Comment by crazygringo

These are actually really, really useful.

I don't know if I'd call the portraits "stunning" but this is exactly the type of image that is extremely useful to use as an author portrait on a blog or publication, in a list of employees on a startup's team page, and so forth.

You can compare with Wall Street Journal hedcuts [1] or the portraits in the Economist's "By Invitation" [2].

Because actual photos often reveal "too much", with a lot of distracting detail not relevant to your "essence", and you're never going to get a series of photos of different people to look all that consistent unless you're using the same photographer with the same setup in the same location, which usually isn't practical.

So this kind of tool that accurately reproduces someone's face and expression and hair accurately, but stylizes the rest, is actually super useful in communicating just the right amount of visual information in a lot of professional contexts.

So kudos to the creator -- I think you might be able to turn this into a business if you market this to businesses that want to use images of their employees, where the business pays to decide on a particular consistent "look", and then can just feed in and update images of employees/reporters as needed. Charge something like $199 to define the look, and then $99/yr for portraits based on up to 100 original photo uploads per year, $179/yr for 200 photos, etc.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/whats-in-a-hedcut-depends-how-i...

[2] https://www.economist.com/by-invitation