Recently, my internet has been awash with Lensa.ai images. At first I was resistant, but then I realized that the computers have my everything anyway, so might as well. How would AI imagine me? What would I learn about myself? Would I finally have an avatar I didn’t hate? I had questions.

I uploaded 20 of my best selfies and paid the $5.99 for 100 AI-generated images and…meh. Okay, there were a few I liked:

a woman with red hair and a solemn face is wearing headphones my anime self

The first fairy princess version of myself was fun, the “pop” and “anime” versions of myself were super adorable, but the rest definitely left something to be desired. Not very impressed. But my husband saw the images and of course he asked me to do it for him. So I did and…then I got annoyed! He got interesting themes like “adventurer” and “astronaut.” My son wanted some too and he looks like he’s straight out of a detective anime series…and rock star! Um, my “wait WTF” radar just went off.

When you upload the selfies/photos of yourself, you’re asked to pick one of three genders. “Female”, “Male” and “Other.” I am not going to go into the “other” as a gender, I think it’s reductive and I’m sure someone else will write an article about it. But I noticed it and was annoyed by it (“ugh do better already”)

Anyway, after seeing my husband’s cool “GTA meets Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and “super cool jedi” images, I decided to do a little experiment.

Man in a suit and tie, wearing sunglasses, in a desert

My Experiment

Now, my sample size is small so this isn’t a proper experiment by any means, so this should be considered anecdotal.

People involved and genders:

  • Me: identify as a female, adult.
  • My husband: identifies as a male, adult with facial hair.
  • My son: identifies as a male, teenager and no facial hair.

I have seven (7) samples of 100 ai-generated avatars each.

  • female x3
  • male x3
  • other x1

Categories

I was mostly interested in what kind of categories seemed “assigned” to a gender, mostly because I hate feeling typecast.

So I uploaded the same set of 20 selfies of me for each gender to see what results I would get. I also compared my results to my husband and son’s results.

Theme Female Male Other
Adventure   X  
Anime X X X
Astronaut   X  
Cosmic X X X
Cyborg   X X
Cyber Scientist     X
Fantasy X   X
Fairy Princess X    
Focus X    
Iridescent X    
Kawaii X    
Light X   X
Mystical   X X
Pop X    
Sci-Fi   X X
Stylish X X X
Superhero   X X
Rainbow     X
Rock Star   X  

The male gender got a lot more interesting categories and resulting images. They could definitely give women the rock star category, there were plenty of my “male rockstar” avatars that were pretty great. The only one that was blatantly sexist was the “astronaut” category– each of my avatars had facial hair! I was irritated by that, and not only because I kind of wanted to see what “Astronaut Mel” would look like. But then I went and looked at my husband’s “astronaut” avatars again and they were really terrible, distorted…everything. Half-formed space craft, misplaced eyeballs, the works. Our son had the cool astronaut avatars, so maybe that’s something.

Overall, I think my son won the avatar game. My son’s avatars looked like a characters out of a video game or anime series. Ahh, youth.

dylan is super cute as an anime avatar

Observations

Resting Bitch Face One really interesting pattern stood out to me more than the rest. My “female” avatars had distinctly disdainful looks on their faces…but none of my “male” avatars did. The machine definitely knows resting bitch face. Very annoying.

disdainful ai mel looks at you with disdain

I would have done this more but… I only did this a few times because it was $5.99 for each set of 100 avatars. I am curious to see this done as a proper experiment but I am not interested enough to give this app any more of my money.

Sexy? I read an article about another woman’s experience of getting over-sexualized ai-generated avatars back. I did not experience this. For clarity, one of my selfies had some cleavage in it, none of the rest did. So I’d be curious to see if feeding the machine “sexier” photos will return more dramatic results.

“Other” is a joke It’s very clear that some of these are just fillers for the count. There were more distorted ai-generated images for the set where I chose “other” as my gender. The “Rainbow” category definitely produced the highest number of distorted images. It was really kind of grotesque. I had such high hopes for “Cyber Scientist” but alas, it also had a higher distorted image count for me. “Other” doesn’t mean surreal or grotesque, but AI seems to think so. Really, it just needs to refactor all of whatever it shipped to determine what “other” means.

weird rainbow distorted image. One of my eyes is surreal

Closing Thoughts

The thing is, sure we train the AI but we can also tell the AI that we want more diversity, we want to see more possibilities, and we want a really cool imagination land future…and it could provide it. Right now, my observation is that this tool is just reinforcing stale biases instead of the REALLY COOL SHIT IT COULD BE DOING. The tech future was supposed to be cool, but it’s mostly just broken, and it’s a total bummer.

This app doesn’t waste any more of your time than Candy Crush and steals less of your data than Facebook or TikTok. It’s mostly a waste of money but hey, I finally have that “Melanie-as-a-mystic-being” avatar I always wanted. Male Mystic Mel wins this competition.

mystic melanie is magnificent mystic melanie is glorious too