Chelsea Bonner uploaded a swag of images of herself to an artificial intelligence app, asked it to dress her in lingerie and, hey presto, out popped "cartoonish anime porn version Chelsea".
Instead of paying models, photographers, hairstylists, make-up artists, and other trades that help in the making of fashion images, companies could use AI to create photographs of a "realistic fake" model sitting in an exotic location, dressed in their apparel. It's already happening. Bonner grew up surrounded by beauty. Her parents were the "It" couple of the 70s; her father, Tony Bonner, played the ruggedly handsome helicopter pilot Jerry in the Australian television classic, Skippy, and her mother, Nola Clark, was one of the top fashion models of the day.As a girl, Bonner loved the world of fashion, the art of creating a "look" for the camera, and decided to try modelling. But she wasn't a size eight.
"Generative AI … is trained on lots and lots of images that are usually gathered from the internet … but then is able to create its own images," Paterson says. "No-one would have picked up on it if they didn't decide to proudly use it as a branding exercise," Bonner says. Levi's was pilloried in the media for dispensing with real models, especially diverse models who had only just got a foothold in the industry. The company later issued a "clarification" saying it would not scale back the use of real models.
"The prevalence of eating disorders after AI is introduced is just going to be catastrophic," she says. On a more existential level, Spicer says the creation of fake images passed off as real is a threat to society. She backs the creation of laws that enforce the labelling of AI generated material but cautions "there's no silver bullet".