AI profile pictures

A friend mentioned that his work profile picture, generated by AI, looked like it was done in a professional studio.

I gave it a try. The top hit came from profilepicture.ai, which had prices up to ~$25 for 999 shots.

Upon signing up, it asked whether I wanted a professional headshot, which on selecting redirected to headshotpro.com. This looked closer to what I needed, but the prices were about double. Since profilepicture.ai also advertised professional headshots, I decided to go with the cheaper option.

Submitting photos

The site requires that you upload 20+ pictures of yourself:

We recommend 10 close-ups, 3 side profiles, 5 chest-up and 3 full body shots. Variety is key: facial expressions, locations, backgrounds and perspectives should all be different.

I scoured my photo library, but as someone who doesn't take many selfies, I could only find about 12 pictures that worked.

So I had to take a number of extra photos around my house. After I successfully submitted them, it took about an hour for the pics to be generated.

Results

The $$ was worth it based on amusement factor alone. Some of the pics were pretty good, but the rest were either really disturbing and hilarious. See for yourself below.

I grouped some of the better pics into subfolders, then used the montage utility from Imagemagick to tile these pictures. Here's the script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -e

for DIR in */; do
    if [ "$DIR" != "tiles/" ]; then
        FNAME=tiles/$(echo "$DIR" | perl -pe "s/\///").png
        echo "Creating $FNAME"
        montage "$DIR/*.png" -geometry 256x256>+2+2 "$FNAME"
    fi
done

Mythic

Mythic

Nature

Nature

Old / bearded

Old

Profiles

Profiles

Stern

Stern

Young

Young