Why AI LinkedIn headshots look AI-generated

You can usually tell. Something about the skin, or the way every picture in the set has the same light on it, and the person in the photograph is almost but not exactly the person you know.

On LinkedIn, where people look at your photo before they read a word you wrote, that "almost" costs you.

Here is what is actually happening in each case.

The skin is too clean

Left alone, most image models produce skin with no pores, no lines and no texture — a surface rather than a face. It reads as a render, and it reads that way instantly, even to somebody who could not tell you why.

The fix is not a slider. It is asking for a photograph in the words a photographer would use, and then not undoing it afterwards with a beauty pass that smooths everything back out.

Every picture is the same picture

A set of twelve headshots where the wardrobe, the light and the room barely change is not a set. It is one photograph rendered twelve times, and it gives you nothing to choose between.

Variety has to be deliberate — different clothes, different rooms, different light — and it has to be built in before anything is generated, because you cannot add it to a picture that already exists.

The face drifts

This is the one that matters most, and the one people notice last. Across a set, the face shifts: a slightly different nose, a jaw that is not yours, an age that is not your age. Any single picture might pass. Together they do not.

Some of this comes from too little to work from. Most of it comes from steps that repaint the face after it has been generated — a pass meant to tidy it up which cannot know which marks are yours and which are not. We tried one twice. The second time it put blemishes on somebody's cheek that were not on her face in any photograph she uploaded.

What good looks like

A photograph where you can see the person had a bad night's sleep last Tuesday and still looks like somebody you would hire. Real texture, a background doing nothing, and a face that is unmistakably one person across every picture in the set.

That is a higher bar than "looks good", and it is the only one worth aiming at.

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It is what we aim at, and you can see for yourself before you choose anything: every set comes back as a spread to pick from, and you only take the ones you want. $25.00 for eight HD headshots, $35.00 for sixteen HD headshots, or $49.00 for twenty-four HD headshots, and $4.00 a picture if you come back for more. What each pack includes.