AI photography is taking over social media. Why are some concerned about privacy?

December 8, 2022

The latest social media trend among users, young and old, is sharing virtual avatars generated through the Lensa AI app, reports ABC News.

Lensa, which has been around since 2018, enables users to upload from 10 to 20 photos of their selfies or portraits—and then it creates dozens, even hundreds, of digital images called “Magic Avatars.”

While the pictures could be considered pieces of digital art, those who are worried about personal online privacy have begun raising concerns about data collection.

Cybersecurity expert Andrew Couts is a senior editor of security at WIRED—overseeing privacy policy, national security, and surveillance coverage. He recently told ABC’s Good Morning America that it’s almost “impossible” to know what happens to a user’s photos after they are uploaded onto the app.

“It’s impossible, without a full audit of the company’s back-end systems, to know how safe or unsafe your pictures may be,” Couts said. “The company does claim to ‘delete’ face data after 24 hours and they seem to have good policies in place for their privacy and security practices.”

According to Lensa’s privacy policy, the uploaded photos are automatically deleted after the AI avatars are generated, and the face data on other parts of the app is automatically deleted within 24 hours after being processed by Lensa.

Prisma Labs, the developer of Lensa AI, told ABC News in a statement that images users upload are used “solely for the purpose of creating their very own avatars.”

“Users’ images are being leveraged solely for the purpose of creating their very own avatars. The system creates a personalized version of the model for every single user and models never intersect with each other. Both users’ photos and their models are deleted within 24 hrs after the process of creating avatars is complete,” the company said in a statement. “In very simple terms, there is no[t] a ‘one-size-fits-all collective neural network’ trained to reproduce any face, based on aggregated learnings.”

The statement continued, “We are updating our Terms & Conditions to make these more clear to everyone. The much-discussed permission to use the content for development and improving Prisma’s work and its products refers to the users’ consent for us to train the copy of the model on the 10-20 pictures each particular user has uploaded,” the statement continued. “Without this clause, we would have no right to perform this training for each subsequent generation. We are fully GDPR and CCAP compliant. We store the bare minimum of data to enable our services. To reiterate, the user’s photos are deleted from our servers as soon as the avatars are generated. The servers are located in the United States.”

Couts added that he isn’t too worried about the photos because most of us already have our faces on social media. He said his main concern is data collection that can be potentially lifted from users’ phones.

Research contact: @abcnews

August 19, 2024

“Redshirting”—or choosing to delay school entry for a year—seems to be an increasingly popular trend among parents who are trying to give their children a competitive advantage, reports Yahoo Lifestyle.

The growing popularity of redshirting may have been started by Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book, Outliers, which was published in 2008. In this book, Gladwell claims that a child being relatively older than their peers provides an advantage.

Gladwell points to data showing that nearly all players for the Canadian Hockey League have birthdays in the first four months of the year. Because the cutoff for most sports in Canada is January 1, children born in the first four months of the year are older than the other children on the team—thus, making them more likely to be identified as talented and ultimately more likely to play professional hockey. Gladwell argues that this principle extends to children who are older than their classmates having an academic advantage as well.

Sincethis book was published, it seems that children are waiting longer and longer to start kindergarten every year. At the same time, kindergarten seems to be becoming increasingly academic and rigorous.

For parents of children born near the cutoff date, the pressure to delay kindergarten feels intense. So does research actually find that redshirting will provide an academic and/or social advantage for children? The answer may be more complicated than you think.

The research on redshirting

Research on redshirting suggests that it is associated with a small academic advantage (that is, higher academic test scores) and test scores that seem to increase at a greater rate in the first and second grades (suggesting that redshirted children are showing enhanced learning in these grades).

However, this effect may begin to fade as early as the end of first grade. This research is also correlational—meaning we do not know whether it is redshirting that causes these advantages or if redshirting is simply associated with advantages. The latter would not be surprising since parents that choose to redshirt their children are often very different from the parents who do not—most notably, they are often higher income families.

Some research studies eliminate the problem of parent choice by looking at the impact of children’s age within the same grade (such as comparing students with summer birthdays to students in the same grade with fall birthdays). Research finds that students who are relatively older than other children in their grade score higher on math and science tests and, although these differences decrease over the years, they are still present to some extent in eighth grade.

Other research finds that children who are relatively older show less hyperactivity and inattention and greater educational attainment (translation: getting farther in school). However, the impact on educational attainment is greatly reduced when schools do not engage in early tracking (translation: sending children to different schools based on academic abilities in elementary school).

Research also shows that children who are older relative to their classmates are more likely to be in gifted education and less likely to be in special education. These positive impacts seem to extend to high school and beyond.

Children who are older relative to their classmates are also less likely to drop out of high school, less likely to commit a felony, and less likely to experience a teenage pregnancy. Children who are older than their classmates also are more likely to attend a four-year college than younger students.

Yet, it is very important to note that this line of research only involves associations (meaning, we do not know whether being older relative to your peers actually causes any of these positive or negative outcomes). Further research is needed in order to conclude that redshirting actually causes any of these positive outcomes.

Are there any situations in which parents may want to avoid redshirting?

So, research suggests that being older than your peers is consistently associated with at least a small advantage—but are there any situations in which parents might want to avoid redshirting?

Research suggests that when your child has an identified disability, a suspected disability—or even if you are just concerned that they may need some extra help in school—you may want to avoid redshirting. In this case, delaying school entry may be associated with worse academic performance, because it would also involve delaying free essential services through the public school system (such as speech therapy and learning support).

This short delay may have a big impact as research finds that services before age five are more effective in improving a child’s long-term outcome than services after age five.

Research has compared the impact of redshirting on children with disabilities (such as autism, developmental delays, learning disabilities, or health impairments) versus children without disabilities. Researchers found that children with disabilities who were redshirted scored significantly lower in math in third grade when compared to children with disabilities who were not redshirted, while children without disabilities who were redshirted showed improved math and reading scores in third grade. Research also finds a negative impact of redshirting for children with more severe ADHD and no impact for children with learning disabilities.

Is redshirting more important for boys than girls?

In any discussion of redshirting, it is commonly assumed that boys in particular benefit from redshirting. In line with this assumption, research reveals that boys are indeed more likely to be redshirted than girls. So is there any research to back up this trend?

Research does find that girls are more likely to be ready for kindergarten than boys and that this difference is mostly driven by differences in social-emotional development.

Research also suggests that boys seem to show greater gains from redshirting and that boys may not cope as well as girls with having higher-achieving classmates.

Research contact: @yahoolifestyle0