Product of the Dayon Product HuntGenerated Photos
The first company to commercialize AI-generated portraits. 2.5M+ photos, used by everyone from startups to Apple and Mercedes.
Context
In 2019, the only way to see an AI-generated face was NVIDIA's "This Person Does Not Exist" — a single page that showed a random face every time you refreshed. No interface, no search, no control. Just reload and hope.
We had something NVIDIA didn't: 30,000+ high-quality studio portraits shot in-house at Icons8 — diverse models, consistent lighting, legal sourcing. We trained our own model on this dataset and generated 100,000 faces. Then we gave them a proper product: filters, search, downloads, and a library you can actually browse.
The release was covered by The Verge, Washington Post, Vice, Forbes, and others. The faces spread across the internet — designers used them for mockups, companies bought them for marketing, and police in Australia used them in criminal investigations.
The library
A searchable database of AI-generated faces and full-body photos. The core challenge: make something that doesn't exist yet feel familiar enough to use.
Filters
Users needed to find a specific type of face — age, gender, ethnicity, hair color, eye color. We built a visual filtering system so you could narrow down 2.5M+ photos by physical attributes and get exactly what your project needed.
Background and download
Each photo came with automatic background recoloring — including transparent background — so you could download a face ready to drop into your design. In 2019, this was not a thing people expected from a free tool.
Quality validation
How do you know your AI is good enough? We built an in-product poll: "Does this face look real?" — yes or no. Simple, but it gave us a continuous feedback loop on generation quality from real users, not just our own eyes.
Brand identity
AI-generated faces can feel uncanny and clinical. To counter that, I built the brand around diversity as a visual principle — colorful circles as a motif, with faces placed inside circles of different colors in marketing materials and on the homepage. It made the library feel vibrant instead of sterile, and emphasized the range of people in the dataset.
Results
2.5M+ AI-generated photos in the library.
#1 Product of the Day, #2 Product of the Week and Month on Product Hunt.
Featured in The Verge, Vice, Washington Post, Forbes, Spiegel, and others.
Used by companies including Apple and Mercedes. Adopted by law enforcement agencies for criminal investigations.
Faces from the library spread organically — avatars, mockups, presentations, game characters, film production.
Generated Photos was where I first worked with AI — and learned how to design for something users hadn't seen before. Every decision was a first: there was no playbook for "stock photo library, but the people aren't real."