Can AI have good taste? Fashion founder and tastemaker Emily Oberg says no.
In a post on her Substack, Emily Loves, Oberg discussed her experiments using AI to help her run Sporty & Rich, the fashion and lifestyle brand she founded in 2018 on the back of a popular moodboard she created. One area where she’s been testing AI, she wrote, is by using AI to generate e-commerce images — and according to the founder’s postmortem, the test was a failure.
“With the rise of AI and the ongoing discourse around the threat it has on creativity, jobs and society as a whole, I firmly believe that it will never possess good taste the way that a human does,” Oberg declared. “And this is why I don’t think it’s as much of a threat to creatives as people think.”
E-commerce imagery, Oberg said, is one of her brand’s steepest expenses, costing “upwards of” $200,000 for each twice-yearly shoot. Wanting to see if AI could help her get around these significant costs, Sporty & Rich used AI to generate e-commerce images to model its last collection. While the imagery may have been far cheaper than photos modeled, photographed, and edited by humans, however, the cost-cutting came with a catch: it just wasn’t very good.
