“A.I. is holding a mirror to our society”: Lensa and the discourse of visual generative AI

Since the release of the open-source AI model Stable Diffusion in August 2022, a panoply of apps that create AI-generated portraits, or avatars, have exploded in popularity. One of the most notable examples is AI-powered photo editing app Lensa, owned by Prisma Labs. Lensa launched in 2018 but went viral in late 2022 due to the launch of its Magic Avatar feature, which uses Stable Diffusion to create fantastical (and occasionally bizarre) portraits of users. This paper analyzed the global English-language press coverage of Lensa and found that it focused on the app’s predatory data practices, the biased content it produced, and the user behaviors associated with it. I argue that this coverage provides evidence of discursive closure around key issues associated with visual generative AI that supports the maintenance of the status quo. I suggest that the press coverage of Lensa, which both articulates key AI-related harms and frames those harms as intractable and insolvable, creates a discourse of inevitability that has implications for how these issues are understood by the public, and for the approaches that are taken to address them. In doing so, it not only offers distinct advantages to those who stand to benefit most from this discourse, but also forecloses more imaginative public discussions of what visual generative AI could– or should– be.