10 Best apps in 2024 for AI-generated faces

Generative AI can produce some great artwork, but it can also generate amazingly realistic faces of people. We played around with 10 of the best AI face generator tools and got some interesting results. We’ll show you how you can generate your own AI faces as well as a few things to be cautious of with this new technology. 

What is an AI face generator?

An AI face generator is a generative artificial intelligence that is trained on data sets, which makes it really good at making realistic faces. Some will generate a random face without any input, while others give you options like age, gender, or race. 

More sophisticated AI face generators will allow you to enter a prompt describing the face you’d like to generate. The more detailed your prompt, the more likely you are to end up with a result you like.

Some people use an AI face generator just for a bit of fun, but there are some other good reasons to give it a try. Online privacy is a big concern, and using a fake but realistic face for online accounts that require a headshot can help. 

Any marketing or commercial use of people’s faces normally requires stock photos with paid licenses or even model consent release forms. Having a constant supply of faces of people means you don’t need to worry about any of that.

Here are a few cool ideas for where you could use the fake faces you generate with AI:

• Create an avatar to use in a video game or in a virtual reality space.
• Use your fake face on a business website or marketing material instead of paying for stock photography.
• Make your chatbot or virtual assistant more relatable by giving it a human face.
• Protect your privacy by using an AI face for online profile pictures rather than your own.
• Generate faces to train your own AI or facial recognition security
• Get inspiration for graphic designers.

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Let’s try out a fake face generator 

We tried a few fake face generators to see how they performed. Some of these were simple random face generators, while others gave us an opportunity to play around with simple options or more complex text prompts.

The simple random face generator apps are great if you just want a quick image of a fake person without fussing too much about the specifics. 

The face generators that give you age, gender, and race options are good for when you have an idea of what you want the face to look like but don’t want to have to write text prompts to make it happen. 

If you want to generate human faces that have specific details like freckles, a scar, or a specific emotion then you’ll need to use one that uses prompts.

Here are some of the best fake face generators and their pros and cons.

Marketing Tool – Random Face Generator

This is one of the easiest, simple fake face generator apps. When you load the page it displays a random face the app has generated. Below the image, there’s a button to generate faces and another button to download the image.

When you click the Download button, it opens the image in a browser tab, and then you need to right-click and save the image. It’s a little clunky, but it’s free, and the 1024×1024 resolution is twice what you get from some other free face generators.

Here’s a face that we generated using this AI face generator.

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Pros

• Free AI face generator.
• Fast and easy to use.
• High-resolution images without watermarks.

Cons

• No options for the customization of faces.
• The interface isn’t very user-friendly.
• Some of the faces have weird AI glitches from time to time.

This Person Does Not Exist

This random face generator gives you a few more options to play with. When the page loads it already has a random face generated. You can generate another one by clicking the Refresh Image button. 

Use the dropdown options to define the age, gender, and ethnicity or skin tone of the face you want to generate. We went with Female, 19-25 years old, Middle Eastern, and got this:

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It looks pretty good. You have the option to pay for a higher res, watermark-free version of the photo but $14.95 is very steep. The free download option says you only get the image at 512×512, but when we downloaded it, we got the 1024×1024 version even though we didn’t pay. That’s perfect for profile pictures.

It still has the watermark, but that’s easily removed for free on other AI sites like Dalle-2. 

Pros

• Easy to use.
• Simple customization options.
• Free downloads are at 1024×1024 despite what the site says.

Cons

• Free images have an annoying watermark at the bottom.
• Higher-resolution paid images are expensive.

Night Cafe

This AI face generator gives you a lot more options to play with. You can enter a prompt and then choose a style. Ignore the home page options and click More Options. 

This gets you to the page where you can choose the algorithm you’d like to use. We went with Stable Diffusion and selected the v2.1 model, and also tried the SDXL Beta.

Then select between multiple styles. We went for Hyperreal.

We wanted to get an image of a beautiful woman, so for this and all our other generators below, we used the following prompt:

Generate a face of a woman with blonde hair and blue eyes. Heart-shaped face, a small nose, and high cheekbones. The eyes should be wide-set, and the eyebrows should be thin and arched. Full pouty lips.

Here are some of the generated photos we got after playing around with some of the styles:

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You get a few free credits to start, 3 more if you sign up, and after that, you have to buy credits.

The image size is only 512×512, and it costs credits to enhance to higher resolutions. It can scale up to 8000×8000, which should print nicely, though.

Pros

• Loads of options for different AI models and styles.
• Accepts detailed prompts.
• Free to try without needing to sign up.

Cons

• The generated images are only 512×512, and upscaling costs credits.
• A little complicated to use if you’re looking for a simple face generator.

Fotor

Fotor, another AI face generator, has great online photo editing tools, and it also has an AI image generator that you can use to generate a fake face.

Enter your prompt, choose your style and any of the other options in the left pane, and then click Generate.

We went for the Photography style and selected Perfect Portrait, Super-detailed, and Ultra-realistic in the Details section. We chose the Studio Lighting option under Light Effects. 

These are the fake images our prompt generated:

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That looks pretty good, and the resolution is 1536×1536, which is great.

You get a few free credits, but you have to buy more credits once they’re used up. Plans start at $2.99/month, which isn’t bad if you’re looking for a really good AI face generator.

You can sign up with any email address (even a fake one) and then get a few more free credits if you aren’t ready to commit to a paid plan.

Pros

• Loads of customization options.
• The generated photos look great.

Cons

• Need to pay for extra credits.

Dream Studio

This powerful AI image generator does really well with creating faces. It gives you the option of entering a prompt and a negative prompt, as well as style and AI model options. You can sign up for free, and the free credits are enough to generate around 100 images. After that, you need to buy credits, starting with a $10 minimum purchase.

We entered our prompt and selected the Photographic style and the SDXL Beta model and got this:

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That looks great! This is probably one of the best AI face generators for lifelike faces.

We tried the same prompt and settings with the Stability Diffusion 2.1 model and got less impressive results. So we recommend using the SDXL model.

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Pros

• Good options for customization, including negative prompts.
• AI models it uses work fast and generate great results.

Cons

• While they give generous free credits, eventually, you need to buy credits.

Bored Humans

If you’re looking for a fast and easy-to-use random face generator, then Bored Humans ticks all the boxes. On the site, scroll down past all the examples of their work and then click Generate another fake human.

We tried the image generator a bunch of times, and the photos all look great. We hardly saw any obvious AI glitches. Here are some examples of what we got:

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Pros

• Free.
• Easy to use.
• Generates fake faces fast.

Cons

• Loads of ads to scroll through.
• Small images.
• Can’t define facial features.

Unreal Person

We like this fake face generator because it’s easy to use and produces large photos even though it’s a free tool. Once the page loads, you simply click the Generate button, and within a second or two, you get to generate faces that don’t exist. Like this one that we got:

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Pros

• Free AI face generator.
• Easy to use and fast.
• Produces high-resolution images without watermarks.

Cons

• No options for customization.

Meragor

Meragor doesn’t just generate random faces, it creates a whole profile. Use the settings on the left of the screen to define the person and then click Create. It generates a photo of the person as well as a lot of other fake detail.

The images can be downloaded in the most common sizes used on social media platforms and don’t have watermarks once downloaded. This is a free tool, and there’s no signup required, either. 

The options we used were: Women’s, USA, Motivating, Sport, People, Blondes. This is what we got for our AI person:

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Pros

• Free tool.
• Creates an entire profile, not just a photo.
• Decent amount of customization options.

Cons

• Lower-res images only.
• Can’t enter a prompt.

Generated Faces

This is a powerful AI face creator. It has a paid version of the app with loads of bells and whistles, but the free app we linked to above works great, too. Use the options in the right pane to define the face you’re after, and then pick one from the list that comes up. Like this one we got:

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You can right-click on the image results and save the photo in 256×256, but if you want a higher res image, you need to pay for it.

Pros

• Very customizable.
• Great results.

Cons

• It’s a paid app, and it’s pretty expensive.

DALL-E 2

Of course, you could use a generic AI digital art generator like DALL-E. It just takes more work with your prompt to get something that looks like a real person. We used our original prompt but had to add the following to get a decent result:

photorealistic, portrait, fashion magazine

This is one of the better faces we generated:

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Pros

• Very powerful AI art generator.
• Free tool.
• High res images.

Cons

• More difficult to operate if you just want a face generated.

How can faces be generated using artificial intelligence?

AI images are generated by using AI technology called generative adversarial networks (GANs). The GAN is made up of two neural networks, a Discriminator and a Generator. 

The Discriminator is trained on a data set of real faces. So it has a good idea of what a face should look like.

The Generator takes random noise as an input and generates an image. The Discriminator checks the generated image against its dataset and feeds it back to the Generator.

In the beginning, it basically tells the Generator: “You’re way off, buddy. That doesn’t look anything like a face.” The Generator makes adjustments and keeps trying to convince the Discriminator that its new image is a realistic face.

After a lot of iterations, the Generator eventually learns how to generate a realistic-looking face. Now with your prompts or even at random, it can make fake AI faces that the Discriminator can no longer distinguish as being AI-generated or real.

Depending on the dataset that the AI is trained on, you could generate a number of different types of faces of fake people:

• Realistic human faces.
• Cartoon faces in different face shapes and styles like Anime/Manga, Disney, etc.
• Animal faces, real or mythical.
• Hybrid faces of anthropomorphized animals.

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Can fake faces be trustworthy? 

For the most part, people use fake face generators for perfectly legal and ethical reasons. However, there are some areas of concern around the accuracy of the generated faces and possible malicious applications of this technology.

If you’re using AI faces for your marketing or on your business website, you’ll need to examine them very carefully first. AI tools are getting better at producing faces, but they still get some of the details wrong. Especially the free face generators.

Things like weird teeth, asymmetrical eyes, missing or mismatched earrings, or other glitches often pop up and are a dead giveaway that the face was generated by AI. Not a good idea if you’re using these faces to generate trust with potential customers.

There are ethical issues, too. Face generator apps will give you whatever your prompt calls for, but is it ok to use terms that are considered pejorative to get an accurate face? 

Some face generators err on the side of caution, and that also doesn’t help. Our prompt got declined because we asked it to generate the face of an “adult.” It obviously thought we were looking to make some risque pics.

Generating large amounts of faces to train facial recognition is very helpful, but should governments be using this kind of surveillance on their populace in the first place? 

As AI faces become more and more realistic, they have also become tools in the hands of conmen. Being able to present a trustworthy face to a potential victim while maintaining anonymity can be very effective.

Deep fakes and disinformation spread by people using AI-generated faces also have the potential to erode the trust of governments and the media.

Fortunately, there has been a lot of advancement made in spotting faces generated by AI. There’s no global tool that will detect fake AI faces yet but expect to see these capabilities in security software soon in the same way that they scan for malware.

Conclusion 

AI face generators are fun to play with and have some very useful real-world applications. We got a few glitchy facial elements, but overall, we were impressed with how much better these generators work now than they did just a few months ago.

The random generators were great if you need to create faces fast and for free. Getting just the right kind of face with very specific features will take longer, more effort to write an accurate prompt, and will probably cost a few dollars. 

FAQs 

Can faces be created with AI? 

Yes. AI can create synthetic faces in multiple styles, including realistic photography, artistic, cartoon faces, and many others.

What are the main AI face generators?

Fotor, Night Cafe, Dream Studio, and Bored Humans are some of the best artificial intelligence face generators. 

What are the downsides of AI face generators? 

An AI face generator can reinforce bias if it isn’t trained on a diverse set of human faces. The digital art images can also be used for disinformation or other malicious purposes.

How do AI face generators work? 

AI face generators use a GAN, or Generative Adversarial Network. This is basically two computer programs that work together. One program generates an image of what it thinks is a face, and the other program offers feedback on how close it got to producing something realistic. The second program is trained on a large set of photos of real people’s faces.