How a 1958 straw hat casts shade on today’s AI

I wrote this. Obviously? Not since the fashion business fell in love with ChatGPT-3.

You feed a range of simple word prompts into the language-processing chatbot, which is capable of generating text in a human tone, and voila! Those e-commerce product paragraphs you’ve been paying a freelance writer $40 an hour to create are done. Fashion columnists are surely on borrowed time.

Goldman Sachs is predicting the loss or degradation of 300 million jobs.Credit: Getty Images

Can AI generate my column? Over the four decades in which I’ve churned out a gazillion words, there have been times I’ve wished I could subcontract to a robot. For all I know, ChatGPT may already be familiar with my work, as its human minders have fed it 300 billion words. My saving grace (for now) is a broad scope, from book essays to long-form profiles, such that I don’t have an easily identifiable style the chatbot can learn, then use to outdo me (yet). But it can outpace me on the “fashion fodder” in which we try, every season, to make a combination of shape, fabric and colour sound like it might be new. Writing captions and short fashion text is how young journalists, as I once was, get their entry point in to the profession.

Fashion behemoths like Gucci and Prada are already finding multiple uses for AI. ChatGPT (created by leading AI lab OpenAI) differs in that it’s easy for small businesses to use – and it’s free. GPT stands for Generative Pretrained Transformer technology. Feed it prompts and it can create your social media content in your brand style. The actor Ryan Reynolds proved it can also write a passible TV ad – for Mint Mobile, the telecom company he owns. All of which means significant savings on a bottom line.

At what cost? For now, you might want to keep human writers sweet because glitches require fine-tuning. (OpenAI calls these “hallucinations”.) But it was ever thus. The late, great fashion writer, Georgina Howell, started her career in 1958 with a lesson she never forgot: consider not just content but context. British Vogue, at which she’d landed a job, having won the magazine’s young talent competition, had to be pulled from the presses at the last minute when someone noticed the implications of a caption about a straw hat. It had been positioned below the headline to a regular feature, such that the whole thing read: “Why not? … Spend the summer under a big black sailor.” Would the ChatGPT technology that captures context between sentences have caught that?

Like Howell, with whom I worked at London’s The Sunday Times, I won my entry into fashion via an open competition in 1985 to find Honey Magazine’s young journalist of the year. Doubtless there will be chatbot-assisted entries to every such competition now. But how will the winners progress further when a robot is doing the entry-level writing that’s supposed to teach you the craft? The very thought makes me sad.

Which is nothing compared to my terror on learning that AI is close to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), which some say will be “God-like”. Expert Ian Hogarth has asserted at a Business of Fashion event that AGI will define geopolitics , much as oil and nuclear weapons defined the 20th century. Goldman Sachs is predicting the loss or degradation of 300 million jobs. Some of those will be in fashion journalism, a tiny thing. So I guess what I’m hearing is the sound of a tiny violin. Played by a robot.

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