I Tried AI Headshots
It didn’t go quite as well as I hoped it would
The premise was simple: we have a lot of people at my company with terrible headshots.
Terrible.
I mean, some of them are less than 50 kilobites in size, so they get fuzzy when enlarged. Some of them were taken at a wedding, and it’s obvious. And some of them really do look like mugshots — a person slammed up against a wall, usually in either too-bright or too-dim lighting, looking like they’re about to be shot by a firing squad.
So when I heard about Tryitonai.com, I decided to Tryitout. I thought AI might be able to take these less-than-perfect photos and make them into something we could actually use in our marketing collateral. And since the entire cost of this adventure was a whopping $17, I couldn’t resist a test using my own, current photos.
The website asks you to upload between 10–20 photos of yourself from the shoulders up. I could only find 10 total that would work — I don’t do a lot of selfies, and I have two current headshots — one is corporate, and the other makes me look like a cougar about to strike. They’re beautiful and recent, and so I mixed those in with some other candid photos of myself, some with makeup and some without, to see what AI could come up with.
