Having a realistic image of yourself, a vision of yourself with pink hair or your manga version of your face: all this is now possible with artificial intelligence. The applications that allow these transformations have multiplied in recent months. Data AI, Stable Diffusion but also Lensa.
However, the latter is criticized, in particular for the images it generates. A journalist from MIT Technology Review, for example, collected many avatars of her nude or in suggestive positions.
Out of 100 avatars, 30 were naked.
The journalist thus revealed the different avatars that Lensa had generated from a dozen selfies. Result: highly sexualized and often scantily clad avatars. The reason for this unwanted hypersexualization would come, according to the journalist, from her Asian heritage.
The generated avatars clearly show the young woman in very cartoonish universes close to Japanese manga. And even indicating that he wanted avatars of her with masculine features, her artificial intelligence continued to offer him nude works.
Thus, of 100 avatars generated by Lensa, 16 showed the journalist topless and 14 represented her with little clothing or ambiguous positions. On the contraryall of his colleagues had rather flattering avatars of them, sometimes showing them as warriors or astronauts.
Other netizens also received the same treatment from the app.
Internet fault?
When creating these avatars, however, Lensa asks its users (in addition to the 7 euros to generate them) to use good quality photos. He especially qualifies nude photos as “bad photos”.
Therefore, the app generates these nude photos by itself. A process that is not due to chance according to Aylin Caliskan, a specialist in artificial intelligence, interviewed by MIT Technology Review. Lensa would use Stable Diffusion, a system that would be based on a compilation of images found on the Internet.
And according to the specialist, the fact that the Internet is full of images of semi-nude or stereotyped women would tip the scales towards avatars that are also nude and stereotyped.
Already criticized for their ability to make any Internet user look like a budding artist, apps that generate images through artificial intelligence may not be so trivial. They tend to reflect the prevailing sexism on the Internet. Or how art can denounce the excesses of society…
Source: BFM TV
