Lensa AI climbs the App Retailer charts as its ‘magic avatars’ go viral • TechCrunch

It’d appear to be Lensa AI sprung up over night time when immediately, your mates are all posting creative renditions of themselves that they generated on the app. However whereas the Lensa AI app itself has been round since 2018, its viral “magic avatars” characteristic launched in late November, boosting the app to the #1 spot on the iOS App Retailer‘s aggressive “Picture & Video” charts. For comparability, YouTube is #3 and Instagram is #4 on the charts on the time of publication.

Lensa AI works by inviting customers to add 10-20 pictures of themselves. Utilizing the open supply Secure Diffusion mannequin, the app processes your pictures to generate avatars of you that appear to be they had been created by a digital artist.

Once you obtain Lensa AI, you’re instantly greeted with a pop-up inviting you to hitch a seven-day free trial to make use of their AI enhancing instruments — should you don’t cancel in time, you’ll be charged $39.99 for limitless use of the app for a 12 months. You possibly can bypass this display with out committing to the trial, however the free model of the app could be very restricted and doesn’t embody the viral magic avatar characteristic. Even should you don’t subscribe to the limitless plan, you’ll be hit with one other in-app buy display should you attempt to make your very personal magic avatar. On the lowest value tier, you’ll need to pay $3.99 for 50 distinctive avatars (5 variations of 10 completely different types). However hey, a minimum of that’s cheaper than a blue verify!

In line with app analytics agency SensorTower, Lensa AI has amassed about 22.2 million worldwide downloads and nearly $29 million in client spending since its launch in 2018. Within the final month, the app has seen a major spike with the discharge of magic avatars. In November, the app was downloaded 1.6 million occasions, up 631% from 219,000 downloads in October. The U.S. is Lensa AI’s largest market, producing 58% of client spending, however the app is particularly in style in Brazil proper now. Of all November downloads, 31% had been from Brazil, the place installs climbed 24,450% month over month.

Viral picture enhancing apps have a shady historical past, as some apps have been discovered to be vectors for malware. In different circumstances, customers have apprehensive about what occurs to the pictures they add into these apps. These considerations got here up round Russia-based AI editor FaceApp, which later made a press release that it would retailer up to date pictures within the cloud for “efficiency and visitors causes,” however that the majority pictures are deleted inside 48 hours.

Prisma Labs, the workforce behind Lensa AI, instructed TechCrunch that it makes use of AWS cloud companies to course of consumer’s pictures. As quickly as an AI mannequin is skilled on a consumer’s pictures, the photographs are instantly deleted.