Lensa AI tops the App Store charts; prepare for keyword spamming

With Lensa AI taking the top slot in the App Store charts thanks to the viral appeal of its “magical avatars,” brace yourself for a deluge of AI photo apps — both real and fake.

AI and machine learning have so far been buzzwords that developers love to include, whether their apps actually use them or not — but the open source Stable Diffusion deep learning tool is blowing minds right now, and Lensa AI is using it to turn selfies into impressive avatars…

Stable diffusion

Stable Diffusion is an incredibly sophisticated image generation tool whose most impressive feature is its ability to turn text prompts into photorealistic images, but it can also work with existing photos.

What blows the mind is the incredible speed with which the technology has evolved from laughable novelty to images like professional renders, if not actual photographs.

A friend of mine recently demonstrated this, and asks versions 1-4 of Midjourney to show images of a “Ferrari SUV”. Here is version 1, as of July this year:

Now here’s version 4, less than six months later:

Lensa AI

Lensa AI is an iOS app that can do all the usual automatic photo retouching, but recently applied Stable Diffusion code to create avatars from selfies.

TechCrunch note that the popularity of the (paid) feature leads to keyword spamming by competing applications.

Consumer demand for the app, and for AI mods more broadly, has now pushed numerous other “AI” apps to the US App Store’s Top Charts. As of Monday, the top three spots in the US App Store are all held by AI photo editors, and even more AI art apps are new to the Top 100.

However, the number 1 spot in the US App Store is still held by Lensa AI, which saw 12.6 million global installs in the first 11 days of December, 600% more than the 1.8 million installs it achieved during a seen similar time frame. in November (November 20 to November 30), according to new data from App Store intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The U.S. accounted for 3.6 million of those new December installations, estimates indicate.

In fact, 8 out of the top 100 apps downloaded on the US App Store were AI art apps during the December 1 to December 11 time frame, the firm’s analysis found.

While it would be great to see more iOS apps take advantage of Stable Diffusion, we can expect to see a lot more query spam from decidedly unimpressive apps.

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