AI Headshots

I seem to be getting adverts at the minute. It seems to be - again… another ‘new thing that it’s another risk to my business and to my livelihood and all that and I’m not going to have a career again.’ And it’s AI headshots. 

I don’t know if you know of the adverts, I mean again, because obviously photography comes up a lot in my social media platforms, I get thrown these things on a regularish basis. And one of my friends, Matt Cartwright, posted about a picture the other day and then all of a sudden, within a couple of days, I was getting loads of them in my feed as well and it just made me chuckle I think, really. Mobile phones haven’t ruined my career, Zoom-based photos haven’t - sorry, that was the thing in lockdown, where some of us were talking their way through how to take a good picture on your phone and right, ‘Take it now, I’ll take it through your phone.’ Nah, I’m not having that, that’s not affecting my business in the slightest. 

And I think this is the latest one and it’s AI headshots. And it seems to be ripping from pictures that don’t necessarily need to be square on and straight, it’s kind of photo manipulating your head and being able to change your background. Being able to change your backgrounds is one thing, that’s quite nice for me, I kind of get that, but being able to just pick a random picture of you and fully manipulate it into this thing, is really interesting. 

There’s no doubt it’s really, really interesting, but on the flip side, they’ve obviously gone a little bit too far. What I would say is, they’ve gone a bit too far in Portrait Professional, which is a bit of software that some photographers still use and, you know, ‘Can you touch it up a bit?’ It’s a kind of a bit of software that really does extreme touching up. And it leaves quite a lot of artefacts and looks incredibly fake from my perspective, somebody who shoots quite natural and doesn’t edit people’s faces at all in reality. I was going to say ‘very much’ but I don’t do it at all. I’d much rather be seeing people as they are rather than a fully manipulated image of them. 

So yeah, these adverts keep popping up for these AI headshots. And do I feel threatened by it? I mean, you know, long term, it might be that it does make a dent into headshots because I mean obviously, headshots is a significant part of my business, but do I really feel it’s going to financially hit me at the end of this year, for example? No! Do I feel like it’s going to be in the next year? No! Five years’ time? Maybe. 10 years’ time? Yeah, probably, but in 10 years’ time, is headshots going to be a big chunk of my business? If you’d asked me 10 years ago what the big chunk of my business would be, it wasn’t what I’m doing now. 

So, do I really need to worry? I think we’re all adaptable people these days, certainly, so am I worried about it really affecting my business? Not really. But it’s always just interesting to see what technology can do and the way that AI is starting to take over the world, Sarah Connor-style. 

Yeah, it might have a big impact, but I’m not particularly worried at the minute, maybe I should be, I don’t know. What are your thoughts? Have you had any adverts through for them or is it something that it’s just us photographers that are getting at the minute, which is because of their bad adverts and key wording thrown in front of people that don’t really gain from? 

Let me know your thoughts.