The backlash against AI headshots isn’t coming. It’s here.
A 2024 Ringover survey of 1,087 recruiters found two-thirds would be put off a candidate the moment they realised a headshot was AI-generated — even though, shown the same images blind, most recruiters couldn’t reliably tell the difference in the first place.
Separately, Getty Images’ VisualGPS research found 90% of people want to know when an image was made with AI, and 98% say authenticity is pivotal to whether they trust it at all.
Some companies aren’t waiting to find out which way their own clients lean. Greentarget, a UK PR agency, decided in 2025 that it wasn’t appropriate to use AI-generated imagery anywhere on its company assets — website, press releases, marketing. Law firms have started receiving formal guidance on the same question.
Camera manufacturers are responding from the other direction: building proof of authenticity into the hardware itself. Leica and Sony are both rolling out Content Credentials, a tamper-evident signature showing an image came from a real camera, not a prompt. Nikon tried the same thing on the Z6III last year, then had to pull it after a security flaw let people fake the signature. Even the technology built to prove something is real has to earn that trust properly.
None of this is anti-AI. It’s pro-trust. And it’s exactly the distinction we’ve built Augmented Imagery around: you, photographed for real, then developed with the same craft a retoucher has always used — just with more of it available. Not invented. Not plasticky. Still you.
Real photography, developed properly for every corporate headshot we deliver, doesn’t have that problem.
The impossible, made possible.
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