I've lived in NYC for the last decade+. Had many friends that had legitimate careers as models. Some lasted a year with just a few shoots and a self-funded trip to Paris fashion week before they quit or went into debt over it. Some have been going at it for more than a decade and you would recognize if you flipped through a fashion magazine even semi-regularly.
I also work in media, date someone in fashion and have knowledge of what actually gets paid to models.
While there are a rare few who find a real career out of it and rise out of the traps of shitty agencies and contracts, usually by branching out and establishing a self-brand, none of them that I know made something they can comfortably retire on just with what we would consider the job of a model.
There are certainly exceptions to this but in general, if you're a fashion brand, digital or print magazine offering any type of exposure, hiring a model is inexpensive. Rarely if ever livable wages. That goes for most of the people who work on sets or for fashion shows.
So with all of that preamble out of the way, what I am getting at is...
1. Coordinating an AI model, that has to wear these clothes, and that bracelet, and be on this location, or pictures with this lighting sounds complex and expensive when hiring a set to produce the real thing is a known quantity and cost virtually minimum wages.
2. There are still people who deeply care about the art of the whole thing and do most of their work for free to be supported in anyway to keep doing it. I am looking on the not so bright, bright side here but I'd like to think AI is little more of a thread than stock photography.
You know a lot more about this than me, but one potential counterpoint though is Ikea already using ~75% computer generated images in their catalogues. When the technology is mature enough, it provides a huge amount of flexibility compared to a photo shoot.
From my own attempts at hobbyist 3d modelling, computer generating a human with clothes is far harder than furniture. Looking through the computer generated images for IKEA almost all of them are hard body (solid objects) with very few soft objects (clothing, tablecloths, etc) and nothing that is alive. Creating realistic clothing renders is quite difficult, and it gets even more difficult when a lifelike human needs to be rendered as well.
Consider the incentives fast fashion vendors have, and it seems clear that completely AI generated product photography is inevitable.
It's expensive and slow to hire a photographer and a studio and a model, and you have to ship the clothes there ahead of the launch on your website to have them spend all day getting in and out of different outfits while stylists keep their hair tidy, then the photographs go to the art direction team to be photoshopped to match the site aesthetic...
If you can just get someone in the factory in China to snap a photograph of the latest batch of dresses and tops and skirts as they come off the sewing table, then you can just send them into a GAN, and have style-matched 'photographs' generated showing the clothes on a selection of different models, each of whose appearance is perfectly tailored to appeal to different market segments.
You can have high quality creative on your website and in the product feed to Google the same day, and start taking orders before the inventory starts piling up.
Then next week, you can do it again with the next set of designs.
> If you can just get someone in the factory in China to snap a photograph of the latest batch of dresses and tops and skirts as they come off the sewing table,
Just a simple photo of the garment will not tell you how it behaves on the body (how "malleable" it is, how it bends, wrinkles etc.) and how it interacts with the light.
Just ask any artist about the nuances of painting clothing materials - it's a big subject in its own right. I suspect that only shooting photos on a in-factory models, in various lighting conditions MIGHT be enough to train the AI.
Yep, but how is that informative for a particular garment that you want to visualize? You can't infer, from a corpus of images of random clothes being worn, how that particular shape and fabric behaves.
You don't need to have full computer generation to dis-employ a lot of models. Just making modeling a lot more productive would do that. For instance, you could have a "deepfake" approach that replaces the clothing a model is wearing. That would enable a small number of models and a pile of software to generate a hell of a lot of imagery.
From what I know about the industry, there's also different categories. I don't doubt that Target or Walmart could use digital models for generic clothing. I doubt that would work for a designer launching a new high end collection. Then there's the experiential side where designers like Oscar de La Renta will have events with live models for women to view their red carpet/wedding dresses. Potentially, software could help designers quickly test and iterate on new clothing ideas, but launch brands likely will launch campaigns around real people.
What I meant to say was not that the technology was ready today, rather that when it becomes ready it's likely to be used. At least it was in the case of IKEA when the technology was able to meet their needs.
The way modeling can work is that you take a photograph of a mannequin with the clothes upon it then digitally add in facial features or skin tone.
Even just being able to shift skin tone, and not show a face will work and will add to profitablily because people do want to know that clothing will work with their complexion
Ehh, this could backfire if it ends up in the uncanny valley realm. Consumers prefer images of models wearing clothing, because it shows the fitment. They may flock to brands that explicitly use real models.
IMO, modeling is one of those things that will never go away because of how cheap this labor is compared to hiring someone to make a software solution. Just like how it is cheaper to stock a fast food joint with a few minimum wage people worked to the bone than a sleek robot with a pricey service contract, even if the latter is sexier.
They were at 75% in 2014. They might be closer to 100% now. Ever since I learned about IKEA's CGI work, I always take more time to browse their catalogs.
While I agree with what you say, I think there's also subsets of modeling which can be cheaper with a computer which doesn't need wages, an agent, travel, or royalties. Also remember that models are human talent and human talent tends to come with costs which must be geographically local: makeup, photographer, scene, etc. Humans can only work so many hours a day, they can develop drug or eating habits, they can age. They can say indecorous things which will cause an outrage mob to want to boycott brands associated with them. All of these are costs or liabilities.
Granted, there may be a new generation of agents that specialize in AI models and royalties may still exist (with shrinking margins), but if nothing more, AI is likely to opt downward pressure on wages/jobs/contracts some of the non-minimum-wage models. Once it's bootstrapped, it will either become more appealing (for the reasons I mentioned above) or turn out to be complex and not worth the cost/risk. Only time and experimentation will tell.
> Human talent ... can say indecorous things which will cause an outrage mob to want to boycott brands associated with them.
I'm not envisioning a future in which some company creates a full persona for their AI models, and we get a full Tay[1] moment out of it, and then we've come full circle.
There are also the companies producing or providing the AI. Any entity capable of producing a convincing AI fashion substitute can do much more besides, some possibly not wearing well with public opinion.
Sure, your comment didn't look like it was trying to disagree as much as add more info, whether you realized I had a typo or not. I had just happened to read a comment I had mangled atrociously earlier because I did it on my phone and then I saw this comment, and the urge to correct myself here was overwhelming. :)
Also remember that models are human talent and human talent tends to come with costs which must be geographically local: makeup, photographer, scene, etc.
This sounds vaguely similar to initial discussions I remember with self-diving cars. It begins with "I look forward to the day we don't have fallible humans at the wheel" and end with the realization the AIs are going to be more fallible and in different, strange ways.
I mean, hypothetically, suppose you had a system that could constantly monitor world fashion trends, world clothing markets, the routes of hip and average people and so-forth.
In the case you might create a system that produced a variety of still and moving images that satisfied all the constraints that today's fashion industry satisfies just with a few written or spoken suggestions from executives. Then you'd eliminated no just models but a large chunk of the industry.
But let's look at what "AI" is now (and what it seems likely to be for a while without any "revolutionary" changes). What you have now is a way to extrapolate typical objects out of a stream of similar objects. Just GPT-3 does a great job create texts that sound vaguely right, you can create a vaguely plausible looking set of still and moving images of one or another "typical" model. Moreover, these extrapolations require constant training by professional much more highly paid than actual models now (as the GP notes).
Further, without being in the fashion industry, I'm pretty sure there's a lot more to a useful set of images than "looking about right". I suspect you could generate a model-image that would "work" with a kind of clothing (since both clothing and image can be trained). But generating a model-image that suits a given demographic, that expresses "what's becoming hip right now" and so-forth would be extremely hard.
It may not be impossible but it would require lots of high paid labor by AI engineers, defeating the entire purpose once the novelty wears off. And all this is to say that these "replace human activity" approaches wind-up with the problem of doing an "90%" of the activity right and then foundering on corner cases - like self-driving cars that are easy-yet-impossible AI tasks.
> I suspect you could generate a model-image that would "work" with a kind of clothing (since both clothing and image can be trained). But generating a model-image that suits a given demographic, that expresses "what's becoming hip right now" and so-forth would be extremely hard.
I mean, when I picture the problem, I imagine taking a single panorama-like photo capture with a smartphone, circling repeatedly around a human being whose likeness you want to use; and the phone using its barrage of sensors and ML cores to spit out a pre-rigged and textured high-poly 3D model of that person, that you can then drop into Blender and throw your clothing designs onto (i.e. the very same digitally-simulated designs that your designers prototyped with before getting the design made for real — presuming there was any amount of industrial design going into the object, which there certainly is for anything as complex as e.g. glasses frames, or a handbag.)
The pre-rigged 3D model output from such a body-scanning app would have a standardized rigging, such that 1. you'd know how your digital clothing items would interact with it before attaining the body-scan itself; and 2. allowing you to throw some posing "behaviour" scripts on it (that target said standardized rigging.) So this could all be parallelized.
Last step: pick a 3D-recreated environment, set the viewpoint camera and lighting, and snap screenshots at will. (This part doesn't need to be a science; you can just put a trained photographer in VR goggles, and have them circle around the digital model taking digital pictures with their field-of-view at time of trigger-press being the composed shot.)
The important part of this, from a cost perspective, is that you can then reuse this model for a combinatoric number of "shots", without ever paying the original body-scanned person again, or taking time to organize a new physical shoot with them. You can "re-shoot" them in localized advertisements for every target market you're launching the product in, all without needing to leave the room, let alone paying them to come back in. If you launch accessory products months later, you don't need to retain their talent; you have them "on file." Likewise if you need to dredge them up 10 years later for an anniversary "shoot."
> But generating a model-image that suits a given demographic, that expresses "what's becoming hip right now" and so-forth would be extremely hard
Just generate a spread of different looks, test them on different audiences, and measure engagement. Feed that back into the parameterization for generating the next set of images.
> And all this is to say that these "replace human activity" approaches wind-up with the problem of doing an "90%" of the activity right and then foundering on corner cases - like self-driving cars that are easy-yet-impossible AI tasks.
I don't think the boycott mob is a unique problem to the human. Could just as easily end up with an anti-AI boycott mob. Neither bet is fully safe on that front.
The issue is for companies that just want to sell clothes, without also being forced into a wide variety of shallow, poorly thought out political stances that could blow up in the companies face. Note just how much of this article is the 'model' talking about what is basically politics. They're half model, half politician. This is 100% liability to most of their employers, who ultimately just need a good looking mannequin to wear some clothes or pose seductively for advertising.
A GAN generated face textured onto a convincing 3D model means you can just keep clicking or adjusting until you got a truly beautiful model, without needing to pay extra for it, and you know your exposure is capped in entirely predictable ways. This model won't unexpectedly cause trouble for you, or demand you take a particular stance you may not agree with in order to employ them.
I don't see the average consumer caring whether the model for their perfume commercial is flesh and blood or CGI. They already don't care what the quality of life is like for the test animals for those same cosmetics. Plus, it's easy enough to create fake personal social media profiles to pretend like the persona has a real history.
It seems like you're looking at the core of the job as it exists now, but perhaps the threat will be on the periphery? New technology tends to automate tasks, not jobs, but that can change the jobs.
Stock photography probably does have some effect, for some websites where they might have hired a model. Suppose stock photography gets better, more flexible? What could a more ambitious stock photography company do to help clothing retailers find a different way to sell clothes?
It depends on the kind of shoot. A picture for a catalog is going to be much cheaper than a picture for an ad. The reason isn't just the model's time, it's all the other work that goes into it. A picture for an ad, all things considered, can be surprisingly expensive. So the catalog images are easier to do digitally and the ad images have a larger incentive to make cheaper. If you can replace enough of the pipeline, you can save significantly. The model is just a part of that, but they'd still lose their job. Even the simple catalog work where you might digitally change that solid red t-shirt to blue and green and orange saves time and means fewer models are needed, shrinking the job market.
It's hard to imagine AI/virtual models being able to satisfy the high-end fashion industry's love for traditional pomp and pageantry. But I'd have to guess that an unlimited, cheap supply of perfect and customizable human models will unavoidably have a massive impact on the many non-A-list models who make a living doing photoshoots for unbranded campaigns, especially models who are currently used to model clothing for online sellers.
While there will likely always be added commercial value for (human) celebrity campaigns – e.g. Kanye and Gap, Jennifer Lawrence and Dior – I'm not sure how Old Navy/Banana Republic/Uniqlo/etc. would suffer much at all by having digital models for their website and in-store photography.
There are different kinds of modelling. The old paper catalog - now website - modelling has already been replaced. You can see the results all over Amazon and various merch shops. Clothes and other objects have colours and textures shopped in effortlessly.
Is that AI-able? Not yet. Making edited images look seamless is still a moderately skilled job, and AI is still struggling with basic object recognition, never mind the semantics of object presentation.
It might be possible one day, but not for a good few years.
High end modelling is about celebrity, and that's not going to be replaced any time soon.
Likewise for high end fashion photography. You can't hand something like Nick Knight's work over to an AI, because no AI has the creativity or imagination needed to make images that look like that, and engage the viewer like that.
It might be possible in principle to automate some of the more obvious fashion cliches - intensely aesthetic people with cheek bones in a variety of exotic locations - but it's harder than it looks, and the quality of manual production values will make it very hard for AI efforts to cross uncanny valley without getting stuck in it.
Attempts will also suffer from the CGI problem, where CGI turned out to be more expensive than modelling for most movies. And the results end up looking plastic and rather soulless no matter how much detail they have.
As I understand it, actor performance quality wasn't the main driver of The Mandalorian's live CGI sets. It was lighting and reflections. When your main character's head is essentially a chrome ball, green screens really aren't going to cut it. They needed believable reflections and lighting and the live set gave them that.
There are and always will be a lot of people willing to do art for free or even at great personal cost. I've had friends who modeled niche clothes (i.e. corsets) for the clothing producer, in exchange for a discount on the clothes (not even free clothes). I would go so far as to say that a lot of the most interesting art out there happens at break-even or negative valuations.
That said, I don't think you're right to place big companies that provide most of the media presence of fashion scenes in that category. Big clothing companies care about selling clothes, not about art, and they'll follow the cheapest, most effective way to do that. A marketing scheme based around supporting artists might happen, but if it happens it will be because market research says it plays well with target demographics, not because of some sense of charity. And it will likely be a token gesture, not a core strategy.
Look at what has already happened in fashion in the past: nods to fat shaming have been laughably tiny "plus sized" models, nods to race issues have been light-skinned black women with primarily European features, nods to skin not being perfect have been un-photo-shopped pictures of women who, from what I can tell, have perfect skin to begin with. And the vast majority of the time the gigantic Broadway/Lafayette billboard is a slender white photoshopped woman.
The cost of doing this stuff with AI is only going down. Why would you pay a whole photo crew and model when you can send a few low-rez photos of the clothes to a team in Bangalore and get back a video of a "model" with exactly the body specifications you request, doing exactly what you want, for $200?
Interesting. In some way, in hindsight, I believe the internet might also be responsible for the downfall of the profession. Remember the "Top Models" of the 90s and that this is less common today
In some way, the demand for modelling has probably gone up, but it's more long tailed. The internet also allowed for more "democracy" in this area and less gatekeeping
The different tastes and long-tailed nature probably contributed to less emphasis on "top models"/attention being focused on a sole person and/or mainstream beauty standards
I don't know nothing about all this. How much of work that involves models has an actual creative process behind it vs. having someone pose in front of a white background with a product for a catalog?
The latter seems to be bound to be replaced by AI eventually. I could see something similar happen like to orchestral music for movies and games where since years only few players, especially soloists, are recorded live and the rest is entierly made up by virtual instruments good enough to trick most people into thinking there is an full orchestra.
Think we are going to have real models for the magazine covers and expensive ads for a long time. But for e.g. online clothes shopping, to be honest, I would prefer to be able to switch out and modify the models to something closer to my body than what they usually are.
I've still never heard a virtual trumpet that sounds like a real trumpet. Not even close. Each trumpet player has his own tone or "lip" that is unique. I can tell who is playing just by a few notes.
Solo I don't think there are many virtual instruments that get even close to the real ones. But grouped together, mixed with real instruments, it gets a lot harder for the untrained ear. Especially in a context like a movie where the music is not the primary focus and often much less nuanced.
Virtual models gives you a lot of flexibility.
For example, you can change the skin color of the models depending on the country of the IP address.
You can even tailor the body types of the models for every customer to maximise the sales.
I wonder if, after a torrid love affair with AI models, we'll have to return to human models simply because nobody could resist the urge to tweak the AI model parameters beyond what is sensible and useful over time, as AI modeling users compete to stand out that little bit more. Convenience of flexibility could become a problem, in the long run. Not that models haven't had their own problems with trying to conform to whatever the industry's standards of beauty is this month, but having to still be living human beings has at least kept them on Planet Earth to some extent.
I think the problem is that models will become more and more "super-human" and computers will help with that. You can already see this in the amount of Photoshopping in ad photography. And for example in imagery aimed at children (e.g. the unrealistically big eyes of the Frozen characters). People want eye-candy and it doesn't necessarily have to be realistic.
At some point it will just be simpler and cheaper to replace Photoshop and in fact the entire photography/imaging pipeline by some AI.
If you can put your clothes on a virtual model in photoshop -and be done right there - that will be it.
I think this will start to happen in the next 5 years.
First for the 1/2 of fashion that is low-end and it will look a little off - but as colour and lighting and sets improve, it will make its way into other brands.
I should add: fashion and most creative industries are extremely cheap and cost conscious. Making that shirt for $19.99 entails cutting every corner possible. Every little bit of fabric etc. optimised to save money.
Once they can start generated images 'for free' they will, and it may not even be the unit expense, it may be the operational expense.
Chicago Tribune now sends reporters out with iPhones instead of having staff photographers.
Our food supply is full of filler and garbage ingredients.
Fashion brands are constantly dying, where there is a way to lower costs, it will happen.
given that the bespoke companies (Inditex, H&M) are regularly selling off half their stock at 50% off and meanwhile looking into insolvency every few years, I think you overestimate their execution. Producing a shirt probably costs 40cts (if at all) at enormous costs to communities in the disenfranchised parts of the world.
I doubt that the "brands" do any "finegrained" optimization, it's "make shirt or have no food"; the actual subcontractors probably do, but not in any rigorous way except introducing slavery.
They are viscously price-sensitive industries, always flirting with commercial problems, running on very thin margins with ugly working capital requirements.
These are exactly the kinds of companies that will use nearly-free AI instead of real models.
And FYI, they are excessively optimised for efficiency, more so than most industries. When an item doesn't sell, it goes on clearance right away. They adapt faster than any other industry to trends, down to the micro level. 'Home Base' knows exactly what is going on in every store and everything they make, cost & labour is a key consideration: 'this kind of seam -> this kind of cost' , 'this pattern doesn't fit well onto sheets of material leading to XYZ amount of waste, implies ABC extra cost'. Their online data is mapped to local inventories etc..
That's the only way 'fast fashion' exists, and it's a function of their scale, reach, adaptability etc.. In many ways, they are 'exemplary'.
> hiring a set to produce the real thing is a known quantity and cost virtually minimum wages.
The interesting question is whether the cost of the technology solution can be brought down below the cost of the human solution. If it can, then it's not a question of "if" the humans will be replaced but "when". I don't know enough about the cost structure to give an answer.
This. Modeling and photography are low skilled jobs, with minimal pay and long hours. Over years system became ruthlessly efficient to extract value from people.
Good luck replacing that with expensive AI developers to produce fake stuff.
I have no knowledge of the skill involved in (real life) modelling, but I do know the skill involved in professional photography is a lot higher than I fully understand.
For most of us, photography is just point the phone and tap the screen, without really giving much thought to lighting (colour/s, fill/spot combinations), scene composition, lenses, and probably a lot of things I don’t even have names for given the stuff I’ve listed is stuff I only know about from 3D modelling.
And conversely, the end users of a future AI synth of a model won’t be paying directly for expensive AI developers, any more than the average visitor of thispersondoesnotexist.com
>I have no knowledge of the skill involved in (real life) modelling, but I do know the skill involved in professional photography is a lot higher than I fully understand.
Yes, but there's no shortage of people who know all the involved stuff...
High-skill as in "you need to know lotsa stuff", yes.
High-skills as in "the skills are rare, and require a special degree or years or training", no.
They're not that rare (there's an overabundance of both skilled and non-skilled photographers), and they're not that hard to pick up (to the point that 18 year olds can know all there is to it with a little determination and practice).
Or let's just say that "high skill" is relative, and being a pro photographer is hardly like being a pro coder or a surgeon...
> there’s an overabundance of ... skilled photographers
I’m really not sure this is the case. I know more about cinematography than photography (I direct) but here in China a decent cinematographer can charge for a day what some workers might earn in a year. And you can tell the difference between their work and someone cheaper. That would suggest to me their skills are rare.
> and being a pro photographer is hardly like being a pro coder
This is where I strongly disagree. Becoming good at composition, setting up shots, etc is an art and can take a lifetime to perfect. No less high skill than programming.
High-skill usually implies that some sort of specialized training or schooling is required. Working an espresso bar is also a delicate skill, but no one calls baristas high-skilled workers.
Simple. The model can be the last part of a production pipeline in meatspace that gets replaced. There's a lot of post production that happens after a model shoot.
Render the clothes on the model before production to test demand. Render the model in the outfit the customer has in their cart right now.
Nonsense. Maybe the generic low-end catalogue models will be replaced by some kind of AI but it definitely won't happen in high fashion. I've worked for some of these organisations and it's ALL about the in-person social aspects of the industry. Catwalk shows are an event with real people, not because it's the most effective way to showcase the physical items but because it creates a buzz that everyone wants to be a part of. The business thrives on parties and bars and muses and the backstage chaos, frantically pulling everything together at the last minute so they can glide out there and look serene for a few brief seconds. The designers and stylists and hair and makeup and accessories people love working with the girls - even the difficult diva types who turn up late and think they own the whole show - because it brings fun and spontaneity and joy and relationship building and uncertainty, the dangerous unpredictability, just on the threshold of losing control, is a big part of the energy and many people in the business have their entire 24/7 social life wrapped up completely in their careers. These techno "models" are a gimmick that will be used for as long as they grab headlines but in the long run, fashion people love people (each other, not necessarily their consumers) and - this may be hard for many IT types to comprehend - the business will always thrive on those people who are able to walk into a room and move around and pull faces that grab attention in surprising and unexpected ways, especially if those people are also enjoyable to work with in a way that some CGI never could be.
> this may be hard for many IT types to comprehend
Save the condescension, this wasn't written by an 'IT type' or published on a tech journal.
All industries that got disrupted by more modern technology came up with arguments similar to the ones you brought up - bookstores vs amazon, brick-and-mortar stores vs ecommerce, face-to face meetings vs video calls, film vs digital, newspapers vs internet.
There will always be demand for high end fashion, but eventually it'll get relegated to a niche.
> Save the condescension, this wasn't written by an 'IT type' or published on a tech journal.
You only need to look around this very thread to see many indignant, condescending comments towards models by those who refuse to try to understand the value they bring to the creative process. It's much easier to condemn something than to try to wrap your head around a totally different social milieu.
The "human factor" is still why we don't have AI replacing doctors! There's a lot AI can and should be doing for improving worker efficiency in many industries, but ignoring "human factors" leads to 737 Max sort of screw up for deploying automation technologies.
All those industries thought they could rely on their consumers, en masse, valuing the human factor over price and convenience. In the same way, Vogue may disappear as a print publication and with it the newsagents, printing presses, distribution networks... But readers consuming digital Vogue on a tablet still demand striking, original content, and the people who create that content will continue to value the human factors I have outlined above.
Horses are great animals and people love working with them. They have social ordering and it's fun to talk to people who really know them. You don't even pick up the social cues and they translate "horse did X, Y, Z". Or take coal mining. It's unbelievable how tightly a group of men holds together if they've been underground for years. Mechanization and automation has removed many of the horse and coal miner jobs regardless.
We still have horses today. We still have coal miners. We'll still have human models. There'll just be less of them.
I think you're completely correct. Most successful automation technologies tend to create two markets: the lower end mass consumption market and a higher end artesian market.
Power looms certainly drove out hand looms, displacing many artesians that supplied most clothing in the 18/19th century. Suddenly clothes were cheap because of a new technology! But does that mean there's no market for specializing in the higher end clothing that requires special attention and detail? No! Instead, the market tends to bifurcate into the mass consumption market and higher end artesian market (I certainly know many people who do like the higher end artesian products!).
I think we need to worry less about if we have X or Y technology that will disrupt a working class of people, and instead focus on building up a more robust welfare state to allow these people to have a meaningful place in society.
I remember when people said brick and mortar music stores would be fine because people cared so much about the human experience of going into a physical space devoted to music and interacting with a knowledgeable, passionate employee.
Humans thrive on real in-person contact, but you wouldn't know it if you looked at how we acted.
It depends on the type of store (high end vs low end)! It seems every 3rd business in Venice Ca is some sort of boutique clothing store. Pandemic withstanding, they have focused on prioritizing real in-person contact to drive revenue. At the lower end when clothing is commoditized, there's a smaller difference if you're buying at Ross, Walmart, or Amazon.
Just earlier this week, I was talking with a colleague about all the hidden jobs that no longer exist because of software. And these are not jobs that dramatically went away all at once, like a team of longshoremen being cut in the movies.
Think of all the teams of bookkeepers (yes, actual people who penciled numbers in books) who were obsoleted by Excel being able to let a store owner do a calculation/scenario by himself that would take accountants a week to do.
Think of all the secretaries whose work disappeared (or were no longer needed in proportion to the growing economy) as soon as personal calendar software and meeting invites became common.
Graphic designers / publication layout experts you would pay because you didn't have desktop publishing software.
There are more jobs lost silently to these kinds of developments than any factory being shut down dramatically. (for the US at least)
Alternatively, a lot more businesses were created because the sum total of labor required to run a business went down, so businesses that would have been unprofitable back when it took a room of bookkeepers to manage a department store can now exist.
People think that economics is a zero-sum game, but the endless drive for efficiency and productivity is what makes our world possible and lifted billions out of abject poverty. It is the opposite of zero-sum.
The value that economics promises to create is wealth-weighted. By this metric, destroying the ability of a million people to eek by is a huge win if it makes a person worth ten million times as much worth twenty million times as much.
Thankfully, as you point out, it often does the exact opposite and makes everyone richer! But not always, not reliably, certainly not as a fundamental guarantee. "The Wedge" plot illustrates this fickleness, where about 40 years ago the American story switched from "a rising tide floats all boats" to "rich get richer, poor get poorer." The economy kept growing, but the overwhelming majority of people not only did not manage to capture a share of the new growth, they did not even manage to hold on to what they had. Yes, those on top scooped up more money than those on the bottom lost -- but how is that supposed to be comforting?
It frustrates me when certain elements preach the prosperity gospel while framing it as a matter of fact rather than self-serving faith. I personally have faith that we'll eventually figure out a compromise, but I don't believe that denying blatant trends helps us get there.
>if it makes a person worth ten million times as much worth twenty million times as much.
But that never happens. Ten million multiplied by twenty million is 200 trillion. You can't make 200 trillion dollars by taking a dollar away from a million people. Nobody has ever made 200 trillion dollars from anything, but if they did, it makes no sense to think there's some way it could be done by impoverishing a million people who have almost nothing. It sounds as illogical as the Matrix use of humans as batteries.
I think you misparsed that sentence as "20 million as much [as 10 million as much as one of those people]", where it should be "20 million as much [of one of those people]". An x2 multiplier, instead of an x20 million one.
Trying to put it in concrete terms - Jeff Bezos has maybe $180B. One ten-millionth is $18K. So the scenario is, suppose Bezos got his $180B by taking $1800 each from a million people, who relied on that capital to live, and somehow multiplied it by ten.
Since nearly everyone rich has less than Bezos, anything that happens a fair amount would involve smaller numbers.
It's not as absurd as making $200 trillion, but it still doesn't sound to me like a thing that happens to the extent that it says something about economics or utilitarianism or whatever. It seems like a contrived trolley problem to me.
Absolutely. A friend of mine started selling her cookies online without any help from anyone tech-savvy. She found out about Wix, Canva, Stripe and a bunch of other tools and setup her own business during COVID. She's not coming back to her old job.
True. Although with the increasing rate of changes, there would be a point where people can't re-skill themselves faster than their jobs are replaced by AI or software. Imagine change to a completely different job every 5 years. Hopefully societies are mostly well-off to give people food while they are busy learning another craft that hasn't been made obsolete.
My father-in-law provides a good counterpoint. He worked at a bridge span builder when PCs were coming out. A supplier gave them 5 Apple computers for buying something. His boss told him to throw them away it’s just some fad.
That night he picked up a manual and learned a little BASIC and put together a program to do some calculations for manufacturing bridge spans. It would normally take 3 guys 2 days double checking and redoing the precise calculations but the Apple II took minutes. Now 3 guys were free to do other things and a bottle neck was removed. The company could take on more work and the boss was pleased. “Take those things out of the trash!”
What the boss really didn’t understand was the software you needed to buy to make the computer useful.
|What the boss really didn’t understand was the software you needed to buy to make the computer useful.
I would almost change it to say "what the boss didn't really understand was how to use the computers to make my employees more productive". I think the specifics in how you automate is incredibly important, and there are many cases of how it can fail. 737 Max MCAS system is a prime example of how ramming automation through without consideration of "human factors" leads to massive failure.
In this case, the man-hours per bridge drop. But how many man-hours were available in the field pre-computer? So now we've got excess man-hours and we've got a choice. Either move those man-hours to higher value tasks OR release the bridgespanneteers from the job.
And that's the conundrum we face with automation where we remove bottlenecks, and we can't retask the capacity.
Cashiers are on their way out. You can walk into any Walmart and see two people in line for 10 minutes because of the 50 available registers only 2 are open. Walmart wants to drive people to use the self checkout. I hate it because invariably something goes wrong and you have to compete for the sole person manning that section.
Self-checkout only stores is exactly what hell looks like. I hate self checkouts with a burning passion, if not for the sake that I got duped as a consumer to work for the company, while paying the same price on my goods, but for the fact that they aren't faster, they certainly aren't friendlier, and generally cause a certain level of frustration or anxiety for the consumer.
If you care about accessibility and not being ageist, they are terrible for people with disabilities or the elderly. You will almost see no old or disabled person using a self checkout line.
As a show of more anecdotal evidence, a recent large grocery store chain in my large populated city of 2+ million people experiment with going self-checkout only failed so bad (lost so many customers and people were complaining), they hired cashiers again to basically scan people's groceries for them at the self-checkout line. Now they are stuck with the worst of both worlds.
Get better self-checkouts. The ones that try to simulate how a traditional checkout works are stupid, the same way a mechanical messenger pigeon would be stupid but email is pretty good.
A friend of mine has several serious problems. He much prefers the self-checkout. No human interactions, which means no need to try to figure out what the other person thought they were communicating.
It was much better during the worst of lockdown too. I go in, I pick up items I want, I scan them and place them in my backpack, I go to the checkout, I hold the same device I used to scan items near the checkout, it acknowledges that I agreed to pay for the items I scanned, I put the backpack onto my back and I walk out of the store. Minimal contact, no human interaction, very low risk. Nice.
I hate this thought process with the same burning passion you hate self checkout, probably more in fact.
You dutifully wander through the aisles gathering your goods, You slide your card, operate the pin pad, carry your own goods to your car. These are all goal directed activities you completed for YOURSELF in order that you could consume or use the products you have so acquired. There is no fundamental difference between scanning your own goods and sliding a card.
You aren't paying for someone to scan eggs and put it in a little bag you are paying for someone to manage every step between where the hen laid the egg and making it conveniently available on a shelf 1/2 a mile from where you live.
You aren't getting paid for doing it yourself like you aren't getting paid for carrying your own goods to your car instead you are benefiting from a price point enabled by the degree of automation and self service that the store engages in. Its ironic that people simultaneously flock to stores that have even slightly lower prices while complaining about lack of help. Simultaneously driving and bemoaning the same trend.
Your anecdote about bringing back the cashiers for the worst of both worlds sounds like a buggy whip manufacturer gleefully cackling at the unreliability of early cars. I believe we both know how THAT turned out. Given that Walmart was doing inventory on all its socks by walking past the socks with a wireless reader 10 years ago I'm pretty sure even your can of baked beans will have a chip in the label before long and your self checkout experience will be literally consist of solely being asked to pay for the goods in your cart. At this point paying an entire body to baby site each transaction would be wasteful and silly as 99% of them will consist of you touching a button on your phone or on store hardware to pay.
You say that self checkout is "ageist" in an era where even people turning 60 years old today probably saw a computer by the time they were 30. In 10 years this will be true of our 70 year olds. Are we just supposed to pretend that people who didn't have a phone shoved in their hand at 5 can't learn? That would seem in itself to be ageist. The reality is that old machines sucked pretty badly and older people don't like change and have taken their impression from older machines. This isn't the same thing as being incapable. For those that truly do have difficulties it ought to be sufficient to have staff on hand to help.
There is fundamentally no difference between waiting in line 2 minutes patiently in line and standing at a self checkout while the attendant helps others there for the same duration but people don't seem to react the same at all. In fact properly regarded what having 4 self checkouts with one attendant instead of 1 cashier with one computer is the probability of waiting far less.
Would you rather wait behind 3 other people or would you rather checkout out immediately and wait 30 seconds if you need help with the machine?
The Walmart near me closes opens self checkouts based on demand. So when the store is crowded, all self checkouts are open and there is a line. When the store is not crowded, half the self checkouts are closed, so there still is a line. I don't get why they would do this, but I absolutely hate it.
These kinds of jobs being replaced by software is an increase in efficiency. Those people well by and large end up doing something else that's useful for society.
A digger (machine) replaced a lot of workers with shovels, but in the long-term it has clearly been good for society.
Has it? Those gains in productivity seem to be increasingly captured by the executive and capitalist class[1]. "Society" is 90% people who have not seen much benefit to their bottom line.
When something becomes incredibly cheap to produce, it also becomes incredibly cheap for consumers. The ditch diggers had to find new jobs, but now pretty much every house in the developed world has running water, electricity and increasingly internet connectivity, resulting for an increased quality of life for everybody.
I think one way to solve it is creating institutions that invest in the job cutting technology on behalf of workers. This way workers pick up the productivity gain and not the businesses that employ the technology.
It would be a massive shake up and would seem very seizing the means of production in a indirect way though.
The graph would very heavily depend on definitions, wouldn't it? Such a sharp change should easily be tracked down to a specific event. The entire economy doesn't just decide to to things differently in sync without an external factor. So, what happened at that time?
To be fair, looks like the graph starts to flat-line in 1972-1973. I think that lines up with Nixon leaving the gold standard in 1971 and going to China in 1972. It's possible that globalization may have ended labor scarcity in the U.S. and thus labor has no leverage to capture productivity gains.
| Think of all the teams of bookkeepers (yes, actual people who penciled numbers in books) who were obsoleted by Excel being able to let a store owner do a calculation/scenario by himself that would take accountants a week to do.
And now accountants have a much greater ability to keep track of a firms financial health, allowing them to grow more efficiently!
| Think of all the secretaries whose work disappeared (or were no longer needed in proportion to the growing economy) as soon as personal calendar software and meeting invites became common.
And hence forth came executive assistants, who could focus on more important features of their job such as managing a calendar rather than retying memos!
| Graphic designers / publication layout experts you would pay because you didn't have desktop publishing software.
And now graphic designers can produce amazing movies, the complexity of which would dumbfound animators from the 1930s!
In almost all your cases, the productivity of these positions has grown, enabling more efficient use of their time and resources. Sure, it's required to know how to use Excel, Outlook, and Creative Studio to be productive in these newer jobs, but they it's precisely because we have integrated these tools into our workforce that we can be so productive. I see an analogy to asking "what are radiologists going to do when the AI comes"? Sure, maybe the older radiologists who don't use AI tools may be outdated and either learn to use newer tools or retire, but radiologists are not fundamentally going away. And other positions that may outright be antiquated, it's a moral imperative to create a robust welfare and career focused educational system to ease transitions pains.
If this were a concern, unemployment would have skyrocketed after Microsoft office was released and never recovered to this day.
However, decades later, there are still secretaries who schedule meetings and manage electronic calendars, bookkeepers who type numbers into excel spreadsheets, graphic designers and publication layout experts who are versed in professional publishing software, and even accountants.
My opinion as a tech-inclined person who works with many fashion/beauty clients in a creative capacity: fashion, in general, doesn’t understand tech, and have been consistently 5-10 years late adopting The New.
The industry continues to be centered around still photographs—generally for the average campaign 90% of the budget/crew will go to the photographs, and video will be thrown in as an afterthought, even though it is an order of magnitude more difficult to create—and nearly exclusively those stills will be experienced on a computer that is told to show that same frame 60 times every second forever.
My clients are just barely starting to understand how video works. To try to get them to wade into 3D—and not just as a splashy one-off tool for attention, but for the actual day to day creation of hundreds of e-comm images/season—I don’t see this happening for a long time.
I am nowhere near the fashion industry, but my kneejerk reaction is that the industry might be slow to adopt technology because they don't have that much to gain.
If they are very familiar with still photographs and (I assume) can somewhat predict how still photographs will be perceived by the market, what is the incentive to switch to something new?
As a consumer, my guess would be that a video or 3D display would not create a huge spike in revenue. In fact, if done poorly I could even see it having the opposite effect.
So what is the incentive to invest time and money into switching to something new and risky?
-------
CGI models however seem to be a different story. The cost saving aspect is clear cut and I as the consumer likely won't even realize anything has changed.
Those are good points, but fashion exists in a logic-adjacent (interesting, infuriating) intersection of Art and Commerce; on a big set you can almost map where someone is on that continuum by their order on the call sheet.
On one hand, it makes total sense to ask if embracing 3D stuff, or pushing (to my mind) a more appropriate use of the digital mediums in which we create and experience most things will lead to spike in revenue:
If you do it poorly (read: solution looking for a problem) I wouldn’t expect that to make much of a leap in any real metrics—and if companies are trying to pass off images on the wrong side of the uncanny valley that’d be more likely to hurt than help.
But it’s the Art that actually sells the “lifestyle” (read: clothes), and if you can create a gobsmacking incredible experience that makes people feel things you will absolutely see that in metrics and earned media and attention...
There are so many interesting technologies that are widely accessible today that fashion companies aren’t embracing because 1) they don’t know to look for them and 2) they don’t understand how they work. Small example: I absolutely blew a (publicaly-traded) client’s mind showing them a projection mapping concept... 2 years ago, well after the tools made it a 15 minute job they could have gotten the savvy intern to execute.
“Video-video” often not, and there’s a lot of work we do that the client is excited about making that you just know nobody will ever watch, but hey they’re paying the invoices and good excuse to hone the craft.
And to your point the funny thing about fashion and narrative-style film/video is that when it’s a single frame of a skinny lady making a contorted pose in the middle of a crazy scene, you’ll accept that as given in a single image, but suddenly when you actually have to flesh out the world she’s in and try to create an implicit narrative around it to keep the viewer interested (instead of just a vague moody simulacrum of depth) it falls apart; when fashion people talk about “story” they are usually referencing the relationship between particular garments and poses between group still images, without any regard for what that word means in the larger narrative sense re: it being the key to human’s communication and attention.
I think there’s more an opportunity to rethink the problem stills are solving, and if our current solutions are still the most interesting and medium-appropriate ways to address those.
Like say we’re talking functional e-commerce imagery to sell you a specific sweater. What’s the best way to communicate the weight and flow of that sweater: through a 1/125th of a second of it puffed up to show its shape, or seeing how it actually flows and how the weight responds to manipulation in real time. Why deprive ourselves of all of that rich lighting and movement and color dynamics information our brains use to understand what we’re seeing, just because traditionally we’ve used ink smeared on wood pulp.
See Marvelous Designer[1] and CLO[2]. These are CAD programs for designing clothes. They make both a 3D model for viewing and patterns for cutting and sewing. When design moves to CAD, the designer already has a 3D model before the clothing is made. So, for catalog photos, there's no need for human models.
Mostly. Those two companies need better hair shaders.
1. The protagonist watches a prototype perfume commercial with eye-tracking glasses, and the computer ends up superimposing the closing logo over the part he watched the most often (this being 1981, I'm sure you can imagine...)
2. The implication that the computer can determine the 'perfect' poses and actions for optimal viewer response ("Not enough body twist according to the computer"), and the physical model having to contort herself to fit the ideal (you can see a few seconds of this at 0:39 in the trailer - https://youtu.be/yoT-r1slAZ4)
This is one of the few "AI will kill X" that I can see (if the article's claims are true). This wouldn't just impact models - it would automate the entire shooting process.
Models are cheap, but the overhead of the process is expensive. Hiring a photographer, lighting person, studio space, model, clothes and backdrop; coordinating with relatively high-paid internal stakeholders (execs, designers, etc.); and developing/touching up photos after... Big processes add up. There's a need.
At the low and medium end, this could totally replace the shoot process. Presumably, designers would have a basic version of the software in their standard toolkit (you can see it in a catalog before it's shot - talk about sales!), so the marginal cost would be 0. There's no differentiator - no friction.
If the software's output is comparable to a shoot for a department store, the there's a real solution.
Is there really a point to rampant, non-stop technological advancements if the common people never really get to see the benefits of it? It seems like life just keeps getting harder and harder for the lower classes.
But they do get to see them, they usually just don't notice them. Almost everyone in the developed world has a supercomputer in their pocket that acts as a flashlight and a video camera as well! Modern cars are far safer than old cars. They're faster than horses too. A modern combine harvester does the work of many people, which makes food much cheaper.
There are untold small and big improvements like that that we just take for granted. GDP per capita roughly doubles in 20 years. That's the combination of all of these small and big improvements added up on a societal scale. Before industrialization it could take over 1000 years to see a similar level of improvement in the life of an average person.
My grandparents had no running water. They would wash in a sauna with water from a pond or well. Famines were common at that time. People still mostly used horses for transport. Roads were not paved. Clothing was mostly self-made. Televisions didn't even exist yet. Radios were for well-off families. Compare that to today in a developed country.
This rampant non-stop technological advancement is what's making life better. It's just hard to notice if you don't think about it.
You caan't live in a video game. You cannot eat an iPhone. Maslow's Hierarchy still rests on its base, and tens of millions within the US and billions worldwide live precarious existences.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs is far from the problem in the US. Many millions might end up being evicted but the vast majority of them will end up finding other accommodations. There's a lot of housing available in the US. It's just not cheap in the places people want to be.
Maslow's hierarchy, a friend pointed out a few years back, is best considered not merely as a set of essential and nourishing goods and services, but security in those elements. The hand that offers whilst threatening, withdrawing, or threatening is not nurturing but the definition of abuse and trauma.
Living on a knife's edge, at all times, is not tenable.
Every year, 'Luddite' becomes less of a pejorative in my head, and I catch myself thinking maybe the Amish aren't being that unreasonable (except how to I get antibiotics, vaccines and bone grafts without also getting Twitter and online gambling?).
Based on the sorts of 'unplugging' trends that get picked up with some regularity, I'm not unique in this experience.
There is so much that's really cool in tech, but that feeling of discovery and wonder is a dopamine high. The junk food of happiness. It doesn't sustain, so you either have to let it go at some point, or get stuck in a loop of novelty seeking that doesn't end until you're just too old and tired to keep doing it. And like any addiction, the people who don't chose abstinence feel existentially threatened by those who do, and react as if being personally attacked. Meanwhile I'm sort of stuck in the middle because I don't think either works as well as moderation, which both sides hate because 'you people' won't pick a side. Novelty should be novel.
I keep waiting for the West to repeat the experiments of the '60s, complete with zen monasteries (now with 85% less sexual harassment!) and Hare Krishna robes everywhere.
At the risk of quoting a pervert: Everything is awesome and nobody is happy.
Wow, I think totally the opposite: I'm as anti-communist as they come, but even I recognize that if we as a civilization keep going down the path we're going down, there's going to come a day when there's no more useful work for humans to do. When we get to that point (but not before, you silly Antifas), we'll have to completely reimagine how people spend their days.
As others have commented there are lots of costs and logistical complications involved in a traditional photo shoot.
You need to have all the garments of the outfit, the model, the photographer and all support staff in the same place at the same time.
Replacing this with all digital models and clothes would be a big cost reduction.
However, it is still relatively hard to render photo-realistic faces and there's still a long way until all clothes are available as 3D models with realistic simulation of fabrics etc.
But there are already solutions being used today that achieve some of the benefits without using completely generated content.
Looklet[1] provides a system where each garment is shot individually on a mannequin. This is done by a couple of operators in a custom studio, typically placed in a warehouse or similar where samples are received.
The images are then combined with other garment images and previously shot images of models to produce photo-realistic catalog images without the need for a traditional photo shoot.
The web page has sample images and a list of retailers using this technology.
Take a look at e.g. Saks Off 5th's[2] catalog and see if you can spot the images that have been produced in this way.
>For one thing, digital models drastically reduce the environmental footprint associated with photo shoots and bringing clothes to market. It’s not uncommon for a model to shoot more than 50 outfits in a single day for an e-commerce shoot, and many of those samples end up in the landfills. Using 3D models would eliminate all of that. I spoke to Anastasia Edwards-Morel, a 3D fashion design expert at the design company CLO, who explained that by using 3D avatars and her company’s design software, a significant portion of the supply chain can now happen in a computer.
Model is just a top of the pyramid which is being eaten by software.
One can see though that that may also lead to small tech-advanced (3d printing/etc.) object "materialization" shops popping up close to consumer. While you're running your morning run and having breakfast, the outfit chosen upon waking up (based on looking at weather and your own "feel like") from a design collection just posted couple days ago (and which you can preview online as fitted right onto you instead of a model - it may look good on a model and not on you and vice versa) is getting "materialized" and delivered right to your door (and your previous ones which you don't need/want anymore are collected for recycling, refurbishing, donation, etc.).
That article, and the related one about Miquela Sousa [1] now have me thinking in several directions.
1. How long before someone plugs in a GPT-3 backed chatbot to handle the comments for these virtual models? Eventually, AI powered voice synthesis, lip-sync and animation (helped by a kinematics model) will handle basic animation, to allow real-time chat with a "virtual model" who can walk and talk. This could be my big ticket to Internet fame and fortune!
2. And then someone will want to marry one, a la William Gibson's novel Idoru. It'll be a real fight when true AGIs are asking for equal rights. But how about before then when someone wants to extend rights to a fancy chatbot with an animation package that we know isn't sentient? Will forming a corporation help or hurt that effort?
Why do we even need all that? My exposure to modelling is what I see them modelling, typically garments or accessories. There's no dialogue in spoken or written form.
Software has getting/gotten extremely good at mimicry. Natural motion and facial expressions are in development. I really don't see these things as being that far off into the future where the human is just moving a mouse/hand to find the motion and expressions for a specific sequence. Video game avatars are the best indicator. If you go back 5, 10, 15 years and compare those to what we can do now then extrapolate 5-15 years.
I think the biggest potential for AI in fashion will be to allow a customer to do "virtual try-on" - see a clothing item rendered on the customer's own body. Maybe eventually we'll reach a point where it's way cheaper to synthesize a photograph of a model wearing an item, but how expensive could those really be to make using a human being and a camera? But if you can synthesize a model wearing a shirt, it's not that big of a step to instead synthesize ME wearing that shirt. I can't easily get pictures of me wearing every shirt in the store the traditional way, so even an expensive, slow or flawed AI system to accomplish that would still have value.
I suspect I would buy significantly fewer clothes online if I saw a picture of myself in them first. The model sells me on it because somewhere deep in my brain I think maybe those clothes will make me look like the model.
As a customer, I would definitely be better off with an AI Selfie - I'd be happier with my purchases more often and maybe even get some sort of hidden psychological benefit to not looking at unrealistic model bodies. But I'm not sure retailers would stand to benefit much.
there is also rosebud.ai which creates images of clothing on (deepfake) models for businesses. It's supposed to save time and possibly money on photographers/models. Really excited for this to become viable for small businesses <3
"What if every time you shopped online you could see yourself in the clothes?"
What if every time you shopped online you could see a version of yourself you'd indicated you want to be (via a thousand small web interactions) in those clothes?
Taking that idea a step further, what if every time I wrote a comment online I could see a version of my comment that the person I want to be would write?
I think the article is hyperbole. 120 years ago, photography changed painting and today AI is going to change photography. It might be, just as with modernist painting, that freely available perfection creates a desire for distilled humanity that can't (yet) be captured by AI.
I think there is a fairly huge middle ground. I wish that REAL models would digitally represent themselves as 3D meshes, so that I could preview digital clothing on them. That would really sell clothes man.
>> The company uses generative adversarial networks (GANs), which is a type of machine learning, a subset of A.I.
"Subfield" is more correct but it's interesting that a model (and that's not a language model) gets the relation between neural nets, machine learning and AI right, when the majority of the so-called tech press gets it consistenty wrong, e.g. using AI to refer to deep learning in a kind of reverse-synecdoche.
Wow, so many questions and thoughts this article raises in me.
The biggest takeaway for me was that this technology will likely naturally evolve to seeing ourselves in the content and clothing we want. Maybe it's a bit narcissistic to declare publicly, but I have personally seen through my own work the march towards personalization: what's more personal than seeing yourself everywhere doing everything?
I think many of these comnments are missing the broader implications for the fashion modeling world in general.
Right now there are a lot of folks that are not models tied into this as well: photographers, lighting and set people, makeup, dressers, travel arrangers, fixers, etcs.
I can easily see a near future with the equivalent of Unreal Engine for modling. All sets, lighting, makeup, AND people in picture will be life-like. There will be easily configurable random but realistic auto-posing, etc.
The jobs will all become highly comodified down to low paying jobs for long hours much like the video game industry is today.
And none of the afore mentioned jobs or attendent costs will be required.
As for consumers wanting to "know" the real models and their lives and advantures? Ok well, I'll get off your lawn grandpa. If current trends contue, none of that will matter. Folks already form para-relationships with digital/fantasy people (re: go to any cosplay convention). So the models not being "real" will pose no barrier in the long run.
On a related subject, most of the images in an IKEA catalogue are now entirely digitally generated. One reason this is so is to allow for slightly different content to be delivered country to country (change of wall colour, different wall furniture etc). Some details here: https://architizer.com/blog/practice/details/see-how-ikea-3d...
What remains to be considered is human judgement. But it won't be long. There has been some research on automating the aesthetic placement of the camera within the scene... automatic composition. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9112197
As a painter, I certainly know there are rules, albeit very 'floppy' ones.
A side question: do people want digital models that look like real people?
Shudu and her peers _look_ CGI, and I think that's deliberate. Compare the Shudu instagram with the output of a modern GAN. I think this is likely an intentional aesthetic choice. What if part of the appeal of a digital model is it can look both like and not like a person, in a way that is controllable and expressive?
A separate question from the aesthetics is, could it be better to "objectify" something that's already an object, than to do that to a real person?
The self-description of "Shudu Gram" as "world's first digital supermodel" ignores the history of Lara Croft's spread in The Face magazine (in Versace, amongst others), or the likes of Hatsune Miku and more Japanese idoru.
I was skeptical, but while I was reading the article my wife looked over my shoulder at the photo on top of the article. Unprompted, she asked "Wow, she's absolutely gorgeous. Who is she?"
We might be further along towards CGI models than I thought
I'm not sure I agree with this. Just like people still like to go to live concerts I think that people will still like real live models. And knowing that a real live model has a limited life span will make them way more interesting while in their prime. Besides, what makes a person quite interesting many times is not necessarily only how they look but how they live their lives.
I do agree that AI models may/can become huge. But there will still be plenty of room for human ones.
It almost feels that if AI models became prevalent the result would be to make some human models even more interesting.
When I say Paris and NYC fashion week won't be kill I mean: the more artistic and high aspirational side of fashion will always be driven by humans (IMO) and humans will want to work with other humans. Not a fashion designer but I suspect it is hard for you to design clothes for a digital human to wear. I mean, if you're a game designer maybe you're moved by that. But not sure a fashion designer would.
Modeling is an art form. In my opinion it's about as likely to be taken over by AI as any other art form.
We have seen AI (or CGI) being used increasingly in film, music and writing, but the highest forms of these arts are not AI, unless they are AI for AI's sake (i.e. as a novelty).
A fintech firm might now be producing daily stock summaries from AI. A Hollywood studio might make use of CGI in its movies. But the highest art form still makes without AI and will continue so for many decades to come.
The ... value ... in at least fine or collectable art (as opposed to mere mass entertainment) or other assets (wine, ancient artefacts, first editions and original manuscripts, etc.) lies largely, though not necessarily entirely, in uniqueness, particularly in status signalling value, as a Veblen good. Costs of production and provenance here are actually favourable characteristics and establish signalling capability.
There is at least some likelihood that it's precisely the elements or aspects which are not automatable, or which are not automated, which will achive higher status.
Actual models are already unrealistically attractive and fit so I'm a little bit worried about generated models are going to make people feel about themselves.
I can see models being eliminated just because operating with them is politically dicey and fraught with ethical issues.
So many stories of abuse and mistreatment and them eating tissue paper or being sexualized at 14 keep periodically occurring that eventually enough people will just say forget it and use digital creations.
Conversely, I can see models not being eliminated. Because the people in power with money and choosing where to spend it would rather spend it on pretty women they can creep on than throwing it at a few nerds and a supercomputer.
If you`re one of the parties on the leading edge of the transition to "artificial beauty", the champagne will continue to flow.
Beyond the fad and hype sales cycles of fashion perhaps art will flourish again with all of the excess natural beauty that is still in demand. Its still timeless!
i can see that software will also eat the fashion industry how ever not primarily with AI first but CGI+AI.
I can imagine that there will be a transition from hollywood like VFX artists from film/gaming to fashion if the demand for CG models is there.
Putting real life actors in AAA games has been a thing for years at this point, but now the graphics are so advanced that it will look completely photo real within the next couple console generations.
Those game companies put real life actors in their movies because of the audience recognizes them. Same thing will likely happen for fashion as well. If you buy famous models'/celebrities' digital model you can reuse and license that however you want.
This is for the best. It seems especially damaging to the formation of a fully actualized human to derive your living merely on being born looking a certain way. Maybe I'm wrong, but is there any particular skill to being a model?
It seems more like the job of "Model" is being replaced by "Instagram Influencer". Companies can get attractive people on Instagram (possibly a CG person) to show off the clothing for them, and seemingly quite cheaply.
Age will take her job but yeah AI will take away the job of model for the most part when not at in person events. An AI can't ever really replace the pheromone response at those I think.
the era of artificial / roboticized everything is gonna be "interesting".. we need to exist for others even if we have nothing to do (as obligations, survival or else).
I recently started brainstorming with my brother about what fields are actually likely to be disrupted by AI technologies that exist today and the list was quite surprising and unlike what I had seen in the media. The impact is likely to start in the creative industries. Entrepreneurs feel free to steal :
1. Hollywood in the Cloud : The progress of computer vision algorithms, game engines like Unreal and massive computation in the cloud mean that in 25 years time you maybe able to produce a Hollywood quality movie by writing code. Unreal engine will render the backgrounds, Deep neural nets will generate the actors voices and faces and code will be used to stitch everything together. This may also include the production of background scores by neural nets primed on music in similar scenes. The number of people needed to produce a film will be cut by 10x and we will see an explosion in film making. Tik Tok is an early example of this.
2. Digital Models: This is connected to the above. You will also see digital models being used on billboards and news readers will be replaced by models like GPT-3 that convert data into narratives and then they are read by digital newsreaders. They may even make it interactive by reading out the most popular tweets or having fake discussion between AI models with different personalities.
3.Lawyers : GPT-3 has given me a lot of confidence in predicting a major disruption to legal research. You can probably semi automate case research and you don't need armies of junior lawyers or para legals to fight cases.
4.Accountants: This relies on the continued improvement in computer vision in the ability to read and interpret printed invoices. More and more transactions will happen via APIs and be shepherded by digital accountants too.
5.Programmers: I am less sure of how programmers will be replaced but there are some obvious avenues. Natural language interfaces could make most front end work obsolete. You don't really need an Uber app if GPT-3 on steroids can understand exactly what you want and then produce a widget on the fly that shows you the appropriate information on demand. Most simple apps will be folded into natural language assistants which means that front end work will go down. What does exist will be designed with the assistance of AI tools. The backend work could also increasingly be subsumed into making a knowledge base that can learn and respond to intelligent queries.
6.Therapists: Smarter NLP models could act as digital therapists. People maybe more comfortable talking to a digital therapist and not be judged by an actual person. They can be given digital bodies and voices to make them more realistic. GPT-3 is way ahead of ELIZA and even in the original ELIZA studies people became quite attached to it. Technology is making people lonely and people may turn to technology to fix it.
7.Fake twitch streamers / Cam models: Synthesis algorithms could become so advanced that some people could become more attractive versions of themselves and create fake model personas that make a lot of money on websites like Twitch.
Our economy and education system are probably unprepared for the scale of disruptions we may see.
Can someone tell me why models are so in demand? Can’t people remix existing photos and so on? There are tons of stock photos now too. It’s not like they need a new model for every time they show a watch.
What's considered aesthetically pleasing continually evolves over time. There are underlying trends in physical beauty that resemble what we see in fashion, art, music, etc. Humans also have a quite a lot of control over much of their appearance with hair styling, makeup, and (increasingly) cosmetic surgery. This, combined with the ageism inherent to modeling, adds up to fairly sustained demand.
> Can someone tell me why models are so in demand? Can’t people remix existing photos and so on? There are tons of stock photos now too. It’s not like they need a new model for every time they show a watch.
Usage rights.
Time of models and photographers is cheap - for below supermodel catwalk class it is less than $150/h including the overhead. For catalog/commercial models $50/h including overhead is a good pay.
Buying out of usage rights is expensive. Worldwide buyout for a dozen images for 1 years could easily be $50,000. So instead they get those 12 images for that specific usage type (online) for the time rate + $1
Having a good model can set your photos apart from stock photos, even if they are doctored a bit. This is especially important if you don't have someone on hand with good photoshop skills (which is probably also in demand).
I guess this is all dependent on how "in demand" models are...
That's kind of how it works these days. Photographers take a single photo of a model wearing a particular style of outfit and other similar outfits are photoshopped in.
So, instead to taking a photo for each outfit and for each variant of the outfit, they just take one.
I am not so sure. Copying from a short horror story I wrote myself, "The level of earthly technology (...) was already advanced enough to create whole movies using digital actors exclusively, with perfect bodies and unprecedented beauty. But, for some reason, the masses still preferred flesh-and-bone actors, in spite of the costs and their erratic performance. The blurry, undefined line between the character and the human being is attractive by itself."
>whole movies using digital actors exclusively, with perfect bodies and unprecedented beauty.
lets make one step further - how about digital actors' images adjusted slightly for any given movie watcher. Can't be done with real people. New tech isn't always "better" (like in "better horse"), it opens/brings in new possibilities/capabilities (like in "car").
I've lived in NYC for the last decade+. Had many friends that had legitimate careers as models. Some lasted a year with just a few shoots and a self-funded trip to Paris fashion week before they quit or went into debt over it. Some have been going at it for more than a decade and you would recognize if you flipped through a fashion magazine even semi-regularly.
I also work in media, date someone in fashion and have knowledge of what actually gets paid to models.
While there are a rare few who find a real career out of it and rise out of the traps of shitty agencies and contracts, usually by branching out and establishing a self-brand, none of them that I know made something they can comfortably retire on just with what we would consider the job of a model.
There are certainly exceptions to this but in general, if you're a fashion brand, digital or print magazine offering any type of exposure, hiring a model is inexpensive. Rarely if ever livable wages. That goes for most of the people who work on sets or for fashion shows.
So with all of that preamble out of the way, what I am getting at is...
1. Coordinating an AI model, that has to wear these clothes, and that bracelet, and be on this location, or pictures with this lighting sounds complex and expensive when hiring a set to produce the real thing is a known quantity and cost virtually minimum wages. 2. There are still people who deeply care about the art of the whole thing and do most of their work for free to be supported in anyway to keep doing it. I am looking on the not so bright, bright side here but I'd like to think AI is little more of a thread than stock photography.