The public argument is framed as replacement. Wrong frame, and both answers to it are wrong. Here is where the technology actually earns its place.
The fortieth person
A session is an event. A workforce is a flow. Someone joins in March and does not match the January set, and eighteen months later the team page is mixed again.
Same crop, same background, same colour temperature on the fortieth face and the four hundredth — a different technical problem from making one good image, and the strongest case in the category. Companies with real brand specifications hit a stricter version of it: a specified background value, a specified crop ratio, an aspect that has to match existing assets.
Volume against a deadline
Sports leagues are the clearest example: hundreds of players across dozens of clubs, all needed before a season opens. The constraint is calendars, not cameras. The wider argument for that use turns entirely on consistency across people.
What it cannot do
Tell you what is wrong. A photographer looks at you and says your chin is slightly too high. That feedback loop is the real product of a session, and no generation step reproduces it. Where the two sit relative to each other makes the point more fairly than most vendor pages.
Where it fails, consistently
Faces further from the average: strong glasses, tightly curled hair, darker skin tones, marked asymmetry. And the failure is not obvious — the image looks real, it just looks like someone who is almost you.
The five things that actually go wrong
The common style problems are worth reading against that, because four of the five are free to fix: no edge between hair and background, wrong crop, side light, and the wrong photograph for the destination.
The fifth is the source photographs, and it applies only if you are generating.
How the process actually works
The plain explanation strips the marketing. The system learns what is constant about you and separates it from what is circumstantial — which is why fifteen images from one afternoon in one shirt teach it that the shirt is part of your face.
That single input decision moves the result more than switching vendors does.
Where the category stands
The market research update has numbers rather than opinions: quality plateaued, prices fell, and any comparison written before roughly 2025 describes prices that no longer exist.
