I Asked AI to Generate a Headshot for Me

I needed a new headshot for work, as I was pissed in my old one. But instead of getting a photographer, I asked AI to do it for me instead.

A while back I decided I needed a new headshot, as the one I currently use everywhere is from a night out with friends where Iโ€™m actually little drunk. It was an okay picture of me, so I decided to edit my friend out of the picture, remove the background, and use it:

kev-dave

kev-yellow

Now this is fine for my personal profiles, but I also used that avatar in work and on LinkedIn. So I needed to come up with a more professional picture for those kind of situations.

I seriously considered hiring a photographer to do a proper headshot for me (and I still might), but serendipity struck and I received an email from Aragon AI, who claim they can turn your selfies into professional headshots.

I had a look at their pricing and it was $29 for โ€œ20 high-quality headshotsโ€. Deciding that was way cheaper than what a photographer would cost, I decided to give it a shot.

This wasnโ€™t my first foray into AI, but it was my first time with any kind of AI imagery, so I was excited to see what it could do. I went ahead and paid my $29, uploaded a handful of pictures from my phone, and left Aragon to do its thing.

The results

For $29, I wasnโ€™t expecting miracles. An hour or so later I had my results - apparently I qualified for a free upgrade and they ended up generating a tonne of images. Like, over 100. Hereโ€™s some examples:

3-handed-kev

better-call-kev

fat-kev

president-kev

wtf-kev

Okay, so the result werenโ€™t great. But I continued to trawl through the headshots and ended up settling on 2 options that actually look a lot like me:

option-01

option-02

In the first image, the collar of the shirt is all fucked up, but it actually looks a lot like me. Like, 99% like me. Thereโ€™s a couple of very minor differences, but they would only be noticeable by someone who knows me really well.

The second image looks like me too, but the teeth are wrong; again only someone who is really close to me would notice that. In the end I decided to go with option 1. I cropped out the fucked up collar, played around with it a little and gave it the same coloured background Iโ€™ve been using everywhere else. For more professional settings, like in work and LinkedIn, I kept the outdoor background.

yellow-avatar

Final thoughts

Will I keep this avatar? Probably. Itโ€™s better than an image of me half pissed from a night out with some friends, and it saves me the embarrassment of having to pose for a photographer.

Overall, I think it was $29 well spent. Most of the images gave me a good laugh, and I managed to pluck out a couple of usable ones, so thatโ€™s a win, I think.

Aragon claimes that the more images you upload, the more accurate the results will be. Iโ€™m not really one for taking selfies, so I didnโ€™t have many, but I might try building up a little collection and trying again to see if I can get more accurate results. In the meantime, this one will do.

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