I Got 'Professional' AI Headshots to See If Photographers Should Worry

Headshots are pretty vulnerable because no-one really cares if it's fake, as long as it actually looks like you. But there are a number of areas of photography that don't really have to worry about AI because the entire point is capturing the moment.

For example, wedding photography. A picture that looks like you and your husband dressed up doesn't cut it. It's the moment, capturing everyone together, the crowds, etc.

The best I can imagine is that you could have someone walking around with a basic phone (or CCTV) wide angle capturing everything in low res, and then an AI could take those images and create convincing looking upscaled versions of them with interesting perspectives and composition etc. I still think though that people will want the real deal.

Sports photography and journalism are similar.

> Also, there are still too many mistakes like the weird hands and asymmetrical reflections in the eyes.

Even the article contains pictures with "weird hands"...the one where his arms are crossed in front the hands are WRONG :-)

Personally I wouldn't use this, not because I have anything against AI, but because I think that trust is one of the main reason that you would use a headshot. If you have a headshot then people are more likely to believe that you're a real person, but if the headshot looks too perfect or too fake people start wondering if you're a a scammer using a stock image or headshot that's entirely AI.

I wonder why all services insist in going all-AI when we could instead go like 80%-AI and have the best of both worlds. Most people won't care about whether the background is not real, and some of the clothes were pretty good (except maybe the buttons). So why not generate a bunch of unimportant stuff and then add the actual person's face to the image? Maybe even the arms and hands? I think a much more useful service would be to take an amateur picture that you took from yourself (mobile phones' cameras are pretty good anyway in terms of quality and resolution) and then "enhance" it by adding a bunch of fake things like clothes and background.

Think people missing the point.

The vast majority of people don’t get professional headshots. They’re expensive and I’ve only ever had one when my employer has had a photographer come in for them.

They’re also a signal only for people you don’t know, not ones you do. I don’t know this guy but for some of these images, I couldn’t tell by looking at them that they are AI generated, and for the ones that are, I doubt a lot that when you have a tiny thumbnail of it on LinkedIn that you would be able to tell.

I think like many things, if they’re good enough but not as good as the best, it’ll still be enough for most people in the market for this.

Most important part of the article, in my opinion:

> It’s worth pointing out that the company that owns the foundation model used to make these headshots, Stable Diffusion, is being sued for stealing over 12 million copyrighted photos to train it with.

I have to question how much these AI tools are profiting off stolen data.

Would have loved a comparison to some others. I haven't tried personally but been watching Pieter Levels post progress on fixing stuff like this for photoai.com and I think he has done a lot more tweaking than the service mentioned in the article which I hadn't heard of.

Since last week specialty smartphones and flux fine-tunes do "profession portraits".

Who really cares if people who want fake photos of themselves get them by AI, photoshop or some lens lighting makeup trick. They are for those seeking fame.

It is quite striking that no two photos actually look like the same person - crudely similar, but the face shape is all over the place.

I would think this is an especially long “last mile” for training and fine-tuning: this might need a more sophisticated approach than a diffusion model, e.g an initial 2D->3D layer that first creates a 3D representation of the user’s face from a photo.

They shouldn't be worried just like programmers shouldn't be worried as these things are often subtly wrong in uncanny ways. People who know me immediately see it's fake. But most people don't know me, so it's good enough for many things and complete crap for others.

How much work / cost is it to do this "manually" against stable diffusion?

Often the discussion around these kinds of tech/AI dwell on the wrong things: questions like "will GenAI put artists out of work?" or "should photographers worry about AI-generated headshots?" miss the point that headshot photography probably only accounts for work for a small subset of working photographers, or that most artists are not making the same things that people use GenAI for.

Did Google Translate put professional translators out work? Probably not so much. Certainly not based on the discussions I've had with professionals, who may use AI translation but spend more time on copy-editing the results now.

Most of the time the AI-generated outputs are fine when you don't value the results more than the cost of getting better results. If you're doing translation of legal or technical documents, getting more accurate results is worth paying for.

Same thing for headshots: if they're important you probably pay for them, if not you weren't going to pay for a professional to do them anyway.

More than though: the whole point of portrait photography is displaying the individual, in all their idiosyncratic differences that make them distinguishable from others. These headshots have a blandifying effect of making the person look less like themselves the individual and more like a smoothed out, generic version of themselves.

I'm going to use this - thanks!

Yeah I'll also use it. I agree that headshot imaging is a good use for AI, and other portrait styles too. For situations like weddings I take the point that a normal photo is what's required, but it could be cool to also have some fantasy style pictures - my nephew is getting married next year with a Viking themed wedding!