Human Generator

Human Generator is a free web tool from Generated Photos that makes realistic, full-body photos of people who don't exist, and you don't need an account. You choose age, gender, body type, clothes, pose and background, wait about a minute, and download a JPG. Here's the catch: the free download is small, has a watermark and is for non-commercial use only; for a client, a store or an ad, you need a paid license, which starts at $19.99 a month.

So it's perfect for mockups, drafts and personal projects, and it's a paid tool the moment money is involved. Here's what using it is actually like.

What happened when I made a person

The editor doesn't greet you with an empty box. It opens with a sample person already in place, with the description written as a row of blue tags: age, gender, origin, clothes, shoes. The sample changes every time you load the page, which is a fun way to see the range. In a few reloads I got an older man in a sweater and a middle-aged woman in a jumpsuit with a punk jacket.

I took the sample I was given, switched the gender to Female and pressed the button. The button changes from Generate variation to Update human as soon as you touch a setting, a small hint that you're editing this person rather than starting over. What followed was the free queue: a Generating counter ticking up, and next to it a pink Skip the wait button. I pressed it out of curiosity, and it opened the subscription offer: generate faster, no watermarks, commercial use. My person took about a minute.

The result: a woman with blonde hair, standing full-length against a gray wall in a white shirt dress and chunky black platform shoes. Face, hair, fabric and light all look like a real photo. If I'd seen it on a store's About page, I wouldn't have blinked. In the corner, softly, the words GENERATED PHOTOS.

The Download button gave me a JPG of 512×1024 pixels with that watermark in it, no questions asked. The page also got its own link, and when I opened that link again later, my person was still there.

The controls: a character creator, not a prompt box

This is what makes Human Generator different from the general image generators. Below the description there's a long list of settings: Gender (female, male or non-binary), an Age slider that runs from child to elderly, Skin tone, Ethnicity, Body type, Clothing style and color, then top, bottom, underwear, outerwear, footwear and accessory as separate menus, plus Background, Hair style and Hair color. Each choice turns into a tag in the description, and you can also type your own text or a negative prompt (sorry for the jargon: it's the list of things you don't want in the picture).

There's also a Randomize button, which is the quickest way to fill a page of placeholder people when you don't care who they are.

Two more tabs sit at the top. Pose has two options, From text and From photo. Describing the pose in words is handy when you need someone sitting, walking or with arms crossed; setting it from a reference image, and a library of 300+ ready-made poses, are listed as paid-plan features.

On my second visit, I tried the free option, From text. The sample person that time was a standing woman in an olive hooded jacket and cargo pants, and the Pose box already held her pose in words: "standing, left leg raised." I replaced it with "sitting on a wooden chair" and pressed Update human. A little over a minute later, she was sitting on a wooden chair against a plank wall, hood up, with the camera still showing her full length, from hood to sneakers. That took one short sentence, and I didn't touch anything else. The download was the same deal as the first time: a 512×1024 JPG with the watermark, and still no account needed.

Face upload lets you use a face from your own photo (JPG or PNG, up to 5 MB) on a generated body, with the obvious caveat that it's your face and your responsibility. Generated Photos' own FAQ says that if you upload a real person's photo or type a celebrity's name, you can't use the result without that person's consent. Good rule, and not just legally.

Free means non-commercial

Here's the part most people skip, and it's the part that decides whether Human Generator fits your project. The page says "Absolutely free", and the fine print right under it reads "For non-commercial use." The FAQ repeats it: free for non-commercial use, contact them for commercial projects.

The terms go a step further for free users: one copy for personal, non-commercial use, no removing the copyright notices, and a visible, clickable credit that reads "Photos by Generated.Photos" wherever you use the image. So a free download is fine for a school project, a personal blog or a mockup you show a colleague. It isn't fine on your online store's product page.

On resolution, the FAQ lists outputs from 512×512 to 1024×1024 pixels, as JPG, and points you to their separate upscaler if you need bigger. On volume, it says there's currently no limit to how many people you can generate.

What it costs

Pricing lives on the Generated Photos pricing page, and Human Generator shares it with the rest of their catalog (a gallery of ready-made people, a face generator, datasets and an API).

The bulk prices are tiered: $9 per photo for the first 20, $7 up to 50, $5 up to 250, $2.50 up to 1,000 and $1 beyond that. The page's own example, 100 photos, comes to $640. Those are for ready-made photos from the gallery; for the people you make in Human Generator, the paid route the editor offers is the subscription. There's also a Faces + Face Generator plan at the same $19.99 a month, if faces are all you need.

My take: do all your sketching for free, then pay for the month you actually ship something commercial. The terms make the license on what you get while subscribed perpetual, so you don't need to stay subscribed to keep using those images. Paid yearly, the plan works out to $16.58 a month, which only makes sense if you'll need new people all year.

What the paid license covers, and what it doesn't

Sorry, one more round of fine print, because "commercial use" on a pricing card doesn't mean "any use." According to the terms, a subscription or bulk purchase gives you a perpetual license for commercial use in one project. The permitted uses include website and app interfaces, background characters (NPCs) in video games, presentations, blog posts, social media and videos under 1 million impressions, and printed materials where the person is a secondary element, up to 1,000 copies.

Some uses need Generated Photos' written permission, and possibly an extra fee: paid advertising campaigns, products for resale where the person is the main element (t-shirts, mugs, NFTs, avatars or virtual influencers), logos, web templates and UI kits, and TV or film productions. And some are simply banned, including anything illegal, content meant to deceive or harm people, harassment and anything involving harm to minors.

In plain English: a model on your product page, a face in your app's onboarding screen, a crowd of NPCs in your indie game, fine with a paid license. A fake person who presents themselves as real to fool people, never, and no license makes that OK.

Who it's for (and who should skip it)

If you design websites, apps or presentations and you're tired of placeholder silhouettes, Human Generator is a lovely shortcut. Same if you run a small shop and need a believable model photo without booking a shoot, as long as you budget for the license. Game developers get a fast way to rough out a cast.

If you want artistic range, scenes with several people or full creative control, a general image generator will serve you better: Midjourney and Leonardo.Ai in the browser, or Flux and Stable Diffusion if you like prompts and settings. What they don't give you is Human Generator's menu of body types, clothes and poses, which is exactly why I'd keep it bookmarked for the day I need "a person, full length, jeans, neutral background" in a minute and a half.

Other ways to make a realistic AI person

Human Generator isn't the only way to get a believable person who doesn't exist. The general image generators can do it too; they mostly want the person described in words. Here's how they compare on what matters for this job:

How I'd choose: if you need one person, full length, in specific clothes, Human Generator is still the quickest route I know, with no account, because the body and each piece of the outfit come from menus instead of from a prompt you hope the model reads the way you meant it. The chair shot took one short sentence in the Pose box; everything else was already set.

The general generators win as soon as the person is part of a scene: two people at a table, a particular street, a certain kind of light, a style that isn't photographic. Gemini and ChatGPT are the easy ones to try at no cost, as long as you sign in. Flux makes sense if you're building on an API and would rather pay per image. Midjourney is for when you're happy to pay from day one for the look. And Higgsfield puts many image and video models under one account, which pays off if your person also has to move.

Whichever you pick, read the commercial-use column before anything ships. A free Human Generator download stays non-commercial, while every Midjourney plan comes with commercial terms; that difference matters more than a slightly better face.

One more thing from the table: Gemini and ChatGPT images carry an invisible SynthID watermark, so anyone with a Google, Apple or ChatGPT account can check them later with the free SynthID Detector. Human Generator's free files have a visible mark instead.

Written by Miguel Ángel, with help from an LLM to verify facts.