app to the #1 spot on competitive iOS “Photo & Video” charts. App Store. For comparison, YouTube is #3 and Instagram is #4 on the charts at press time.
Lensa AI works by inviting users to upload 10-20 photos of themselves. Using the open source Stable Diffusion model, the app processes your photos to generate avatars of you that look like they were created by a digital artist.
When you download Lensa AI, a pop-up immediately appears inviting you to join a free seven-day trial to use its AI editing tools. If you do not cancel on time, you will be charged $39.99 for unlimited service. use of the application for one year. You can skip this screen without committing to the trial version, but the free version of the app is very limited and does not include the viral magic avatar feature. Even if you don’t subscribe to the unlimited plan, you’ll see another in-app purchase screen if you try to create your own magical avatar. At the lowest price level, you’ll need to pay $3.99 for 50 unique avatars (five variations of 10 different styles). But hey, at least that’s cheaper than a blue check!
Image Credits: Lensa AI on Instagram
According to app analytics firm SensorTower, Lensa AI has amassed around 22.2 million downloads worldwide and nearly $29 million in consumer spending since its launch in 2018. In the past month, the app has seen a significant increase. with the release of magical avatars. In November, the app was downloaded 1.6 million times, up 631% from October’s 219,000 downloads. The US is the largest market for Lensa AI, accounting for 58% of consumer spending, but the app is especially popular in Brazil right now. Of all downloads in November, 31% came from Brazil, where installs increased 24,450% month-over-month.
Viral photo editing apps have a murky track record, as some apps have been found to be vectors for malware. In other cases, users have been concerned about what happens to the photos they upload to these apps. These concerns arose around Russia-based AI publisher FaceApp, which later stated that it might store updated photos in the cloud for “performance and traffic reasons” but that most images are deleted within 48 hours.
Prisma Labs, the team behind Lensa AI, told TechCrunch that it uses AWS cloud services to process user photos. As soon as an AI model is trained on a user’s photos, the images are immediately deleted.
Source: news.google.com