Written by the BetterPic team. Disclosure: we sell the alternative. These are the cases where we are not the right purchase, written down because the alternative to saying so is you finding out after paying.
Generated headshots have got good enough that the interesting question is no longer whether they work. It is where they still do not, and the boundary is sharper than most coverage admits.
This is the clearest line and it has nothing to do with quality.
A security badge, a professional register, a regulator's directory, a visa or right-to-work document, a casting submission. In each of these the photograph is being used as evidence of what you look like. A generated portrait, however good, has failed at that job, and several of these contexts have explicit rules against it.
Presentation contexts — LinkedIn, a company team page, a conference speaker page, a personal site — are the opposite. There the photograph is an acknowledged construction and always has been. A studio portrait was also staged, with lights and direction instead of a model.
These tools fail unevenly, and the failure modes are consistent across every vendor: strong prescription glasses, where frames dissolve or change thickness at the temple; tightly curled hair, where the boundary against the background turns to mush; darker skin tones, where the lighting model gets the balance wrong; and anything distinctive you actually want kept.
If you are in one of those groups, the honest advice is to test on a free tier and believe the result rather than trying four more tools. A photographer handles all of it without thinking about it, because a camera records what is there instead of predicting it.
A particular expression. A particular location that means something. Your hands doing the thing you are known for. A photograph with another person in it. Anything with legible text — a badge, a book spine, branded workwear — which generators return as convincing gibberish.
Generated output is very good at producing a competent, conventional portrait. It is poor at producing a specific one, and if you know exactly what you want, describing it to a model is a worse tool than describing it to a person.
Actors, models, performers, and anyone whose portrait is the sample of their work. The brief there is range rather than consistency, the audience is trained to read these images closely, and the failure modes above sit exactly where they look.
To be even-handed, the cases where it is the better purchase are also clear: when you need consistency across many people rather than excellence in one; when the people are in different places and getting them into one room means the set will never be complete; when the photograph needs replacing more often than a shoot can be justified; and when the alternative is not a photographer but the wedding photo you have been using since 2021.
That last one is the common case and it is worth saying plainly. The realistic comparison for most people is not studio versus generated. It is generated versus nothing.
One person, and it matters: a photographer who shoots portraits rather than events, for one look done well.
Forty people, and consistency matters more than any single face: generated, and spend the saved money on doing it again in eighteen months rather than on doing it better now. Per-seat pricing exists because this is the case it fits.