Moments ago, I trashed the post I wrote about Levi’s announcement that it plans to use AI generated models in order to provide its customers with greater diversity.
Fashion brand Levi Strauss & Co has announced a partnership with digital fashion studio Lalaland.ai to make custom artificial intelligence (AI) generated avatars in what it says will increase diversity among its models.
San Francisco-based Levi Strauss & Co — often shortened to just Levi’s — is perhaps best known for its wide range of blue jeans. Founded in 1853, the company says it is one of the world’s largest brand-name apparel companies and is a global leader in jeanswear. It has chosen to partner with Lalaland.ai in order to use its advanced AI to create a wider range of avatars to model its clothes.
Levi’s explains that it know its what its customers want and plans to give it to them good and hard.
We know our customers want to shop with models who look like them, and we believe our models should reflect our consumers, which is why we’re continuing to diversify our human models in terms of size and body type, age and skin color. This AI technology can potentially assist us by supplementing models and unlocking a future where we can enable customers to see our products on more models that look like themselves, creating a more personal and inclusive shopping experience.
In the post I’d written and trashed, I expressed my view that Levi’s has both missed the boat on diversity by eliminating any actually diverse human being from being involved in favor of achieving equity the old fashioned way, by eliminating people altogether. From there, I launched into my doubts that anybody actually wants to see how jeans look on someone in dire need of sit-ups and fewer maple bacon donuts.
But then I realized that it may only be me who doesn’t buy into this “looks like me” mantra. On the one hand, not all old Jewish guys look alike, so if they generate an AI model for old white man, there’s nothing about it that “looks like me” to begin with. But more importantly, I’m well aware of what I look like. I have a mirror. I want to see the clothing to buy, and seeing it on some unattractive person who happens to share some remotely similar characteristics does not make them “look like me,” present anything that I wish to see or would make me want to buy the clothing.
Am I wrong? Is it just me?
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