蜜芽传媒

The August edition of Vogue magazine has upset a lot of people. But I鈥檓 not one of them. I was, admittedly, pretty alarmed when I first heard that it had included an advert with an AI-generated fashion model. As a father of three young daughters, I worry enough already about the unrealistic standards promoted by the fashion industry. What fresh hell of perfectionism are we entering now, I wondered, with these computer-generated images of stereotypical beauty?

On reflection, though, I鈥檝e come to feel less apocalyptic about AI鈥檚 emerging role in fashion. When cameras were first invented, artists worried it might be the end of art. If photographic equipment could perfectly reproduce a landscape, or a bowl of fruit, or a person鈥檚 face, what chance was there for human beings attempting the same with a paintbrush? But cameras didn鈥檛 destroy art; they refocused it. Artists pivoted to what photography couldn鈥檛 so easily portray. Impressionism, Symbolism, and Expressionism were all attempts to explore the inner worlds of human life and experience.

Might AI provoke a similar shift within the fashion industry? Christianity, along with many other religious traditions, insists that human beings are more than material beings, that they possess souls, and are made in the image of God. At the same time, Christianity affirms the body鈥檚 role in expressing the soul and participating in divine life. It鈥檚 a deeply incarnational faith. At the heart of the Christian story is, after all, the shocking claim that God Himself took on a human body, vulnerable to suffering, scarring, aging, and death.

At its best, the fashion industry celebrates the beauty of the human form and the power of the imagination. Models are dehumanised, however, insofar as their images are edited to eliminate wrinkles, blemishes, or supposed imperfections. AI has not changed this. It has merely taken the airbrushing habit to its logical conclusion, creating images of humans with literally no human beings in them at all. Pure fabrication and fantasy.

AI has not changed this. It has merely taken the airbrushing habit to its logical conclusion, creating images of humans with literally no human beings in them at all.

Yet the uncanny appeal of AI models may be just what the fashion industry needs to force a long overdue conversation on the representation of the human form. Things may finally be bad enough that they might start getting better. Now that artificiality has so thoroughly triumphed through the creepy unreality of AI, there may be reason to hope for some kind of rebalancing towards greater authenticity.

Perhaps that鈥檚 wishful thinking. But we as consumers do have some power to effect positive change. As well as making known our distaste for the use of AI models, we can, individually, each work harder to regard human models with more dignity. The advent of AI would be a good thing if it encouraged us all to see, and not just look at, our fellow humans.

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