What gets lost when you curate your closet and Instagram photo dumps to appease the ever-fickle algorithms? Are we giving AI taste? Are we passively developing its preferences?
Take a second to contemplate this — certain expressions of style exist to cater to AI while it is running and rifling through the internet, learning to imitate us from us.
Spoon-feeding artificial intelligence human culture is surely a slippery slope that science fiction has addressed time and time again. AI and algorithms are in charge of promoting, discarding, and selling fashion trends. Even the best marketing professionals can only execute as effectively as the social media algorithms will allow them to.
Artificial intelligence is deciding what’s in and what’s out.
The most popular fashion content creator apps, Instagram and TikTok, are powered by AI algorithms. After consulting multiple tech sites (totally not my crowd), I have found AI algorithms to be described as a set of instructions that give machines the power to learn, analyze, and independently make decisions.
What is an influencer but a person favorable to the algorithm gods?
A large part of the reason fashion brands seek out and gift influencers is to attach their name to a personality with considerable digital reach.
They swallow up our FYPs and timelines because the AI gifted them visibility. Visibility is crucial to turning a profit in the fashion industry.
Intermission to say that I’m not someone who is consumed with fear about our online data being used to fuel consumerism, but it is a fact of 21st-century life that we’ve become a bit too blasé about.
There is also the factor of designers integrating AI into fashion, so much so that Vogue Business has a topic category dedicated to artificial intelligence’s evolution within the industry.
Generative AI is the form of artificial intelligence you’re probably most familiar with, you type in a prompt and the model responds with text, image, or video pulling on information it has gathered and patterns it has recognized. Designers have used AI to assist them in creating collections, managing supply chains, writing marketing materials, and predicting trends. Your elite IG ‘fit might be one of the machine’s many inspirations for this data.
So are we giving artificial intelligence taste? I say yes. Is this a problem? It certainly can be.
The Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) has already launched a pilot program to teach designers how to use generative artificial intelligence while attempting to alleviate fears around idea theft. Ira Miller of Alice + Olivia provided a standout quote on the matter, “You know it’s coming, you know it’s disrupting the industry and your choices are to ignore it and put your head in the sand or find ways to embrace it and empower your business to take advantage of it.”
Anti-AI stances have been loudly taken by independent artists for years now, and larger more exclusive institutions, i.e. fine art and high fashion, seem willing to be consumed and sputtered back out by machines.
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