In Italy, the Garante suspended the now famous chatbot "ChatGPT" a few weeks ago in the name of user privacy. In the rest of the world, however, increasingly creative ways are being sought to harness generative technologies and apply them to everyday life to improve our lives. In the midst of the buzz from off and on events of the Salone del Mobile, in fact, news broke that these days (April 20th - 21st), in New York at the Spring Studio in Manhattan, the first AI Fashion Week, a.k.a. the "fashion week" of Artificial Intelligence, kicked off.
But should one really be afraid of AI? The 350 or so creators who submitted their projects to AI Fashion Week certainly aren't. After all, the occasion is a great one: this is a free event organized by the Revolver Group, one of the most important players of the moment for online fashion shopping aimed at millennials and Gen Z.
But how does this competition work? In the full spirit of its nature, there will be no real runway show of models on New York catwalks, but many digital megascreens on which participants must project a minimum of fifteen to a maximum of thirty outfits each. An online survey is tasked, however, with deciding the ten finalists from which the superjury, which features members from top brands such as Celine, Adidas, and Vogue magazine, must fish out the three winning collections that will be financed, produced, and then marketed.
AI Fashion Week aims to discover new talents working in fashion with artificial intelligence, a more topical implication than ever that already invests our present more than our future. In fact, artificial intelligence associated with fashion has the power to quickly perform consumer sentiment analysis. This is possible thanks to the aggregation of data collected from, for example, Tik Tok videos and Instagram Reels that gives concrete form to the most current trends in an increasingly fluid, fast-paced and flexible fashion world. Haute Couture brands have been pinning their antennae on this first AI Fashion Week to intercept the most interesting creators and secure the youngest and smartest customers in the market.
So, at this point, all that remains is to rephrase the question: should we really be afraid of AI? As an evolutionary technology by definition, still there are many bugs but they are bound to disappear soon. Can the thrill of human creative beauty be replaced by a thinking robot? Probably not, but the debate will constantly dominate our lives from now on.
After all, can anyone reading say for sure that this article was written by a real-life journalist? If you can, ask ChatGPT.
