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Comment by acconrad | Hacker News Reader

would this mean that outside of runway models, you wouldn't need models to showcase your clothing anymore since you can just "wrap" your clothes over these AI humans?

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Exactly. If you're Gap and have a lineup with thousands of articles of clothing, why would you go through the trouble of procuring models? You have to deal with modeling agencies, photographers, set managers, etc... When the AI gets good enough, it will be even better than the alternative. It will serve ads showing only your body type. Maybe the models will even have....your face.

It could lead to more than just putting casual models out of work. Fewer stylists and designers would be needed.

Let the AI generate the color patterns (sticking with Gap as an example, it might retain their chosen /size as constraints) and boom, on demand styling

Not to mention you wouldn't need photoshop anymore to give the models unrealistic proportions. Adopt this system and proudly declare that you don't photoshop the models! Like fat-free soda.

Hm something got lost there. Intended to write their garment design and known sizing guide as constraints.

Basically start by changing colors around.

Until 3D printed textiles get there anyway.

I could see A/B testing with minor variations in style and appearance too, optimizing for CTR.

That would be great. You don't need a floor length mirror and changing rooms if you can just have your rendered body and face to exchange clothes on. Need to get accurate measurements for the right dimensions though.

This leads to more very cool stuff.

3D body scanning to get a representation of your body. Than use software to automatically generate and cut clothing patterns to get the exact fit you're looking for. TNow all that's left is stiching, which would be fairly difficult to automate when patterns are variable so would still be a significant cost point for custom clothing.

That would depend on very accurate cloth physics simulation as well. This is way beyond what the article is showcasing, it's not even in the same ballpark.

Models may also license their image so they don’t need to try on 1000 clothing items.

Or perhaps there will be manufactured AIs that star in films and model clothing.

I don't think this will work because the AI is not going to recreate what a specific article of clothing will look like on a human. Or at least not yet.

This tech generates random images of models in random clothing. Maybe it could be instructed to do 'male' and 'brown' and 'jacket' - but never with the specificity required of a specific piece of clothing.

All clothes fit and drape in a unique way.

Also - models for regular clothing are a commodity and the process for getting generic imagery is industrialized and cheap.

Getting the 'photos of clothing on the model' is a small part of the cost.

Finally there is of course the other aesthetic choices, i.e. what's in the background that have to do with a particular design choice for whatever reason i.e. season choices. That won't be reproduced by AI either.

So it's all very cool, but still mostly novel.

Ikea does this for furniture already;

https://www.cadcrowd.com/blog/why-ikea-uses-3d-renders-vs-ph...

Doing it for clothes on humans seems like a reasonable next-step.

Wow, I would have never guessed their catalog is made up of 3D renders.

Somehow they'll have to find a way around lookalikes. A real human who believes the rendering is actually their image and likeness. So they'll have to have a way to prove that there was no "contamination".

Funny enough, there was a case[1] of a real person thinking a model on a website was him but it turned out the image was that of an altogether different person that just looked like them, uncannily.

For illustration, let's say the AI generated a "body" that looked eerily similar to Kim Kardashian or the president of Burundi and used it to promote products or causes.

[1]https://www.npr.org/2019/03/10/702063209/man-inadvertently-p...

We simply use `bod2vec` to enforce a perimeter around trademarked personas. One simply chooses a suitable metric and embedding, and a safe distance, like (kDash-prezBurundi)², and any corporate avatar closer than that to a trademarked bod has to pay royalties at an inverse-square rate.

I can imagine the liability of _not_ having a human to say "this is me" miiiiight keep this from becoming a go-to for big brands.

Or we could put it this way: a corporation might see this as a choice between A) creating a whole new branch of case law to test in the court system, fueled by highly paid lawyers, or B) just pay a part-time model to be able to say "this wasn't you nor inspired by you, because that's the the model and we entered this contract together"

There will definitely be cases, if this becomes mainstream. I’m sure the companies developing this will come up with a solution proving “independent” genesis of the image/likeness.

I imagine they'd have to have a curating pass that cross-checks the generated models against public figures. For the less famous, as with your example, people are just going to have to get used to the fact that their appearance isn't necessarily unique and that they don't own the appearance of other people (real or fictional) who coincidentally look like them.

Some brands that sell lots of variants of similar items, like t-shirt stores, already do something close : they take a few shots of models in various poses, and then somehow "map" the pattern and color of the piece of clothing on those few shots, so really they need a model once and then they can do without.

No because the pictures are randomly generated. You can control some things like age, gender, and in this case probably things like dress length, but there's no way to say "here's an item of clothing, make them wear this". At least not yet.

AI already taking human jobs...

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