Unreal

Generative automation tools are creating a far amount of anxiety, due to concerns that the main thing that they'll be put to use for is replacing people in creative fields. It's a rational concern, as many people understand creative endeavors to be expensive. This is mainly because they're very labor-intensive.

Given this, a company called Instaheadshots decided that people could cut photographers out of having headshots done. The basic idea is simple. Give the company a photograph, even a selfie, and they'll use generative automation to produce a professional-looking headshot for online profiles and the like. I suspect that what's really at work here is prompt engineering, and then tweaking things to clean things up. Nothing particularly high-tech, but interesting nevertheless.

So when Instaheadshots posted an advertisement on LinkedIn, with a customer testimonial, I was interested.

Given that the ad says that "Clayton" had used the generated headshot for both their LinkedIn profile and their "overall online presence" I figured that I would be able to find it with a Google Image search. So such luck. The only hits I was able to find were other postings of the entire ad. I wasn't able to find any hits for the original picture shown in the advertisement.

So I turned to looking for the Trustpilot review. Instaheadshots is a new company, so their overall number of reviews was fairly low. So I skimmed over all of the 5-star reviews. Again, I didn't find anything.

And I think that this is part of what worries people. Here's a business, directly targeting portrait photographers, that appears to have created a fake customer and a fake testimonial on a trusted site in order to promote themselves. Of course, there are other explanations. It's possible that the Trustpilot review had been taken down or hidden for whatever reason. But it doesn't look good on the surface.

And generative automation tools need to look good. If people start to believe that the companies that are using these tools are behaving unscrupulously, and people are losing work as a result, they're going to see these tools as threats. This won't prevent the adoption of these sorts of tools; but it might drive it underground. And this is going to make things more difficult than it needs to be.