My experience with using an AI Headshot
Recently, I got a new headshot. Except it’s not me; it’s an AI rendering of me.
I posted the picture on my website and instagram, mostly as an experiment to try to get first-person answers to some of my own questions around the whole AI photos thing: How viable is this tech? Does it actually work well enough to use professionally? Am I comfortable using photos that aren’t really me?
I’ve spent the last week living with it and wanted to share my thoughts here.
My trial with an AI generated profile photo.
First, some context… I’d been using the same headshot since the week before COVID. It was one that a photographer friend of ours took as he was dialing in his camera settings for a client photoshoot. It wasn’t an intentional photoshoot session; he just needed someone to test the lighting, and I happened to be closest to him. The photo came out alright, looked kinda professional what with the lighting and the backdrop and the fancy camera, and it was better than anything I had at the time. So, I started using it as my go-to headshot.
The problem is, that headshot didn’t represent me well, emotionally. It was too serious and made me look kinda, well, cool (neither of which are totally accurate characteristics for me).
I knew I should probably get another photo that was a better reflection of who I am, but I never put in the effort to get a new one and so I lived with the well-lit-but-too-cool photo for years.
Fast-forward to a couple of weeks ago, and after some prodding from a friend, Phil Pallen, I knew it was time to make it a priority. The problem is that Ren and I are traveling around right now, and it’s a bit hard to find photographers that you trust when you’re bouncing around from city to city. There are some great digital nomad photographer websites, but I wasn’t finding anything in Chattanooga (where we’re staying for a few months). And the notion that I needed to update my profile photo was taking up more and more mental space.
Then one morning, I stumbled across this website that creates AI headshots from photos that you give it. The premise is, for $35, you upload a few photos of yourself and, using AI, it will generate 40 professional-looking headshots of you. Economically, $35 and 30 minutes for 40 images is a very compelling offer, and so I decided to give it a try.
When I first got the results back, I was immediately impressed. Many of the photos were way too “professional” looking, like me in a suit and tie (yeah, right), so those were out. But many still were pretty compelling… more than compelling, even. As I scrolled through my 40 AI-generated headshots, I saw photos that ranged from someone who looked very closely related to me to ones that were a spitting image of me.
Honestly, if I saw most of them at a glance, they’d even fool me. I felt like I was seeing a whole bunch of really really good doppelgängers of myself. I knew they weren’t actually photos of me, but I could almost believe they were.
After spending more time looking at each image more closely, it started to feel eerie. I started to notice little flaws that betrayed reality. The closer I looked, the more I noticed the subtle little cues that tell you something is off.
More to that point, after looking closely at each image, there wasn’t a single one that I would feel good about using on my About page. These photos could work as my tiny profile picture on Instagram or Youtube, but I didn’t want to share them blown up and in high-res anywhere. I didn’t want people to zoom in and start to notice some of the little hints that this was not in fact the real Will Myers. And you definitely shouldn’t feel that way about your headshot. Things like the pupils especially looked a little off, and when I zoomed in on my eyes I felt like I was looking at a Westworld version of me.
Will anyone notice?
Even though I was hesitant, I decided to lean into the whole thing and make an experiment out of it. I’d seen the capability of the technology (pretty damn good, although not quite perfect), and now I was curious about the social/emotional aspects of this whole thing — how I would feel about using an AI-generated headshot in my public profiles? Would it feel different than using a headshot with Instagram filters or touched-up headshots from Photoshop? Was I going to feel a stigma around using AI photos of myself? Would “shot by real human photographers” become the new “made in America” sticker?
So, I changed all my Instagram and Google profile photos to one of the better (and more casual) AI headshots and waited to see how I felt… and if anyone else would notice.
As it turns out, no one did — even my own parents commented on what a great photo it was of me and never noticed anything amiss! Emotionally however, it felt super creepy. I picked the best photo that I felt actually looked like me but still, days later, I had this icky feeling about it.
I left it up for about a week before switching it out for a photo my wife took of me and our dog the other night at dinner (neither serious, nor cool).
In the end, while it was really fun to see the photos I got back, I’m not actually using any of the AI-generated headshots for anything. Turns out, I just couldn’t handle staring down those creepy Robo-Will eyes every time I logged onto Instagram.
So today, I’m in the same place as where I started — with a photo that works but isn’t quite right, and “GET A NEW HEADSHOT” back on my to-do list.
Keep Building,
Will
