Reading Time: 5 minutes
We all get used to read physical or e-magazines, however there is a revolution in the fashion industry ! But is this really gonna work and people would switch their preferences, that’s a tricky question. After I came across this article I found it both exciting and controversial. Before I’m gonna make a conclusion I’d like to show some of the most important parts of the article. Here we go.
– It was a Sunday night, quiet in the house, and I sat on the sofa with a hefty issue of Copy—billed as “the world’s first AI-powered fashion magazine” by its creator Carl-Axel Wahlstrӧm. The more I flipped the more unsettled I became. I knew the “models” were composites, but they look like real people; plus they had real sounding names, as did the brands. “Say goodbye to emotions, wrinkles, and individuality,” made me wonder just what Wahlstrӧm’s objective was.
A 41-year-old Swede, Wahlstrӧm holds a degree in marketing communication. After entering the workforce, he gravitated towards fashion, launching a magazine called Fashion Tale in 2008 that he published through 2012. Much of Wahlstrӧm’s career has been working with fast fashion. Being Swedish, he’s worked with local brands including H&M, & Other Stories, Gant, and Björn Borg. When Wahlstrӧm started playing with AI he wasn’t doing so in order to make a magazine, but that changed in the press of a button. From one day to the next, he explains, the technology improved enough to allow him to prompt imagery that was realistic rather than airbrushed or abstract. “It was love at first sight,” says the creative director. “I saw a lot of red warning flags, but I also felt that I was part of something new and revolutionary. I understood quite early that the technique is still very young and that it has a lot of faults, but I had this urge to just get it out, to be able to say I made the world’s—as far as I know—first AI fashion magazine. I realized that no one would ever sponsor me, I would not be able to get advertisers, so I just decided that I was going to finance it myself, do it myself, and I’m going to try to win over the technology, because the technology wasn’t that good and it’s still not that good. The reason why I think that we have created such a beautiful result is that we have added so much human intellect and knowledge and the craftsmanship into the images.”Wahlstrӧm, a team of one, worked with Midjourney and Chat GBT to create images and text that were edited and retouched (by humans). He sees the debut issue of Copy as a document of fashion up to now. He talked me through his process.
In Copy you feel that all models are like real people, isn’t it scary at some point but how cool to discover that AI is capable of doing it:
- An AI image is a visual created with the assistance of computer-generated intelligence. The software utilizes algorithms to create images that closely resemble real photos, yet they are entirely computer-generated. The AI learns from a diverse range of real images to accurately capture realism. [Essentially,] it’s made out of brain; it’s made out of nothing. Creating images in AI really [requires that you] be very inventive with words. Often when I type words that are very clear to me the AI totally misunderstands me because the training models and the metadata that we’re putting into our images gets confused. It’s also interesting because you discover things that you might not have thought about because we are also very limited in our fantasies and ideas of what to create. Many times when the AI misunderstands you, it comes up with something more interesting that what you could have realized. I really think that AI is a very good creative partner in that sense; the misunderstanding often becomes quite funny and interesting.https://assets.vogue.com/photos/64ee3add1234889bb6346489/master/w_1600,c_limit/OMSLAG_COPY_MAGAZINE_2023_ISSUE_1.png
Midjourney is the program that was used to make Copy:
- Midjourney’s algorithm is based on images from the Internet. I must say that I’m not an expert of how Midjourney is created, but this gives the program a quite specific style. I can definitely tell if an image is made by Midjourney. There are other apps, like DALL-E, which is based on another type of algorithm, and you also have Adobe and other large companies that want to get into this race of AI generated pictures. For me, Midjourney was the perfect fit; I would never have been able to do this magazine on Adobe, for example, because everything would’ve looked like a stock image.
Midjourney has sort of taken all the imagery that we have ever created and uploaded on the Internet and did machine learning on that. So what we are seeing, and what we can create, is what we have sort of fed ourselves—the aesthetic, the imagery, the stereotypes, the norms, everything. This is a summary of that. Midjourney isn’t creating anything by itself; it has been taught upon what we have created. Therefore it is also very hard for Midjourney to create what’s to come because the computer can’t really imagine that—at least not if the results should be realistic, and that’s what I’m aiming for. I was, and am still, very limited to norms and stereotypes, and when I try to sort of push those limits and boundaries, the results just become surreal and fake.AI technology is very literate. It sees everything either in black or white: Either you are thin or you’re thick; you’re this or you’re that. There is rarely an in-between. Machines are very pragmatic, and the metadata that we are prompting our images with is very summarized, very strong words. I realized quite early that the only realistic images I can actually create here are very stereotyped ones.
Does AI equate fashion with a generic idea of glamour ?
- That is the default mode for the AI because, as I’ve said previously, it’s been trained on the mass image bulk, and this is the end result, this is the AI’s conclusion of what fashion is, that it’s glamorous. If you try to prompt a very cool, independent designer, the AI doesn’t know that, the AI knows the broad painting strokes of what fashion is and what it represents.
[This magazine has no interest in making money, it’s more of a discussion. A visual story by an AI and me, a collaboration between human and technology.]https://assets.vogue.com/photos/64ee3adce0bacb797a6544aa/master/w_1600,c_limit/LOOK_206_FINAL.jpg
Conclusion:
- AI gives you the opportunity to create something that you couldn’t have created yourself before. Now anybody with the right mindset, the knowledge, and maybe also the aesthetic, can actually make a fashion magazine, and a little bit of money. In this case, AI expands your horizons and thinking, but in terms of replacing normal and standard magazines I guess that in the closest future it’s not gonna happen just because it’s simply all artificial! A good experiment which has right to continue to see all the possibilities of AI as well as new ideas, but only as a separate type of magazine, still, something should remain unchanged with real human beings !
Thank you for your attention 🙂
Sources:
- main article https://www.vogue.com/article/exactly-what-is-copy-the-first-ai-powered-fashion-magazine-trying-to-prove
- https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/generative-ai-unlocking-the-future-of-fashion
- https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10113373
- https://flanellemag.com/how-has-cgi-and-ai-infiltrated-the-fashion-industry-and-what-does-it-mean-for-its-future/
- https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/themes/sizing-up-the-effects-of-generative-ai-on-the-fashion-industry
