You want to look your best in professional headshots for your company website or LinkedIn profile. (A bathroom selfie is not recommended.) But serious photographic portraits can cost hundreds of dollars, not to mention the time and effort. But maybe you can skip all that hassle with artificial intelligence.
AI can turn run-of-the-mill selfies into as many “professional” looking pictures as you’ll ever need in about 15 minutes. But are artificial intelligence photos good enough for professional use? I put it to the test. But first, here’s how to get your hands on AI-made headshots:
How to get AI headshots
Choose a service: There are any number of AI headshot-generation websites out there: Fotor, Try it on AI, and Aragon are just a few. The prices vary a bit, but they all seem to offer basically the same service. Remini, for example, offers a short trial for some paid plans, which can net you a free AI headshot if you’re savvy.Sign up: The companies I checked out all required a credit card payment. The one I used cost $17 for the cheapest option.Follow the instructions: You’ll probably be asked to submit between 10 and 20 selfies to get started, with specific directives about poses, usually chest-up pictures with hair and eyes visible, and different backgrounds, expressions, and angles for each. Wait for your results. Or, you could do it yourself: If you’re more technically minded, this Twitter post lays out a step-by-step.How to get the best results from AI-generated photographs
Vary the expressions of the pictures you send: You might have your own “blue steel” pose you think looks best, but if you send in only one expression, you’re not doing it right. AI tries to make all your poses look better.Try different angles: AI-photograph services generally want a picture from the chest up, with hair and eyes visible. There’s still any number of angles you can include within those parameters.Vary the backgrounds: AI will enhance the information in your photos, so give it something to work with. A blank wall will likely become a different colored blank wall.Keep your hands out of the shot: AI will make your hands into grotesque deformities.Ignore all these rules for a few samples: There’s something really fun about throwing AI for a loop and seeing what comes out, so send one or two where you’re winking, or your hands are touching your face. It will be fun.How do AI-generated headshots compare to professional photographs?
To put AI headshots through the most rigorous test possible, I turned to a couple professionals in a field where good-looking headshots really matter: movies and television. Actor Andrew Kirsanov, whose credits include Dexter, CSI, and Extant among others, and casting director Kirkland Moody, who help choose performers for the Coen Brothers, Larry Charles, Harold Einstein, and many more, helped me run a little experiment on the viability of AI-generated headshots. I chose Try it on AI because it’s inexpensive, easy-to-use, and no-frills. I chose the cheapest package, too—$17 for 100 AI-generated images.
Kirsanov sent me 15 or so selfies that happened to be on his phone and I uploaded them to Try it On. The entire process took maybe 20 minutes, plus an hour or so for the website to return the pictures. The end result: 100 AI-generated headshots for less than $20. I’ll let you decide if they’re any good.
Below is one of Kirsanov’s real headshots, from Xander Photography.
Photo: Jeff Xander
And here are some of the AI images that Kirsanov thought would be most useful professionally. (Some examples of weird ones are in the image at the top of this article.)
Photo: Try it on AI/Andrew Kirsanov
Obviously the real headshot is a much better photograph than any of the AI images. That said, the AI images are much better photographs than the selfies used to generate them. The AI algorithm improved the lighting, added more interesting backgrounds, dressed Kirsanov in some smart suits, and otherwise “professionalized” the images. But the photos also changed how Andrew looks in a fundamental, sometimes hard-to-express way—a very bad idea in his field.
“For all the wonders of the technology, these are not yet usable as submission tools for actors,” Kirsanov said. “Casting directors hate when you do not look like your photo, and for all the work that the AI did, not many of the results truly look like me—and that’s not just limited to pictures with distorted limbs and bizarre eye colors.”
The real test was putting the AI images in front of casting director Kirkland Moody though. “They don’t look fake to me,” Moody said, “except one (The AI-Andrew in the bottom middle in the image above).”
As for whether an actor could used AI-generated headshots professionally, Moody’s opinion is yes, but with a caveat. “It really doesn’t matter if it’s an AI image or a professionally taken photograph, as long as it actually looks like the actor who walks through the door,” Moody said.
Moody says that about 5% of professional headshots he sees don’t look like the actor. In terms of this experiment, 100% of the AI photographs don’t look enough like the subject for use in casting. They’re too altered, as AI-enhanced photographs aim to present the subject in the most flattering way possible. This is not the best for being cast CSI: Vegas, but is it good enough for your dumb job?
Can AI generated pictures be used for professional photographs?
Most professions don’t require you to look exactly like your bio photo—a loose approximation is good enough for a company website’s “about us” section—so if you need a picture for a professional purpose, and you want to save some money, I don’t see any practical reason not to use AI to generate one for you. It can make you look “better,” if you think the weird gloss of AI is better than how you look in real life, and the technology is good enough that people usually can’t tell that AI images are fake. So it’s worth it to give it a shot and see what you think.
Of course, you are taking money away from a photographer and maybe contributing to the AI-decimation of all jobs, but that’s between you and your conscience.
