How to tell if someone is using an AI headshot — and why it matters more than you think

Let me say the generous thing first: AI headshot tools are genuinely impressive. The technology has moved fast. For $29 and twenty minutes, someone can go from no professional photo to something that looks, at first glance, like a real headshot. That's not nothing.

But here's what I've noticed after a decade of photographing executives and a parallel career managing how senior leaders are perceived: the people whose judgment matters most to you are very good at reading images. They do it constantly, often without knowing they're doing it. And the things that give away an AI headshot aren't subtle once you know what you're looking at.

This isn't written to be dismissive of the technology. It's written because your personal brand is doing work on your behalf right now — in search results, on LinkedIn, in every bio and press mention and company page where your image appears. Understanding what that image communicates is worth your time.

The five tells — and what's behind each one

1. Not retouched-smooth. Texture-removed-smooth. Real skin has pores, variation, the kind of character that accumulates over a life lived and a career built. Professional retouching preserves all of that while removing distractions. AI skin removal is different — it buffs away the texture entirely, leaving a surface that reads as assembled rather than photographed. The face looks younger in a way that doesn't quite match the hands, the neck, the eyes. The parts the algorithm paid less attention to give it away.
2. Every strand accounted for. Nothing out of place. No flyaways, no natural variation, no evidence that this person exists in an environment with air in it. Hair that perfect reads as assembled because it was. The algorithm has seen millions of professional headshots and learned what "professional hair" looks like statistically. What it produces is the average of all of them — which is to say, something that has never existed on an actual human head.
3. Usually blue-grey. Sometimes a subtle warm neutral. Technically clean. Completely generic. No photographer made a creative decision about that background. The algorithm selected the most statistically average professional setting from its training data and applied it. There's no relationship between the background and the subject — no thought about what the color does to the skin tone, no consideration of what the depth of field communicates, no decision at all. Just the most common answer to the question "what does a professional headshot background look like."
4. Good portrait lighting is a decision. It comes from somewhere specific, does something intentional to the face, and leaves a signature. You can look at a photograph and feel the presence of a human being who chose where to put the light and why. AI lighting is averaged. It illuminates without deciding. It's technically adequate in the same way that a sentence generated by autocomplete is technically grammatical — the mechanics are there, but nothing was chosen. The result is light that looks like light without looking like anything in particular.
5. This one is the hardest to name and the easiest to feel. A great headshot captures something that was actually there — a moment of genuine ease, or confidence, or focused attention that a photographer created the conditions for and then recognized when it appeared. The subject was real. The moment was real. Something true got recorded. AI generates a plausible face in a plausible setting. It cannot generate what happens when a real person is put genuinely at ease in front of a real camera by someone who knows how to do that. You can feel the absence of a human being in the room. Most people couldn't tell you why. They feel it anyway.
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Why this matters beyond the aesthetic

The argument for AI headshots is usually framed around cost and convenience. Both are real. But the framing skips the question that matters: what is a headshot actually for?

For most people, a headshot is the first impression they make on someone who searched for them, found their LinkedIn profile, or pulled their bio before a meeting. It answers a question that the viewer is asking whether they know it or not: does this person take their professional presence seriously?

An AI headshot answers that question. It just doesn't always answer it the way the person intended.

"The people making decisions about you are pattern-recognition machines. They've seen thousands of professional photos. They know what presence looks like. They know when it's missing."

There's also a specific credibility problem for senior professionals. The executives, founders, and senior leaders I work with have spent years building a professional reputation. They have real authority, real accomplishment, real presence in a room. An AI headshot — however technically competent — produces an image that was generated from a statistical average of professional photos. It produces someone who looks like a senior professional. Not them specifically. Not the version of them that walks into a room and commands attention.

For people earlier in their career, "looks professional" might be enough. For people whose personal brand is doing real work — board meetings, press coverage, speaking engagements, LinkedIn audiences of thousands — the gap between "looks professional" and "looks like them at their best" is a meaningful one.

The technology question and the brand question are different

AI headshot tools will keep getting better. The skin texture issue will improve. The hair will get more natural. The lighting will get more sophisticated. At some point the technical tells will largely disappear.

The presence problem won't.

Because presence isn't a technical property that can be generated. It's what happens when a real person is in a real moment that a real photographer recognized and captured. That's not a workflow. It's not a feature that can be added to a model. It's the whole thing — and it's the thing that makes a headshot work for the person in it rather than just work as a photograph.

The question isn't whether AI headshots are impressive. They are. The question is whether "technically convincing" is the standard you want your personal brand held to.

I've spent a decade photographing executives in Atlanta and a parallel career managing how senior leaders are perceived at a Fortune 500 company. The before/afters on this site are the most honest demonstration of what the alternative produces. The lighting technique used here is employed by fewer than 1% of photographers — and it's the reason the results look the way they do.

If you've been meaning to update your headshot and keep finding reasons to put it off, that's worth examining. The friction is usually not about the photo. It's about not having had an experience that made the process feel worth it. That's a solvable problem.