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Headshots, portrait photographs depicting the face, can be found in all sorts of settings—personal, travel, and bureaucratic domains just to list a few. From passport and gym-entry photos, corporate LinkedIn profiles, CVs, and profile pictures on social media, everyone has now had a camera up close and personal to their face at some point in their life.

Gone are the days of the cat emoji profile image. As the world becomes increasingly online, the need for a good headshot becomes increasingly important. Work and personal connections are often interfaced through an online profile, with just a single profile picture sitting alongside text to convey personality, competence, professionalism, and other personal descriptions.

This means that many people are now going to extra lengths when trying to snap the perfect photo to use online. Whether channeling corporate chic or the effortless ease of a mumfluencer, much thought and effort is going into conveying a certain appearance.

As the internet is evolving and permeating every aspect of our lives, so too is the dizzying advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI). More recently, AI, too, is changing the way many people approach the art of acquiring a headshot by generating and altering images online.

We discuss here the evolution of the headshot and how this landscape is changing to keep up with customer demand, increasing costs, and an evermore online community in the age of AI.

Professional Headshots

Until recently, the gold standard in acquiring a headshot for professional and personal purposes has been to book a session with a photographer and pose for a photoshoot.

From corporate backdrops to poses in nature, a wide variety of high quality headshots can be acquired this way. However, use of this methodology is slowly dropping by the wayside.

Barriers to access, including the need to take time off work and the cost of headshots, and varying quality and conflicting creative visions between the photographer and client, are just many reasons enlisting a professional photographer is becoming less common.

With the advances in smartphone technology, many people opt to take selfies or have their friends snap a photo with your phone. The problem here is that most casual photographers don’t have the training in style, knowledge of how different clothing styles look on models, appreciation for lighting, or even the talent of professional photographers. They just snap the pic and hope for the best.

Now, however, AI is stepping in to play photographer, stylist, editor, and more.

Human Faces: An Evolutionary Drive

Before we dive into the new boundary pushing (and sometimes a little scary) approaches to headshots using AI technology, it’s important to consider why images of faces in particular seem to have such importance in many settings.

The wish to depict the human face seems to have been around as long as human history. From the time of being carved in stone to when expensive oil paints were applied to canvas to the age of modern photography, the power and story held in a face has always undeniably captivated humans.

Neuroscience, anthropological, and psychological studies have long confirmed this. As well as being a source of beauty and attraction, faces and facial expressions hold key societal indicators of many important traits and information about behaviors.

In fact, there are specialized brain systems dedicated entirely to the processing and identifying of human faces. Faces capture attention, more than almost any other stimulus, quickly and automatically in the human brain.

This helps explain why so much weight is given to a good headshot; it affords the option to tailor the unconscious message that a profile image sends friends, employers, and everyone else with nothing more than a poised face.

Human Faces: Futuristic Imagination

AI Enhancement

In some ways, thanks to AI, getting a good headshot is becoming more accessible to people, often right from the comfort of their home.

With tools like PixelPose, AI is enhancing everyday headshots primarily through in-built smartphone camera technology and AI-powered filters that can be applied to photos after they have been taken.

Many smartphones come with AI technology that detects the face, optimizing lighting and color balance, paired with some skin smoothing and background blurring features, for the most flattering image.

Filters are also hugely popular, allowing to subtly alter facial features, add virtual makeup, and provide other enhancements alongside classic photo editing changes such as cropping and adjusting brightness, and contrast.

AI Generation

A newer use of AI entails the generation of completely novel headshots entirely constructed by AI technology.

Rather than having to find the right outfit and styling, to pick a good background with flattering lighting, and everything else that goes into a successful photoshoot, AI can take a few pre-existing images for reference of a particular face and bodily features, and then generate a brand new image of that person’s likeness.

In many cases, the AI is trained to create highly flattering and corporate-approved images—posed to display the right balance of ease and confidence, with smooth skin, and a crisply ironed shirt—that can pass as a real photo.

What Comes Around Goes Around

The spread of AI-driven image generators hasn’t come without controversy and criticism. Much has been said around privacy concerns, artistic ownership, loss of jobs for practicing artists, and more.

Although these are valid and important points of discussion that must continue, there’s also something to be said about a natural and instinctive aversion to doing things a new way—a fault that spans human history.

While today, reading books is highly encouraged to expand vocabulary, knowledge, and critical thinking, their widespread availability caused much concern in the Victorian era. Is the current reaction to AI a new version of this human tendency? Or is there something more insidious about AI specifically?

We could frame this as history cycling back around. Portraits are now being ‘painted’ by AI, much like how the aristocracy of old had painted portraits commissioned—with instructions for the artists to ‘edit’ them to make them the most flattering.

What is it about the age of AI that inspires wariness in some and excitement in others? A head(shot) above the rest or (head)shot in the dark?