Comment by cerol | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cerol | Hacker News Reader

Part of me thinks "this is really cool, it's all moving really fast", but the other part of me thinks "this is moving too fast, aren't people missing something?".

It feels like everyone's so desperate to create or predict the next AI unicorn, that no one's paying attention to the fundamentals. Gives me weird dotcom bubble vibes.

I still cannot see how this can fundamentally change the fashion industry. Fashion is not about design, it's about generating desire to buy. You hire models and influencers to showcase your items, so people think they can be just like them, you just have buy the same piece of clothing. AI doesn't change that. You could totally have a niche for AI-generated clothing, but that's it.

Besides, clothes are a physical item. AI can automate the generation of a "blueprint", but it is still heavily constrained by the physical result. It would be mostly hit and miss. Feels more efficient to have designer use their experience to create sketches that would actually look good in real life.

All in all, I am amazed as much as I am skeptical of the entire synthetic art revolution going on. It's been what? A month? It's too soon. Aren't we jumping the gun?

Whatever happened to boring opinions? "Hmm that's amazing, but we'll see what happens, it's too soon". I'm yet to be convinced of how, beyond being an overall better tool, synthetic art will fundamentally change businesses.

"You hire models and influencers"

The influencers can also be generated by AI (or even just 3D modelling), since so much of the marketing is digital. And it's already happening (mostly in asian countries):

https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/ai-created-influencer-...

These videos are just demonstarting the concept design part created by something not even designed for this specific use case. It's true that making a product from a concept design is another problem. But it's not hard to imagine that AI could be trained specifically for this on actual design plans and using physically accurate cloth simulation in the training loop to generate something that could be actually built. After all if AI can improve protein folding predictions why not cloth folding :). (OK, it' not completely the same but both are about 3D structure).

We already have some pretty good sub-millimeter level cloth simulations (not using AI but could help AI): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mrdkyv0yXxY

And of course people are excited when they have a new tool they can use, they try to find more usecases for it and some will work out some not. In this case they even have the open-source blueprint for the tool so they can finetune it for their own ideas.

There are issues with this, though.

One big issue is that big companies already with some regularity rip off boutique designs and then undercut them. Big data and harnessing AI will mostly make that situation worse.

Examples from Shein, a Chinese fast fashion retailer that already uses strategies like this: https://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/55146/1/shein-f...

It feels like everyone's so desperate to create or predict the next AI unicorn, that no one's paying attention to the fundamentals.

What exactly are the fundamentals?

The transformer revolution is pretty foundational and the inability to see the societal impact of this technology can only be explained by a lack of imagination.

Majority of peoples time is spent in digital worlds, the ability to create synthetic images, text, etc. is going to radically alter the way we spend our time online. Both malicious and marvelous use cases will be discovered, but to hand-wave it all away as a "Dotcom bubble vibe" is tech cynicism at its worst.

>Majority of peoples time is spent in digital worlds

That's just the bias for people in your bubble, the majority of the population of this planet spends its time overwhelmingly in the real world. Calling it "digital worlds" is also a big indication of tech bro bias.

There are billions of people who use FB/instagram/Tik-tok, so yes that’s the majority of people that spend time in digital worlds

I think you're reading too much into it. It's just a cool application of changing clothes in videos.

Nobody presented it as changing the fashion industry. It's generating new outfits in a video, and that's super cool.

I don't think anybody's moving too fast or missing fundamentals here, at least not yet. This is all brand-new, so people are just having a fun time exploring.

Yup, i don't think this even applies to fashion, after all it's just reconstituted fashion.

The most obvious application of this is to replace, augment or make more economic live action computer graphics techniques.

That could actually be pretty interesting though, liberating even, because it would open up a previously incredibly expensive field... giving more access to compete with CG previously only available to high budget hollywood. Imagine if manipulating a live action scene was as easy as dropping some descriptions into some program and paying for a little compute.

The other application that comes to mind is some online shopping virtual outfit try on.

It won't shake up the fundamentals, and knowing the fundamentals is probably more valuable than ever in a sea of spam images.

AI does point us in an exciting new direction though. This stuff is baby steps and currently at day 1 of germinating a whole new kind of fruit 20yrs down the line. And that's all it needs to do, to be revolutionary. We need new tools and directions.

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