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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
| 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.
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?
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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.
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.
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?
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.
[+] [-] talove|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tux1968|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thephyber|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] skybrian|5 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kerkeslager|5 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] raverbashing|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] smoe|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Jyaif|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|5 years ago|reply
At some point it will just be simpler and cheaper to replace Photoshop and in fact the entire photography/imaging pipeline by some AI.
[+] [-] jariel|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] flycaliguy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] TAForObvReasons|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] thrir777|5 years ago|reply
Good luck replacing that with expensive AI developers to produce fake stuff.
[+] [-] FearNotDaniel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeswin|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] est31|5 years ago|reply
We still have horses today. We still have coal miners. We'll still have human models. There'll just be less of them.
[+] [-] skwb|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] munificent|5 years ago|reply
Humans thrive on real in-person contact, but you wouldn't know it if you looked at how we acted.
[+] [-] supernova87a|5 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] seibelj|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wil421|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] HumblyTossed|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aerroon|5 years ago|reply
A digger (machine) replaced a lot of workers with shovels, but in the long-term it has clearly been good for society.
[+] [-] TLightful|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skwb|5 years ago|reply
| 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.
[+] [-] adwi|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] MeetingsBrowser|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Kinrany|5 years ago|reply
Ten hand-picked photographs will probably look better than the whole video they were picked from.
[+] [-] Animats|5 years ago|reply
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] https://marvelousdesigner.com/
[2] https://www.clo3d.com
[+] [-] FiddlerClamp|5 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/2IZfSr891bE (warning, nudity)
Two additional scenes stand out:
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)
[+] [-] DoofusOfDeath|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curiousllama|5 years ago|reply
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.
Why would I ever bother with a physical shoot?
[+] [-] zippy5|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Apocryphon|5 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuAjeuKXX7c
[+] [-] yelloweyes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkaving|5 years ago|reply
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.
[1] https://www.looklet.com
[2] https://www.saksoff5th.com/c/women/apparel
[+] [-] trhway|5 years ago|reply
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.).
[+] [-] ansible|5 years ago|reply
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?
We do live in interesting times.
[1] https://www.vogue.com/article/lilmiquela-miquela-sousa-insta...
[+] [-] karmakaze|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Imnimo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elliekelly|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kipply|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bayouborne|5 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] wwarner|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|5 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] jfernandez|5 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] ickwabe|5 years ago|reply
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.