[pdinny]

Often the discussion around these kinds of tech/AI dwell on the wrong things: questions like "will GenAI put artists out of work?" or "should photographers worry about AI-generated headshots?" miss the point that headshot photography probably only accounts for work for a small subset of working photographers, or that most artists are not making the same things that people use GenAI for.

Did Google Translate put professional translators out work? Probably not so much. Certainly not based on the discussions I've had with professionals, who may use AI translation but spend more time on copy-editing the results now.

Most of the time the AI-generated outputs are fine when you don't value the results more than the cost of getting better results. If you're doing translation of legal or technical documents, getting more accurate results is worth paying for.

Same thing for headshots: if they're important you probably pay for them, if not you weren't going to pay for a professional to do them anyway.

More than though: the whole point of portrait photography is displaying the individual, in all their idiosyncratic differences that make them distinguishable from others. These headshots have a blandifying effect of making the person look less like themselves the individual and more like a smoothed out, generic version of themselves.