What AI Headshots Get Wrong

Here is something people don’t always realize. I get asked about retouching more than almost anything else, and lately the question has changed.

It used to be “how much are you going to fix?” Now it is “did you use AI?”

Both are really the same question. How much of this is still me.

What I actually retouch. Temporary things. A blemish that will be gone in a week. A stray hair across your forehead. Lint on your lapel. Shine, if the lights found it.

What I leave alone. Everything that is actually you. The lines around your eyes. The shape of your nose. Grey. Scars. The asymmetry that every human face has, and that your own friends would notice missing before they could tell you why.

The test I use is simple. If you walked into a meeting and the person across the table had only ever seen the image, would anything surprise them? If the answer is yes, I went too far.

A great headshot does not fix you. It shows what you actually look like.

Then AI showed up. You have seen them. Upload a few selfies, get back forty polished portraits. Perfect skin, perfect light, a suit you do not own, a background you have never stood in.

Some of them look impressive at a glance.

Almost none of them look like a person.

Here is what I think is going on. An AI image is assembled out of millions of other faces. It has never met you. It does not know what your face does when you are actually amused, or when you are listening hard, or in the half second before you decide to say the thing you were not sure you should say.

So it hands you an expression that is generically pleasant. Technically a smile. Attached to nothing.

That is the disconnect people are describing. It is not that the pixels are wrong. It is that there is nobody behind them.

And people can tell. Faster than you would think, and mostly without being able to say why. Something in the eyes. Something in the way the smile does not reach anywhere. The image reads as fine and lands as hollow.

We are all a little worn out on things that are not real. In a business where the entire point is getting a stranger to feel like they could trust you, hollow is an expensive place to land.

What you are actually paying for. Not skin retouching. Not a background. Not resolution.

You are paying for the twenty minutes of somebody paying attention to you until you stop bracing, and then catching the two seconds where you look like yourself.

No model can do that, because there is no you in the room to catch.

That is the whole job. The retouching is just cleanup afterward.