• After seeing all my friends transformed into works of art, I finally decided to download the Lensa app.

• Lensa uses AI technology to turn 10-20 images into artwork across categories like anime, fairy princess, and pop.

• The service costs $3.99 for 50 images, and is a fun and interesting way to see AI technology at work.

While scrolling through Instagram this weekend, I couldn't help but notice that suddenly all of my friends had been transformed into works of art.

Wedged between photos of babies and brunches, my feed was filled with digital images of friends' likenesses turned into anime characters, fairy princesses, and art pop figures. The longer I swiped, the more I wanted to become a masterpiece, too.

So I downloaded Lensa, the wildly popular app behind the digital self-portraits, made with AI technology that renders selfies into artwork.

Lensa first launched in 2018 as a photo editing tool, though it wasn't until the company debuted its "Magic Avatars" tool last month that the app exploded in popularity. It's currently the top downloaded app in the Apple Store's Photo & Video category, a particularly impressive feat given it's not free.

While Lensa offers a seven-day free-trial to use the app before charging $29.99 for a monthly subscription, access to the avatar tool costs a separate $3.99 for 50 images. According to Lensa, the additional payment is to offset the cost of the "tremendous computation power" needed to create the avatars.

So I decided to swallow my pride and pay up because I simply had to see how it worked.

Upon downloading the app and opening the Magic Avatars feature, Lensa walks you through the process, explaining that the technology, which operates using the open source Stable Diffusion model, is not perfect and "may generate artifacts, inaccuracies, and defects in output images."

Thankfully, I had already been warned by a friend who received a distorted image of himself with two heads, so I was primed for some odd results (which I did indeed receive, but more on that later).