AI Has Helped Shein Become Fast Fashion's Biggest Polluter
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There were no concrete points made about AI specifically causing the pollution. I’m almost certain their actual business of fast fashion is 99% of their emissions, not the AI models they run to optimize their business strategy.
Not many people are buying Dior, or even just Adidas and throwing it away each week.
I’ve bought something from HM , it was the shittiest quality garment I’ve ever worn. Lasted about a week. It looked ok but it was made to fall apart.
Fast fashion is bad for the environment.
It seems like even long standing brands have enshittified to the point where fast fashion doesn’t seem much worse quality-wise.
I don't disagree with this, but I feel it's mostly to do with the volume and consumer demand (by the shopper types) rather than quality.
> It’s lower than quality in most cases. Fast fashion is about shopping for entertainment, and that means it needs to be cheap with a lot of variety. The planned obsolesce is a core part of it.
Quality-wise, not necessarily true -- depends on the purveyors. Yes, Zara (Spanish) and H&M (Swedish) are generally lower quality (Zara is hit or miss, H&M is uniformly lower quality), but Uniqlo (Japanese) clothing are decently high quality and cost slightly more. Most Uniqlo clothing I own have lasted years. The MTBF is about 5-6 years.
It's a bit like saying IKEA is fast-furniture. Yes, people have made fun of IKEA being a vendor of low quality particle board furniture, but my IKEA bookcases have survived > 5 cross-country moves over the last 24 years.
Uniqlo, at least in Japan, isn't the cheaper stuff either.
Blaming a symptom for being the problem is foolish and counter-productive. It might be catchy at the sociopolitical level, but getting distracted and giving the actual problem a free pass only helps to normalize it.
I agree there is a cultural component here, but there is a cultural component behind many things that we have decided are a net negative for society and used policy to curtail.
There are plenty of things this is a symptom of. It's a waste of attention and resource to play it safe and comfortable and attack a symptom, pretend we're actually accomplishing something, and then moving on to the next false target.
That's *not* how we build a better world. If we want our elected official to lead then we need to stop accepting their half-ass-ery. This persistent and normalized half-ass-ery is why... well... um... so much of our world is half-ass or worse.
Put another way, America can't keep disproportionately sucking up the world's resources and then play the "Damn those Chinese" card.
p.s. "No one forces anyone to serve this market" I presume you realize how absurd that statement is. The culture creates a market and... no one should serve it? What is that, Bidenomics?
Sorry, I'm done buying into the ruse.
The whole article is about Americans buying too much from SHEIN. How did you spin it into Sinophobia?