Digital Headshots

A New Industry

I’ve been seeing a lot of “digital headshots” ads lately. My “new hairdoo” (or lack there of) makes me feel strange with my mop head professionally so I thought I’d give one a try.

This sample on InstaHeadshot’s home page one doesn’t actually look that good to me. When you look at it, they want 10 copies of your photo. Most likely to get the best photo, but these pages could also have nefarious require. People are being more carefully about their password, but sending images of yourself to companies without any term of service seems sketchy to me. But my Duke security team keeps me well scared all the time.

I thought I would just take a pass at using the “known” tools and see how they do with just one photo. I started with Gemini Nano Banana because that has been and continues to be my top image generator. I just grabbed this photo from last weekend’s rock show:

Gemini

Disappointing. I did it twice, one with the whole photo and one with just the close up of my face and it basically just produced the exact same image.

I even tried a new chat to get rid of that image, but produced the exact same answer (which is an going challenge for image in general - trying to get them “reset”)

ChatGPT

Impressive. I just used the close up photo and I thought it was very good. I was able to edit it as well.

• Make it farther back

• Make my head fatter

• Change it to Duke colors

• Change the logo

It’s hard to look at myself this way, but I think it matches me pretty good. With Duke security. :)

Revised

I think this was better… I went back to the ChatGPT and just went back and replaced my face again. I think the AI is better looking.