The week AI selfie apps took over the App Store, and what you were really paying for

Hand an app a batch of selfies, wait a while, and get back portraits of yourself in styles you'd never commission from a painter. In late 2022 that was the pitch, and a lot of people bought it. On Monday, December 12, TechCrunch's Sarah Perez put numbers on it. That day, the top three spots on the US App Store were all AI photo editors.

What the charts looked like

Lensa AI held No. 1. Its viral "magic avatars" feature used the open-source Stable Diffusion model to turn uploaded selfies into stylized portraits. Citing Sensor Tower, TechCrunch reported Lensa saw 12.6 million global installs in the first 11 days of December, up 600% from 1.8 million in a similar window in November. The US accounted for 3.6 million of those.

Behind it sat "AI Art: AI Image Generator" at No. 2 and "Dawn – AI Avatars" at No. 3, each with roughly 1.7 million installs. Dawn's jump was the wild one, from about 28,000. Across December 1 to 11, eight of the top 100 US apps by downloads were AI art apps.

One app, Voi, had launched on December 7 and was already at No. 39. Its reviews averaged 1.6 stars, with people complaining about the subscription and broken features. That detail tells you a lot about a gold rush.

The next morning, 9to5Mac's Ben Lovejoy predicted a deluge of copycats and noted that developers were stuffing app names with AI buzzwords. TechCrunch made a related point: calling an app AI-powered didn't necessarily mean it used Stable Diffusion at all.

The parts that weren't fun

The same TechCrunch piece listed real problems. Stable Diffusion had been trained on artists' images without their consent. Lensa could be pushed into generating NSFW images. And MIT Technology Review had reported that Lensa produced topless and sexualized avatars of one of its reporters, a woman of Asian heritage, which says something uncomfortable about the training data.

I don't think that cancels out the delight people felt. But it's worth holding both. A tool can be fun and still have been built on a shaky foundation.

What you were actually buying

Strip away the app and the core of a magic avatar is a model, your photos, and style choices somebody else made for you. The app's value was convenience and a nicely tuned set of looks. That's legitimate. It's also something you can partly do yourself, because the style part is just words.