Photographer Chris Gillett doesn’t hesitate when asked what he thinks about AI‑generated headshots. He laughs, shakes his head, and lands on a word he uses more than once: “weird.”
“I’m a heavily biased source,” he admitted. “But I’m 58, and I think it’s super weird. I wouldn’t even do it on a dating website. I’d feel like such a loser.”
For Gillett, who earns 100% of his income from photographing real people, the issue isn’t just aesthetics. It’s identity, honesty and effort. It’s the creeping sense that the more polished our digital selves become, the less we recognize the humans behind them.
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Gillett’s first objection is simple: “trust.” “We tend to do business with people we like and trust,” he says. “It’s hard for me to like you if I don’t know the real you. And it’s hard for me to trust you if I know you’re lying to me.”
He sees two lies baked into every AI headshot: it pretends to be a photographer and you.
He recalls scrolling through a website that featured three columns of glowing testimonials, each paired with a headshot. “Every one of them was the same fake AI style photo,” he said. “So of course I thought, ‘Oh, these are all fake people. All of these testimonials are fake.’”
To him, the visual sameness of AI portraits doesn’t just flatten individuality. It signals inauthenticity.
Gillett’s second objection is more personal. He believes people should strive to be the best version of themselves, not outsource that work to an algorithm. “Winners wouldn’t do that,” he said. “It marks you as a low‑effort person who cuts corners.”
He’s not talking about perfection. In fact, he argues the opposite: that well‑adjusted people balance self‑improvement with self‑acceptance.
“You should be proud of what you’ve accomplished, but always be looking for the next thing you can do to be better,” he said. “If the AI is just making me look better, then what’s my impetus?”
He compared it to posture, clothing that fits or simply walking more.
“I can make people look like the best versions of themselves possible,” he said. “But only they can make themselves better.”
Gillett’s work depends on the tiny, real details that make a face a face — the slight tilt of a head, the asymmetry of the shoulders, the quirks that only show up when someone is framed in a camera. He joked about asking mothers which side they held their kids on, because one shoulder sits higher. He talks about jawlines, posture tricks, and the subtle confidence that comes from showing up as yourself.
Those details disappear in AI headshots, replaced with a glossy sameness he finds unsettling.
He even worries that his own work — meticulous, polished, technically perfect — might someday look too perfect. “Do I need to make my stuff look a little less perfect so that it does look real?” he said. “I kind of don’t want to not do it as well as I can do it.”
Despite his strong stance, Gillett offered one small concession. “Maybe for some people it’s a decent solution,” he said. “If you’re a single mom, you don’t have a lot of spare time or spare income, and suddenly you get a bump up at work and need a headshot — OK.”
But even then, he hopes it’s temporary.
Ultimately, Gillett’s argument comes down to something simple: he wants people to be real with each other. “I want Sally Ann — whether she’s buying from me or having a drink with me — to know this was me. One hundred percent me,” he said. “I’ve even got this big divot here. I don’t know what it is. Don’t care. I look fine like I am.”
