AI gets a lot of hype. It’s often touted as a miracle option in a lot of those slightly click-baity online publications. The reality is really a lot more complicated. What about the promise of AI generated headshots from a quick selfie?

AI: A Useful Tool

At times AI is a very useful tool—where the underlying technology has been translated into a useful tool. We use it for helping with writing where a client can’t quite finalise a piece, AI often helps in the form of Chat GPT at the point. And if it’s carefully used, prompted and edited at the end, can work well.

We also use it for expanding images for clients where the budget is limited for manual Photoshop work.

However, we were recently building a website for a client and the headshots they had were low quality, and very low resolution. In an ideal world a photoshoot was in order. However, they couldn’t get the team together and the costs were pushing the budget a little high for them.

So we took a look at a few AI headshot tools.

We felt it was probably a long shot, but we thought an experiment was in order. This time though, it didn’t work, instead it ended up giving us a bit of a laugh…

I took a selfie of my face… (in my defence, it was a bad day, I handn’t thought of taking a pic that day, I would have made some effort…)

Then we let AI do its thing…

For headshots, which are a credibility tool, these just won’t do. How would any of these be of any use? Anyway, once we’d finished crying with laughter, we couldn’t see anyone actually using these. We ran the experiment a few times (with one of my colleagues, Ben, trying on one of his selfie’s) and each never gave us a professional, usable result. 

Perhaps with more attempts we’d get something usable, but for now, this is one to leave. Just hire a professional photographer, they’ll look brilliant.

These… I guess they’d be fine if you never planned on meeting a client ever! Oh, and you’re happy just presenting a fictitious image.

Maybe we’ll laugh on the other side of our faces one day, but for now, it’s just not ready for the prime time. And that’s true of a lot of AI tools, AI isn’t translating into quality products in many cases—if you want to present a credible image. Time will tell though…

NOTE: When we use AI, we always make the client aware that we’re using an AI tool and ask the client their ethical stance on AI before using these tools on any of their projects. 

Caffeine Creative are an experienced team based in the Cardiff area. We help with graphic design, web development, company values, social media, branding and more. To know more please contact us.