A high-level view of how AI could impact the future of fashion
by Meg Pirie
Photo by Cash Macanaya on Unsplash
According to figures by Fashion United, the fashion industry is worth around £1.65tn globally. Creativity is often upheld as a niche human quality, however, the rise in the use of artificial intelligence (AI), risks eliminating a number of creative and fashion jobs. A paper prepared by PwC for the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, predicts that technology threatens devastating job losses over the next 20 years in wholesale and retail; transport and logistics; and manufacturing. The report suggests that as many as 30% of UK jobs could disappear within this period.
This evidence shows a significant impact on entry-level jobs for younger workers, which are more likely to be automated and those with higher education and degrees more likely to see a positive effect than those with little qualifications. From a socio-economic point of view, this raises the question of how barriers will be identified that prevent minority groups from entering entry-level jobs and what support will be available. With this in mind, in a recent debate on AI and jobs in the House of Commons, Mick Whitley MP, raised the following:
“an urgent plea for a rights-based and people-focused approach to artificial intelligence, and for a process that puts the voices and interests of workers at its heart. In this new machine age, we must assert more than ever the fundamental right of all people to a basic level of economic security and dignity at work.”
The report also showcased data from ONS highlighting significant estimated net employment reductions are projected in wholesale and retail. The paper cites that due to the size of the sector, the automating effect of AI in the retail sector may be particularly disruptive to the economy, specifying that wholesale and retail constitutes more than 12% of employment in the UK. The retail sector has already been pummelled by Covid and Brexit red-tape, as well as the ongoing cost-of-living crisis, alongside record retail closures. In 2021, PWC reported over 17,500 chain stores closed in 2020 alone. More recently, the Centre for Retail Research (CRR) recorded that retail closures affected 34,907 employees in 2022. This raises the need for the voices and interests of workers to be placed at the heart of AI policy, while simultaneously ensuring that investment is aligned to deliver town centres that reclaim maximum impact to a specific place with a focus on hyper-locality.
There are also concerns that AI will have specific impacts in the design process. At the recent respective London and Paris Fashion Weeks, this was already being utilised to predict trends and analyse customer preferences. Forecasting agencies are focusing on quantitative results based on runway show images and also utilising social media to spot emerging trends far more quickly. While this could be seen to assist with market-driven designs, Forbes highlights that a further challenge to AI will be the homogenisation of design and the concern around the decline in the quality of fashion products. Therefore, the challenges will be on the capability for the algorithm to replace human labour. For fashion, this could impact models, stylists, designers, marketers and writers to name but a few.
Writer Rebecca Arnold who has written a number of fashion books including ‘30-Second Fashion’ and ‘Fashion: A Very Short Introduction,’ spoke with us today, as her writing has been used without permission to train generative-AI systems. As anyone in the creative sector will know, writing and publishing at this level, is a labour of love and would have taken countless hours of research. Arnold was first alerted to the fact that her book was being used after reading an article by Alex Reisner about 183,000 books being used to train AI systems, without permission.
Arnold told us:
“After reading Alex Reisner’s article on the theft of authors’ texts by companies including Meta and Bloomberg, I discovered that two of my books were among the 183,000 being used without permission or recognition to train AI to write. This raises huge questions concerning intellectual copyright - and transparency and openness in AI’s development by these companies. All creatives need to be aware of this situation and its implications.”
From an Intellectual Property point of view, we contacted the UK’s leading design and intellectual property campaigning organisation, Anti Copying In Design (ACID) on this topic, Dids Macdonald OBE – CEO and Co-founder of ACID said:
“Many say there are huge opportunities for AI within the creative industries and undoubtedly, there are, but there are also diverse challenges not least about tech firms using artists’ work to train its systems without permission.
“Using the IP of creators, without the originator’s permission, raises serious ethical, legal, and reputational concerns. Firstly, it may infringe on IP rights, potentially leading to copyright violations. Artists hold legal rights over the work they create making unauthorised usage a breach of those rights and, if intentional, it is a crime.
“This practice can also erode artists control over their work through manipulation inconsistent with their original vision. It also denies the author/creator fair compensation, impacting livelihoods.
“There is a significant risk of tech firms damaging relationships with the creative community by continuing to use designs without permission. To mitigate these risks, there is a corporate responsibility for tech companies to secure permissions and compensations for artists.
“Many are calling for global IP regulation on those big tech firms capitalising on IP which does not belong to them but thus far there is little buy-in to this ethos, nor would there appear to be any appetite for licensing models. UK creators are looking to our Government to create clear guidance on this subject which, currently, is expanding exponentially with little or no regulation, ethics, or compliance.”
We do not yet know how this will impact the fashion industry or the broader economy as a whole, therefore we are asking for:
Key Policy Asks:
A roadmap which takes responsibility for the potential impacts of AI on the labour market; its impact on skills and the required steps to mitigate devastating job losses in the fashion sector.
A long-term focused and robust policy framework with a rights-based and people-focused approach to artificial intelligence, and for a process that puts the voices and interests of workers at its heart.
Transparency around the use of AI. That all AI designs and marketing be labelled as such, to ensure that those created by people are set apart. Similar to the Competition and Markets Authority policy for content creators and influencers on transparency around ads.
Stringent IP regulation that protects creatives and their work from the use in training of AI programmes and systems.