Signed, Sealed, Simulated
The infiltration of generative AI into fashion marketing raises urgent questions about authorship, authenticity, and the quiet erosion of creative apprenticeship.
In our increasingly tech-centric world, there’s a growing danger that we’ve infused too much of our personalities into our phones — so much so that we’re sleepwalking into redundancy. The eerie consequences of the tech revolution are already creeping into the fashion industry, a famously human realm now flirting with virtual interns. From curating trend forecasts to mocking up marketing campaigns, AI agents are poised to slip into roles once filled by fresh-faced, coffee-fetching undergraduates. But if fashion hands its apprenticeships over to algorithms, what will become of human creatives?
Before we get to the existential anxiety at the heart of this issue, it’s worth acknowledging just how strong the demand for AI upgrades has become. Corporate adoption of the technology more than doubled in 2024 compared to the previous year. In the retail sector, marketing and sales departments have emerged as key beneficiaries, with nearly half of organisations now using AI to generate promotional content. This specific use case delivered measurable profits for companies that made the switch.
The adoption rate is only set to rise as we enter the “agentic” phase of the technology, which ominously promises to equip AI systems with the ability to act autonomously, not merely generate content. This shift, from sci-fi to reality, occurred in March with the viral debut of Manus, a Wuhan-made software touted as the world’s first fully autonomous AI agent. In a review for MIT Technology Review, Caiwei Chen described Manus as “like collaborating with a highly intelligent and efficient intern.”
To understand how this might reshape departments like fashion marketing, we must consider the clear advantages. AI agents offer unparalleled efficiency, multilingual fluency, and the ability to learn from past projects. Like us, they can think, write, and design, but unlike us, they don’t require salaries, social security, or health insurance.
This new reality poses a critical question for creative industries: if AI agents are the new interns, what happens to the next generation of talent?
As we edge closer to this doomsday for creativity, the implications of the great AI replacement stretch far beyond simple cost-cutting. While companies may reap short-term rewards, the long-term damage to creative development could prove terminal. Interns — often the lifeblood of the fashion industry (think about who really makes fashion week tick) — bring not only fresh insight into cultural shifts and human behaviour, but also a raw passion that will always remain alien to insensate AI systems.
Once fashion embraces AI agents, a more urgent question emerges — one that moves beyond efficiency and touches the nerve of the industry: authenticity. Will algorithmic collections and campaigns feel as timely and resonant as those imagined by human minds? Or are we accelerating toward a formulaic future, where creativity is monopolised by machines churning out campaign after campaign to serve their corporate overlords — who prioritise profit margins over artistic expression, as already seen in fashion’s persistent quest to democratise (and dilute) luxury?
If that’s the direction we’re heading in, it’s worth asking whether AI is even capable of generating truly original ideas. Artists create by drawing on memory, emotion, and personal bias — elements AI cannot replicate. To do so, machines would need lived experience to pull from. Instead, the technology relies on data pillaged from the web, amplifying the risk of imitation on an industrial scale — and with it, the potential violation of intellectual property belonging to real, human creatives.
This inherent vulnerability of the technology is prompting businesses to adopt “human-in-the-loop” mechanisms, ensuring AI-generated content remains under constant scrutiny. While AI will undoubtedly transform workforces, this doesn’t necessarily mean job loss — instead, it could create as many roles as it displaces.
In the luxury sector, creative AI experiments have already yielded fascinating results. For instance, the French-Moroccan label Casablanca enlisted the AI platform Midjourney for its Spring ‘23 campaign, using it to craft a surreal, retro-futuristic desertscape that highlighted the collection and showcased the tech-assisted potential to push creative boundaries. Yet, despite the AI-generated visuals, the concept itself was executed by human talent, debunking the myth that machines can fully replace human ingenuity.
This dynamic positions AI as a collaborator, not a competitor — much like the camera, which revolutionised art two centuries ago. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), Walter Benjamin argued that the camera, while a powerful tool, could never replace the "aura" of human-made art. Similarly, no matter how advanced, AI cannot capture the soul of creativity. That’s why artists must embrace this new technology as a medium — just as photographers and filmmakers did with the camera — turning it into a tool for human ideas, not a force that displaces them.
Ultimately, it’s imperative that we evolve alongside artificial intelligence — not just as creatives, but as a society. The technology is here to stay. Thriving in this amorphous human-android landscape will require new creative fluencies, from prompt engineering to conceptual direction, that allow us to work with AI rather than be overshadowed by it. For the next generation of talent, this isn't just a technical upgrade — it’s a cultural one. If we want a future where creativity remains human at its core, we must ensure we still control the narrative — by learning to speak to machines, not allowing them to speak for us.
