A Psychologist Explains Why Your ‘Hot AI Selfies’ Might Make You Feel Worse

No matter where you hang out online, you’ve probably seen friends sharing colorful, intensely stylized illustrations of themselves. The images weren’t made by human artists but with an app called Lensa, from the photo and video editing company Prisma Labs. While Lensa has been available since 2018, it recently added a feature called “Magic Avatars.” For $3.99, you can upload 10 to 20 selfies and have the software generate 50 of these portraits using Stable Diffusion, an open-source neural network model.

It’s the next wave of art generated with artificial intelligence — Lensa is currently the number one bestseller in Apple‘s app store. And, like all AI art trends, this one has sparked controversy along with curiosity.

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While many have found the Magic Avatars (or “hot AI selfies,” as they’ve become known) too fun to resist, Lensa sits at the intersection of several controversial issues in tech. It can be tricked into creating non-consensual nudes. Artists have complained that the model scrapes and reproduces their work without their permission or compensation — and will ultimately affect their livelihood. The app also trains itself on the pictures you upload, raising questions about what kind of private data it retains.

Prisma has sought to allay those concerns by promising improvements to the product, such as the ability to delete your avatars from their servers and tweaks to prevent sexualized results. But there’s another reason to be wary of this software, as some users have already warned each other: anxiety over body image.

Dr. Toni Pikoos, a clinical psychologist in Melbourne, Australia, who does research on body image and specializes in treating body dysmorphic disorder, sees Lensa as yet another photo-filtering tool with the capacity to shift our self-perception.

“Fascination with these apps is natural — most people would have at least some curiosity about what they would look like if they could tweak, change or ‘fix’ parts of themselves that they don’t like,” Pikoos tells Rolling Stone in an email. She says that AI offerings like the Magic Avatars “are particularly interesting because it seems more objective — as if some external, all-knowing being has generated this image of what you look like.” She thinks this could actually be useful for people with body dysmorphic disorder, a way of highlighting the “mismatch” between an individual’s negative view of themselves and how others see them.

However, Pikoos notes, Lensa isn’t objective. It’s attempting to show you “an enhanced and perfected version” of your face, she explains. Someone suffering from body dysmorphic disorder, or BDD, “may experience a brief confidence boost when they view their image, and want to share this version of themselves with the world,” she says, only to be crestfallen at their looks “off screen, unfiltered, in the mirror or a photo that they take of themselves.”

“When there’s a bigger discrepancy between ideal and perceived appearance, it can fuel body dissatisfaction, distress, and a desire to fix or change one’s appearance with potentially unhealthy or unsafe means” like disordered eating or unnecessary cosmetic procedures, Pikoos says. Meanwhile, she says, the low fidelity of the images erases “intricate details” like freckles and lines, which could exacerbate worries about skin.

But Lensa could also trigger a vulnerable person in the opposite way: by picking up on what they consider an unbearable flaw — like an asymmetry in the eyes — or simply inventing one that doesn’t exist. “To see an external image reflect their insecurity back at them only reinforces the idea ‘See, this is wrong with me! And I’m not the only one that can see it!'” says Pikoos. And because the AI can introduce its own features that don’t reflect how the user looks in real life, the app can drive entirely new anxieties. (Reached for comment, Andrey Usoltsev, CEO of Prisma Labs, replied that the company is currently “overwhelmed” with inquiries about Lensa. He offered a link to an FAQ page that addresses the complaints of sexualized imagery, though not the kind of user reactions Pikoos describes.)

“Many people with body dysmorphic disorder already have a mental image of themselves which can look quite strange and distorted, almost like a Picasso painting,” Pikoos explains. “Seeing this reflected in the app would be very confronting and provide a kind of ‘confirmation’ for the way that they see themselves”, leading them to become “more entrenched in the disorder.”

Lensa, she believes, does have a responsibility to make consumers aware of these risks, saying that the app’s current disclaimer — that images may not be accurate — isn’t enough. “A specific warning that using this app can create or exacerbate body image concerns would be more likely to cause people to stop and consider whether or not they want to use the technology,” she says. In the end, though, it’s up to us to develop a “critical eye” when dealing with this kind of software and the content it generates.

“We need to learn to recognize when an image has been enhanced or filtered, or even when we can’t identify it, reminding ourselves that the images we see online are not an accurate reflection of what we, or others look like,” Pikoos concludes. If we untangle our sense of worth from our selfies and digital avatars, “we can develop greater resilience to the pressures of technology that continue to perpetuate unrealistic beauty standards,” she says.

None of which is to say we can’t experiment with cutting-edge forms of art and photography, or even the particulars of human faces. It’s just that if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that eye belongs to an AI, we’re giving this program — with all its quirks and biases — a measure of control over our self-esteem. That’s a high price to pay for a pretty picture.

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