I tested the app “Lensa” – and became a sex object

I don’t know what it looks like for you. But my Instagram feed is full of my friends’ selfies. First of all, this is nothing new. That’s what Instagram is for. But these are not normal selfies. Marie is seen as a superhero, Dunya as a manga and Linus as an alien.

Notable: My friends all look very, very good in the snaps. Although I don’t want to doubt the beauty of my acquaintances, I must say: I am not friends with models, nor with very enthusiastic cosplayers.

Of course the photos are not real (otherwise Alien-Linus would have already messaged me in his DMs). The selfies were taken with the Lensa image editing app. This works with a deep learning generator called stable diffusion. The software works by taking thousands of images from the Internet as templates and placing them over the photos as a filter.

To take portraits of themselves, the user must upload ten to twenty selfies to the app, pay three francs and wait about 20 minutes. The AI ​​then spits out dozens of images in different art styles from different eras.

So the app appeals to the urge for self-promotion and the narcissism that lurks in all of us – and has been very successful at doing so. The app has been around since 2018, but the selfie generator was only integrated a few weeks ago. Since then, the app has catapulted itself to number one on the Google and Apple download charts.

Before you get offended for calling you narcissistic, I’ve also tried the app – for research purposes only, of course – and was pretty excited at first. I also look very hot in the pictures. It cannot be said otherwise. Except for the one picture where my head was a bit confused with Mr. Bean’s (I’m not saying Mr. Bean isn’t hot, but his head on my body looks a bit odd.)

However, something struck me about the photos. I only found out after another 20 minutes. You should know: I rarely take selfies, even less provocative selfies and none of the ten selfies I uploaded was one of them. Yet all photos without exception showed a lot of bare skin. Me with pink hair and no top. Me with alien features and no top. Me as a flower girl with a top – which consisted only of loose flowers.

Here are a few examples of the selfies I uploaded and what came out:

I then forced a friend of mine to use the app and who would have thought: no half-naked selfies of him!

After a short search on the internet, it quickly became clear that I am not the only woman portrayed in this way by “Lensa”. The same thing happened to dozens of others. Like human rights activist Brandee Barker, who made the app even more of an object of desire.

But why are women depicted in such a sexualized way by the AI? This is because the software gets its information from the vast expanse of the internet. Anyone who has ever read a manga or played GTA knows how women are portrayed in it. Artificial intelligence also uses this and similar representations and learns that women often look like sex robots.

Not only does this risk reinforcing these prejudices, but it also shows what society actually wants women to look like. Pouts curled into a seductive smile, big puppy eyes, a D-cup covered in a hint of nothingness, and a waist smaller than my Monday morning patience.