TikTok will soon let you create AI-generated profile pictures

TikTok AI avatars launching soon
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As per a recent leak on Twitter, AI avatars may soon be coming to TikTok. Matt Navarra, who is a social media consultant, spoke with The Verge about his findings. There are a lot of interesting things about TikTok AI avatars, so let’s get right into it.

TikTok AI avatars: Overview

According to the leak, TikTok is testing the ability to create AI avatars within the app in a few regions. These avatars resemble the art style of the popular “Lensa” app, which was all the rage a couple of months back. The leakster mentions that users will be able to create more than 30 AI avatars by uploading 3 – 10 photos of themselves. Users can then select from 5 different styles after uploading.

Some limitation

Matt Navarra also mentions that TikTok will let users create AI avatars only once a day. This will give you about 30 of them that you can discard or save some or all in your gallery.

It’s unclear if this feature is going to sit behind a paywall, but it’s likely going to be free for everyone. So what can you do with the AI avatars? Well, you can set them as your profile pictures or directly post them in your TikTok stories. The entire image generation process takes a few minutes to complete and the art styles are limited to TikTok’s offerings only.

What about data security?

Naturally, some people voiced their concern over data privacy and security here. And rightly so. TikTok has to collect your facial information and process it to create these avatars, after all. But TikTok promises to delete all of the user photos shortly after generating the AI avatars.

TikTok AI avatars - data security
Image: Matt Navarra

Looking at the screenshot above, we can also see something called “TikTok Plus”. It is likely going to be a subscription-based service of some kind, with one of its perks being that the users will have their images removed immediately after AI avatars are created.

TikTok AI avatars are going to be fun

All in all, it’s going to be fun to see how people use this feature. 30 images per day is a “healthy” offering, and I can see a lot of people leaning towards a particular style and forming huge communities or birthing new AI trends. TikTok may not be the first in this race, but it surely is an early adopter of AI art which may benefit it in the long run.