Are AI Headshots Acceptable for LinkedIn and Work?

AI headshots are acceptable on LinkedIn and on a resume that asks for a photo, with one condition: the picture has to look like the person who joins the video call. A company team page is a question for your employer. LinkedIn's own rules draw the line in the same place. Here is what those rules say, the jobs where a real photo is still the safer choice, a two-minute test to run on any AI headshot, and what to find out before you upload a selfie to a headshot service.

Are AI headshots acceptable under LinkedIn's rules?

LinkedIn allows a profile photo that isn't a plain photograph, as long as it shows you. Its profile photo guidelines say: "You can use an illustration, caricature, or other artistic rendering of yourself, but your profile photo must reflect your likeness." An AI headshot made from your own photo fits that rule when it still looks like you.

Three other LinkedIn texts point the same way:

• Professional Community Policies. "Do not use an image of someone else, or any other image that is not your likeness, for your profile photo."
• Photos LinkedIn may remove. Images made up only of a company logo, emojis, a landscape, an animal, words, a flag, a childhood photo, or another person's likeness, including stock images, celebrities and fictional characters.
• User Agreement. Members agree not to create a false identity or misrepresent who they are.

LinkedIn's test is likeness. A generated face of someone who doesn't exist fails it, and so does a version of you edited until your coworkers wouldn't recognize it.

LinkedIn also screens for synthetic faces, but its target is fake accounts built on the face of someone who doesn't exist. In a June 2023 post, its engineering team described a detector that caught 99.6% of faces made with StyleGAN software (a GAN, or generative adversarial network), while labeling 1% of real profile photos as synthetic. The same post says most members can't tell real faces from synthetic ones just by looking, so the question that matters is whether the headshot matches you, not whether anyone can spot the AI.

Are AI headshots professional enough for work?

An AI headshot looks professional when nothing in it gives it away and it matches your face. It looks unprofessional when the skin is waxy, the jacket blends into the backdrop, or the person in it is visibly younger than you. Where the photo goes matters as much as how it looks:

The last two rows are the jobs where an exact likeness is the reason the photo exists, so any AI change works against you.

Where AI headshots go wrong

An AI headshot fails when it changes something people know you by. Check each of these against an unedited photo before you post:

• Face shape. A narrower nose, a sharper jaw, larger eyes or thinner eyebrows.
• Teeth and smile. Straighter or whiter teeth than yours, or a smile you don't actually make.
• Skin. Freckles, moles or scars that vanished, or skin with no texture at all.
• Hair. A hairline that moved, gray that disappeared, curls that straightened, or a part on the wrong side.
• Glasses. Frames swapped or removed. LinkedIn's Talent Blog says your photo should reflect how you look day to day, including glasses and facial hair.
• Age. A face that looks five or ten years younger than the one in the mirror.
• Clothes. Lapels that don't match, a collar that ends in midair, buttons that vanish, earrings that don't match, or garbled letters on a shirt.
• Background and light. Warped window frames, bookshelves with nonsense spines, or light that falls on your face from a different side than on the room behind you.

AI headshot vs real photo: a two-minute test

Run this before you replace a photo anywhere. An AI headshot that looks real to you at first glance still has to get through every step:

1. Put the AI headshot next to a recent, unedited photo of you, at the same size.
2. Cover the hair and clothes with your hand and compare eyes, nose and mouth one at a time.
3. Shrink both to about the size of a coin on screen. LinkedIn shows profile photos as a small round image, so check they still read as the same person.
4. Zoom in on the ears, hands, collar, earrings and glasses.
5. Show both to someone who sees you every week and ask which one looks more like you.
6. If you would have to explain a difference on a video call, generate it again or use a real photo.

The guide to telling whether an image is AI covers the wider set of giveaways, from hands to text.

Are AI headshots safe? What happens to your selfie

A selfie you upload is a clear photo of your face, so read how a service handles it before you send one. Look for four answers in its privacy policy:

• Where the photo goes. Whether the service processes it itself or sends it to outside AI providers.
• How long uploads are kept. HeadshotPro says input photos are deleted 30 days after generation. Aragon asks for consent at signup, and its policy gives face data 30 days after your photos are delivered before it is deleted or anonymized, longer if you keep a subscription.
• Training. A plain statement on whether uploads can train AI models. HeadshotPro says your photos are never used for training, and Aragon says its contracts bar its AI providers from training general models on face data.
• Deleting. Whether you can delete your photos and your account yourself, and how.

For Toybox AI, the privacy policy says your uploads are sent to its AI providers to make your result and aren't used to train AI models. Unsaved results stay available for 24 hours, and you can delete saved items or your whole account anytime. The privacy policy has the full wording. Upload only photos of yourself, or of people who agreed: Toybox's Terms of Service prohibit generating images of real people without their explicit consent.

How to put an AI headshot on your LinkedIn profile

LinkedIn's Talent Blog cites LinkedIn research that a profile with a picture is 14 times more likely to get views. Save a copy of your current photo first, because LinkedIn can't restore an old profile photo after you replace it. On a computer:

1. Click Me at the top of the LinkedIn homepage.
2. Click the camera icon in the introduction section of your profile. If you already have a photo, click the photo instead, then Add photo.
3. Choose Upload photo and pick the file. LinkedIn accepts JPG or PNG files up to 8 MB, from 400 x 400 pixels up.
4. Crop and position it. The same screen offers filters, adjustments and rotation.
5. Set visibility: 1st-degree connections only, Your network, All LinkedIn members, or Anyone. Anyone is the default.
6. Click Save.

For pixel sizes, the cover image and background colors, see the LinkedIn headshot size guide.

Make a headshot that still looks like you in Portrait Pro

Portrait Pro in Toybox turns one clear photo into a professional-style headshot and aims to keep your face recognizable, so the likeness test is the step that decides whether you use it.

1. Under "Your photo", upload a recent, sharp photo of yourself ("A clear shot of your face works best"). It takes JPG or PNG files up to 10 MB.
2. Under "Look", choose LinkedIn ("Warm and approachable") or Corporate ("Office-ready headshot").
3. Open "More options" and pick Square (1:1, "Profile pic") under Shape, then HD or 4K under Quality.
4. In "Details", name what has to stay, for example "Keep my glasses, my gray hair and the mole on my left cheek." It takes up to 500 characters.
5. Tap "Create portrait". It usually takes about 30 seconds.
6. Compare the result with your unedited photo, feature by feature.
7. If one detail drifted, a Pro plan lets you type the fix into "Want to change something?" (currently 85 credits). On the Free plan, run it again with the fix written into "Details".

Portrait Pro works on the Free plan and currently costs 85 credits for HD or 100 for 4K. New accounts get 20 free credits, which don't cover a headshot, and top-ups start at $4.99 for 500 credits (current prices). If the result doesn't pass the side-by-side check, use your real photo. For a comparison of paid headshot services, read the best AI headshot generators compared, and for taking the selfie you upload, the guide on how to turn a selfie into a professional headshot.