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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.
“This was one area I thought we could try to save on but after having seen the result, I’m now going back to producing our [e-commerce] with a full team of humans, because AI could never achieve the results that my IRL team could,” Oberg reflected, adding that her brand’s current images have a “certain lifelessness to them.”
“They’re flat, the styling is mediocre and the images are too ‘perfect’ in a bad way,” Oberg continued. “The models look dead in the eyes and don’t have any organic movement whatsoever. The images are empty and void of any feeling or emotion.”
Oberg chalked up the AI’s failure to the reality that taste is “felt, not learned.” And image-generating AI models are, after all, learning models; they don’t have lived experiences that translate into a particular way of viewing the world around them and the objects within it, nor do they have a certain “je ne sais quoi.” Though taste is a way through which people communicate with each other, taste itself is something that’s often unexplainable.
“The smartest AI in the world can learn everything there is to know about taste and style,” she added, “but the feeling will never be there.”
It’s interesting to see this AI experiment fail at Sporty & Rich, a brand that, like peers including Glossier and Goop, is a definitional of a certain type of deeply aesthetics-driven venture pioneered on social media platforms like Pinterest, Tumblr, and Instagram during the 2010s. Oberg was able to capture a feeling, first translated through a collection of carefully-curated imagery from across the web, and bottle it into a successful line of fashion and lifestyle products designed to embody a particular “health is wealth” ethos. That today’s AI models apparently can’t adequately capture that same feeling or aesthetic in a way that feels satisfying, or even human, speaks volumes to its remaining limits in the creative world.
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