Technology

Lensa’s Viral AI Art Creations Were Bound To Hypersexualize Users

Posted on by Phil Lam X

This year, it feels like artificial intelligence-generated art has been everywhere.

In the summer, many of us entered goofy prompts into DALL-E Mini (now called Craiyon), yielding a series of nine comedically janky AI-generated images. But more recently, there’s been a boom of AI-powered apps that can create cool avatars. MyHeritage AI Time Machine generates images of users in historical styles and settings, and AI TikTok filters have become popular for creating anime versions of people. This past week, “magic avatars” from Lensa AI flooded social media platforms like Twitter with illustrative and painterly renderings of people’s headshots, as if truly made by magic.

These avatars, created using Stable Diffusion — which allows the AI to “learn” someone’s features based off of submitted images — also opened an ethical can of worms about AI’s application. People discovered that the “magic avatars” tended to sexualize women and appeared to have fake artist signatures on the bottom corner, prompting questions about the images that had been used to train the AI and where they came from. Here’s what you need to know.

WHAT IS LENSA AI?
It’s an app created by Prisma Labs that recently topped the iOS app store’s free chart. Though it was created in 2018, the app became popular after introducing a “magic avatar” feature earlier this month. Users can submit 10 to 20 selfies, pay a fee ($3.99 for 50 images, $5.99 for 100, and $7.99 for 200), and then receive a bundle of AI-generated images in a range of styles like “kawaii” or “fantasy.”

The app’s “magic avatars” are somewhat uncanny in style, refracting likenesses as if through a funhouse mirror. In a packet of 100, at least a few of the results will likely capture the user’s photo well enough in the style of a painting or an anime character. These images have flooded Twitter and TikTok. (Polygon asked Prisma Labs for an estimate of how many avatars were produced, and the company declined to answer.) Celebrities like Megan Fox, Sam Asghari, and Chance the Rapper have even shared their Lensa-created likenesses.

HOW DOES LENSA CREATE THESE MAGIC AVATARS?
Lensa uses Stable Diffusion, an open-source AI deep learning model, which draws from a database of art scraped from the internet. This database is called LAION-5B, and it includes 5.85 billion image-text pairs, filtered by a neural network called CLIP (which is also open-source). Stable Diffusion was released to the public on Aug. 22, and Lensa is far from the only app using its text-to-image capabilities. Canva, for example, recently launched a feature using the open-source AI.

An independent analysis of 12 million images from the data set — a small percentage, even though it sounds massive — traced images’ origins to platforms like Blogspot, Flickr, DeviantArt, Wikimedia, and Pinterest, the last of which is the source of roughly half of the collection.

More concerningly, this “large-scale dataset is uncurated,” says the disclaimer section of the LAION-5B FAQ blog page. Or, in regular words, this AI has been trained on a firehose of pure, unadulterated internet images. Stability AI only removed “illegal content” from Stable Diffusion’s training data, including child sexual abuse material, The Verge reported. In November, Stability AI made some changes that made it harder to make NSFW images. This week, Prisma Labs told Polygon it too “launched a new safety layer” that’s “aimed at tackling unwanted NSFW content.”

Stable Diffusion’s license says users can’t use it for violating the law, “exploiting, harming or attempting to exploit or harm minors,” or for generating false information or disparaging and harassing others (among other restrictions). But the technology itself can still generate images in violation of those terms. As The Verge put it, “once someone has downloaded Stable Diffusion to their computer, there are no technical constraints to what they can use the software for.”

WHY DID AI ART GENERATORS BECOME SO POPULAR THIS YEAR?
Though this technology has been in development for years, a few AI art generators entered public beta or became publicly available this year, like Midjourney, DALL-E (technically DALL-E 2, but people just call it DALL-E), and Stable Diffusion.

These forms of generative AI allow users to type in a string of terms to create impressive images. Some of these are delightful and whimsical, like putting a Shiba Inu in a beret. But you can probably also imagine how easily this technology could be used to create deepfakes or pornography.

Source: The Verge

Advertisement

Adobe Users Working With PANTONE Colors Now Have To Pay To Unlock Them

Posted on by Phil Lam X

If you are an avid user of Adobe Photoshop, we may have important news for you. The creative studio is taking away PANTONE’s extensive library of colors, and they now reside behind a paywall on top of your monthly Photoshop subscription come November.

The move was first noticed by artist Iain Anders, who brought it to the attention of other creatives on Twitter. From his observations, users must pay an extra US$21 to access the catalog.

Moreover, you will be met with blacked-out spaces if you browse your current and old projects on the platform, which has used PANTONE’s shades.

Those who have been keeping up with either company would have known that both brands announced last year that they would remove the collection of hues from Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Adobe Color, and the Adobe Capture mobile app.

When the news came out, PANTONE insisted it was not due to a conflict of interest but that Adobe had not updated its software, the colors may have been outdated, and hundreds of new hues were missing from the library.

The move was supposed to take effect in March of this year, but it has been postponed until now.

In a statement, Ashley Still, senior vice president, digital media marketing, strategy & global partnerships at Adobe responds: “As we had shared in June, PANTONE decided to change its business model. Some of the PANTONE Color Books that are pre-loaded in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign were phased-out from future software updates in August 2022. To access the complete set of PANTONE Color Books, PANTONE now requires customers to purchase a premium license through PANTONE Connect and install a plug-in using Adobe Exchange.”

Source: DesignTAXI

NBA Bans Off-White Cream-Colored Uniforms Due To Effect On TV Screens

Posted on by Phil Lam X

The light-colored jersey blends right in with the floorboards—causing problems for digital advertisers.

Just when you thought companies couldn’t possibly shove more advertisements into your eye sockets, technology proved it was possible. Digital (or virtual) ads are promos inserted into media post-production or in real time. They first emerged in video games, then started creeping into TV shows on streaming platforms. And during the pandemic, digital ads began making their way onto the basketball court in NBA broadcasts.

On top of ensuring that nowhere in sports is safe from commercialization, the virtual ads have had at least one other, unintended side effect: They killed a well-loved team uniform. In a green screen-style snafu, certain jerseys were too close in color to the polished wooden floors of NBA arenas. Thus, digital ads ended up distorted by players wearing the offending outfits, as first reported by Paul Lukas, the uniform-obsessed aesthetics aficionado who writes the popular UniWatch newsletter.

Specifically, the proliferation of digital ads forced the Milwaukee Bucks’ to give up their cream-colored jerseys. The uniforms were an alternate used during some games from 2017-2020. The colorway was inspired by the team’s home city nickname (in turn, inspired by a local building material). Fans of the Wisconsin franchise loved the look, according to Lukas who spoke with the Bucks’ chief marketing officer, Dustin Godsey. “It was incredibly well received,” Godsey told Lukas. “It helped us kind of build that Cream City brand.”

But there was a problem. The teams’ sponsors started noticing that players wearing the jerseys were getting in the way of their ads—and reported a “pixelation effect,” said Godsey. As a result, the Milwaukee uniforms (and all cream uniforms) were banned NBA-wide. The move also impacts the Philadelphia 76ers, who’ve had a “parchment” colored uniform variant in rotation for the past three seasons, according to Lukas.

It may seem a small thing, but the off-white prohibition is a clear signal of the growing influence that advertisers are having in the sports league and beyond—and the technology enabling that influence. Ad tech is big business, arguably the biggest business—maybe even the only business.

Source: Gizmodo

After Chaotic Short-Notice Layoffs, Twitter Now Asks Some Fired Workers To Please Come Back

Posted on by Phil Lam X

Twitter Inc., after laying off roughly half the company on Friday following Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition, is now reaching out to dozens of employees who lost their jobs and asking them to return.

Some of those who are being asked to return were laid off by mistake, according to two people familiar with the moves. Others were let go before management realized that their work and experience may be necessary to build the new features Musk envisions, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing private information.

Twitter cut close to 3,700 people this week via email as a way to trim costs following Musk’s acquisition, which closed in late October. Many employees learned they lost their job after their access to company-wide systems, like email and Slack, were suddenly suspended. The requests for employees to return demonstrate how rushed and chaotic the process was.

A Twitter spokesperson did not reply to a request for comment. Twitter’s plan to hire back workers was previously reported by Platformer.

“Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day,” Musk tweeted on Friday.

Twitter has close to 3,700 employees remaining, according to people familiar with the matter. Musk is pushing those who remain at the company to move quickly in shipping new features, and in some cases, employees have even slept at the office to meet new deadlines.

Over the weekend, Twitter rolled out a new Twitter Blue subscription plan, offering a verification check mark for any user who pays $8 a month. The company also said it will soon be launching other features, including half the ads, the ability to post longer videos and get priority ranking in replies, mentions and searches.

The New York Times on Sunday reported Twitter will delay changes to the check marks until after Tuesday’s midterm elections, after users and employees raised concerns that the plan could be misused to sow discord.

Source: Bloomberg

Zoom Reportedly Working On Email App Called Zmail To Compete With Gmail

Posted on by Phil Lam X

Zoom may be getting ready for its biggest expansion yet: the company is preparing to launch email and calendar apps, The Information reported, and could do so before the end of this year. That would turn Zoom, which has already evolved from a video chat platform to a competitor to Slack and whiteboard apps and even your office phone, into a full-fledged competitor to Google Workspace and Microsoft Office.

Getting into other work apps would seem like a departure for Zoom, but it makes sense the company would go after them. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan has long said he prefers to be a partner to other work tools rather than replace them, but as Zoom’s own platform ambitions have grown, so has the company’s desire to own more of the work ecosystem.

Calendar and email are both heavily used as scheduling tools, too, which means Zoom could integrate more deeply with companies that already use it. And on the flip side, both Google and Microsoft are trying to edge Zoom out: the Meet button in Google Calendar seems to get a little bigger every day, and those companies are betting their default status will ultimately win.

Source: The Verge

Adobe Acquires Figma For $20 Billion, Taking Out One Of Its Biggest Rivals In Digital Design

Posted on by Phil Lam X

Over the past several years, Figma has built its name as a forward-thinking and collaborative design platform and a formidable competitor to Adobe, the giant in the creative apps market. That rivalry ended on Thursday when Adobe announced that it has struck a $20 billion deal to acquire Figma.

The acquisition will allow Adobe to incorporate Figma’s popular design tools into its widely-used portfolio of creative apps. But the acquisition also means that Adobe will once again be taking a major competitor off the market and bringing it under its own umbrella, to the dismay of many designers who rely on the tool and are wary of another critical platform joining the company’s Creative Cloud service. And they have a point: with Figma off the market, the list of companies capable of challenging Adobe’s empire just got meaningfully smaller.

Adobe has a history of buying up some of the biggest tools in the creative space, acquiring companies like Frame.io, a video production collaboration tool, and Behance, which lets people showcase their creative work. (Belsky first joined Adobe through this acquisition.) The company has bought a lot of companies — even Photoshop was an acquisition. That makes the Figma purchase all the more concerning for designers; one of the few notable challengers to Adobe has been swept up, meaning Adobe will continue to consolidate creative app power in one location.

Source: The Verge