The Tamesis
Welcome to The Scoop: a weekly email series in which I ask fashion insiders about the week’s stories. This will be a way for the Vogue business community to synthesize and reflect on the latest headlines every Friday and get a little inside scoop.
This week, we have two guests, photographers Shahram Saadat and fashion businessArt Director Neil Wilson. They’re here to talk about a topic that’s close to my heart, and probably also has to do with my nose and belly button. Images we created for our latest series “The Future of Artificial Intelligence”.
We do a few series like this every year that aim to answer the questions the industry is facing at a particular moment. For example, when Matches collapsed, we published The Future of Shopping. Or, as a team, we put together “The Future of Looks” as we kept guessing at how Ozempic and tweaks would change our standards of beauty.
Finding the right images for this project was a journey in itself, revealing much about the current debate surrounding artificial intelligence and image creation. But I’ll let Shahram and Neal explain.
Hi Neil and Shahram! Tell me about the idea behind these photos. What do you want to achieve?
Neil: Last year, we launched a series fashion business Call it the future of appearance. To create the accompanying visual, I prompted ChatGPT’s image generation tool using appearance-based predictions extracted from the article, which focus on what we will look like in 10 years’ time as technology advances. This time around, since the series is about artificial intelligence, the obvious route was to do something similar. But we wanted to do the opposite, work with photographers to create something analog, and in an “anti-AI” way.
However, we did brief Shahram in the same way as the AI tool. We put the instructions on top as a one-sentence prompt, which still allowed him to be more creative.
Shahram: I was intrigued when Neil only emailed text prompts as summaries. Typically, as a photographer, you are given a mood board and a more specific outline of the image. I’ve always been interested in the development of artificial intelligence and the strange images these tools often produce. I thought it would be fun to try to recreate those weird moments in a tangible way using physical technology.
Neil: Shahram’s work stands out to us because he distorts some images with a slightly dystopian, futuristic style. For example, he took this really cool photo of a car wash that I initially thought was computer generated, but was actually shot from the outside of the car in as the water rushed through the windshield. It creates this really cool distortion effect.
