Etro’s Spring 2024 campaign was produced by feeding prompts into an image AI platform (Photo: Etro)
Artists, designers and writers all over the world have spent the past two years engaged in an existential battle as artificial intelligence (AI) posed the challenge of defining what is valuable about being human. Granted, newer models of chatbots do not spit jumbled responses that sound like word salad anymore, but the enchantment of exerting our imagination, say, crafting a rhyme about mid-rise jeans or a rap verse of Snoop Dog’s Olympic equestrian ensemble in the prose of William Faulkner, has seemed to wane.
“If you want to really hurt someone’s feelings, just call them an AI,” suggested a tech journalist, who referred to the bot’s hackneyed response as a potential demotion of human cognition.
Automated systems are being enmeshed into our daily lives in ways that may be hard to untangle, and if naysayers are right, these “robot overlords” may grow puissant enough to execute plans of their own. (Are we on their revenge list?) However, language model programmers are done with the bad rap and ready to change what we feel about scraping content off the internet that borders on copyright infringement — by making a deal with the same publishing companies that called their material “dull, uninspired and riddled with clichés”.
Said agreement refers to Condé Nast inking a partnership with OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed organisation behind ChatGPT, a few weeks ago. Looking ahead, the major media conglomerate housing some of the biggest fashion and lifestyle titles such as Vogue, Vanity Fair and GQ will appear on the platform founded by Sam Altman and a prototype version of the forthcoming SearchGPT, a game changer that significantly improves online results by combining AI with up-to-date information from the internet. Enabling follow-up questions as you would in a conversation with a person, the feature is supposed to supersede Google’s latest AI-powered search function, which erroneously recommended glue as part of a pizza recipe based on a decade-old Reddit comment that was meant to be a joke. Well, that idea obviously did not stick.
conde-nast-ceo-roger-lynch_1.jpg
Ravenous AI labs always seek more data as they grow increasingly hungry for reliable, timely and, above all, human-written text. But what is in it for the publishers? Because legacy media have always been slow to adapt to the internet, teaming up with a data powerhouse could help magazines get ahead of the curve. If AI is not going anywhere, would it be better to use it to one’s advantage and nab a slice of the revenue pie early on?
In an internal company memo, Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch expressed that AI adoption will make its articles more discoverable. “It’s crucial that we meet audiences where they are and embrace new technologies while also ensuring proper attribution and compensation for use of our intellectual property. Our partnership allows us to continue to protect and invest in our journalism and creative endeavours.”
Such transition is progressing in tandem with the industry that fuels and fills their pages. The fashion circle has seen its fair share of technological enthusiasm that has swiftly sputtered — notably, the metaverse — but generative AI paints a different story, one that is lucrative to businesses and investors, as evidenced by how equity funding for AI-focused start-ups skyrocketed to US$14.1 billion in 2023 from US$3.5 billion the year before. Moreover, not only has the technology been used to promote new collections and produce conversation-starting visuals, it has also brought about AI influencers, virtual brand avatars which have become flashpoints of discussion about inclusion and representation in fashion media.
Family-owned Italian luxury house Etro worked with digital artist and prompt designer Silvia Badalotti to devise otherworldly “rooms” as backdrops for its Spring 2024 campaign. In a setting not unlike a palace in a galaxy far, far away, “models” are seen parading wares in a greenhouse and pastel-terraced edifices. None of these are real, except for the clothes that were photographed and plastered onto the images later.
The immediacy of AI also eliminates the niggling problem of photoshoots — or reshoots —typically required of a campaign. Founded in 2008 by Serra Türker, Istanbul-based upscale handbag purveyor Misela commemorated its anniversary by featuring shots of 15 women carrying its handbags in 15 cities. Türker curated the moodboard but enlisted the expertise of filmmaker and photographer
Alphan Eşeli to first come up with “faithful depictions of the accessories” or placeholders via generative image AI platform Midjourney before another digital retouch artist edited the actual product into each scene. If the brand had executed the vision in a traditional way, the expenses would have been at least 15 or 20 times more.
misela.jpg
Designers are harnessing the benefits of generative AI; so, what is hindering esteemed publications from doing the same? Media watchdogs have likened such collaboration to getting in bed with the devil, but Condé Nast — alongside many other titles such as Associated Press, The Atlantic, Financial Times, Time and LeMonde that are already perusing AI services — merely sees it as survival and a desperate attempt at wrestling online readership back from early monetising gatekeepers including Google and Facebook.
Having said that, not everyone is on the same page, as Condé Nast employees, too, have voiced their unease. “No one wants to help train the tools spreading misinformation and degrading the skills many of us spent decades honing,” said a writer who requested anonymity out of concerns about professional reprisals. Waging a war, industry peer The New York Times filed a suit against OpenAI for property violation, accountable for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages”. On the other hand, the Centre for Investigative Reporting (the oldest nonprofit newsroom in the US) claimed that Microsoft vacuumed up its stories to “make their product more powerful without permission or compensation”.
Hoovering up the intellectual output of humans without consent has been a common practice of AI offerings, which require news and facts promptly to get consumers to trust them. So, why would publishers and fashion houses trade their hard-earned credibility for that little money from the very same entities that are building tools clearly intended to replace them? And let’s not forget that it was Vogue, which ran a story on Copy, the world’s first AI-powered fashion magazine, just a year ago and highlighted the unsettling feeling of flipping through fictitious models and brands.
One thing’s for sure: Media bosses, swept away by a “remorseless technological tide”, as News Corp CEO Robert Thomson calls it, are no longer playing coy. They have acknowledged that sharing journalistic expertise with Big Tech will soon be inevitable. But at what cost?
This article first appeared on Sept 16, 2024 in The Edge Malaysia.
