Did Evoto Betray Photographers With Their New Software?

Thirty years ago, photo editing meant painting and airbrushing prints by hand. Then Photoshop arrived and wiped out most of those jobs. Over the last few years, AI software like Evoto did the same thing to advanced Photoshop skills. Slide a few controls and get results that once took years to learn. Photographers loved it...Until now.

Evoto recently released an online AI headshot generator (which was quickily pulled down). Anyone could upload a bad photo and instantly get a polished professional headshot. No lighting. No posing. No photographer. Predictably, photographers are furious.

I understand the fear. Fstoppers is built on photography, but I'm afraid everyone might be jumping to conclusions. 

I have spoken with teams building similar AI tools. Most are not photographers, and they do not need to be. The software is not making artistic decisions. It is doing detection. Faces. Blemishes. Backgrounds. Anyone can judge which result looks better.

The claim that Evoto trained its model on user uploads also misses the mark. Companies like Google already built massive AI models trained on billions of images from the internet. Smaller companies rent access to those models. Evoto did not need your photos.

More importantly, this software already exists for free. You can generate professional headshots using Google tools right now. You can do it inside Photoshop using the same underlying models. You can even ask it to mimic the style of famous headshot photographers. For free.

So if you are angry at Evoto, you should be more angry at Photoshop. And even more angry at Google. And if they did not do it, OpenAI would have. This outcome was inevitable.

Three years ago I said AI was coming for our jobs. Many dismissed it. This time is different. Not because the results are perfect today, but because they are good enough and improving fast. Anyone still paying for basic headshots or product photography simply does not know this exists yet.

There is also hypocrisy here. Photographers happily used software that wiped out professional retouchers. We celebrated automation when it helped us. Now it is coming for us.

Evoto is not evil. They are a software company doing their job. We are photographers facing a market that no longer needs what we sell. The controversy is not about Evoto going too far. It is about photographers finally realizing what is already here.