There is something inherently narcissistic in using apps that transform, modify, soften and play with your physical appearance. I imagine it's why millions of users, like myself, have downloaded the app to their phones, uploaded selfies, and allowed the AI Lensa to reimagine them. Swayed by a friend's intriguing 'selfies' generated by the app, and it being too early to think, I did it too, and regretted it later.
Or perhaps I learnt something about myself on the way.
My friend had chosen four photos of herself to share out of the 100 the app generates (you can do more, but it'll cost you - apparently it's expensive, and each set costs $5). They were soft featured picture that made her look thirty years younger. What if I uploaded only the most ugly pictures of myself into the app, the ones where I'm grimacing, or I'm caught in a certain light or angle that shows my wrinkles and imperfections?
The first photo made me laugh aloud. Looks like there is a warrior setting. I think I look cool and mean, although it's not quite me - my chin is too pointy. And where are my breasts? Nevermind. Lensa has been accused of generating nude and overly sexualised images, although they say it very much depends on what you feed into the app.
The next photo takes me aback a little. I didn't feed any selfie that looks like this into Lensa, but this is what it has generated. My hair is longer, my skin softened - but it is, essentially, me. For the first time in my entire life, I'm struck by my beauty. If you read my post about my self loathing a few weeks back, you'll know how crazy this sounds. But the app has captured something of my esential self, if I believed myself to be beautiful. Jamie punches me in the arm and says now do you see what I see?
In another image, I look older and fiercer. Handsome I suppose. There is an aspect of me that looks quite masculine. Whilst I won't share the ugliest AI rendered versions of myself here, I can say that these aspects of myself are - I don't know. I'm confused. Perhaps they are me too. Perhaps the folds and lines of my face, shifting in the light, can be seen as beautiful too. It hasn't, however, figured out what colour my hair is, or my eyes. Perhaps it is all the colours. In all the multiverses, I am every shade. This sends me into a kind of awe.
I become, before my scrolling eyes, a flower crowned princess, with my oddly plucked brows and wry smile, and the lines and dimples of my real face softened into something I can't quite put my finger on. It's like I have this potential to BE that, although I will never be quite that. Or I am already that, or have been that, or are becoming that. My head and stomach do flips. This Me-Not-Me is mesmerizing.
I appear wise, strong, fierce. This me-not-me contains multitudes. What is the AI reflecting back at me? What humanity, what kernel of Riverflows-ness, what wild imaginings? What past lives and future lives? My eyes appear green, hyperchromatic, hazel, brown. I feel like I am scrolling through lifetimes and multiverses.
Lensa has also been accused of being racist, and that Asians that have used it appear more European. Apparently the app is only reflecting our own cultural biases back at ourselves. But then suddenly I am most certainly not European. I'm not even myself. There's my eyebrows, perhaps. Elements of my nose and wry smile. I can imagine genetic variations of myself sweeping from England to Germany to Mongolia to Russia and as far East as my distant ancestors might have travelled. It is eery.
Plus, I have a hankering to die my hair pink. There's versions of me with vivid, bright blue hair which look - awesome.
Strangely, this is the one I love the best. It's me as a cosmic crone. It feels that I am not too far from this moment. I can see myself staring intensely back at myself, shades of an authentic moustache, wild eyebrows that need plucking, crows feet and deep furrows around my mouth. But there's something unimaginably beautiful about that, something that Lensa is pushing me toward seeing that I could not see before.
When I look in the mirror now I can see my imperfect skin, my fierceness, my frown and my smile as beautiful because, like all the people feeding selfies of themselves into Lensa this week, we are part of a beautiful humanity: princess, mother, warrior, crone, all of us.
I'm a little sad that I'm not a spaceman, as Jamie becomes when we plug him into the app. It's a little too gendered for my liking and I want to waste another $5 seeing myself as a man. Please stop me. But you can see why this kinda thing might be addictive.
Interestingly, the ones of Jamie weren't quite as good. Nor were the ones of my best mate. Perhaps we didn't quite have the variety of photos it needed.
There's also a rather large issue of the impact it will have on digital artists, something I may have thought twice about had I read this article first. But would an artist been able to do all these images, at an affordable price, for me to unexpectedly gain so much from it? Would I have been happy for them to create one image of me as an aging crone or a weathered explorer? Offended, even? Would I have had the imagination or resources to ask for such an image of myself? Yet certainly it takes much away from the artist who goes the mile - sometimes quite literally - to capture or create an image, an effort that could be made redundant with tech such as this.
To me it feels like an unexpected, grand experiment of self perception, even though ethically fraught.
Was it worth it?
Hell yeah.
Have you used the Lensa app? How did your avatars turn out? What do you think of such things?
With Love,
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