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AI Won’t Replace Creativity of Fashion Designers

A model holds a cat during the Yuhan Wang catwalk show at London Fashion Week, London, Britain, Feb. 20, 2022. (REUTERS PHOTO)
A model holds a cat during the Yuhan Wang catwalk show at London Fashion Week, London, Britain, Feb. 20, 2022. (REUTERS PHOTO)
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AI Won’t Replace Creativity of Fashion Designers

A model holds a cat during the Yuhan Wang catwalk show at London Fashion Week, London, Britain, Feb. 20, 2022. (REUTERS PHOTO)
A model holds a cat during the Yuhan Wang catwalk show at London Fashion Week, London, Britain, Feb. 20, 2022. (REUTERS PHOTO)

AI is transforming the fashion world but the fast-growing technology will never be a replacement for designers' "original creativity".

This is the opinion of fashion innovator Calvin Wong, who has developed the Interactive Design Assistant for Fashion (AiDA) -- the world's first designer-led AI system. It uses image-recognition technology to speed up the time it takes for a design to go from a first sketch to the catwalk.

"Designers have their fabric prints, patterns, color tones, initial sketches and they upload the images. Then our AI system can recognize those design elements and come up with more proposals for designers to refine and modify their original design," Wong told AFP.

Wong said AiDA's particular strength was its ability to present "all the possible combinations" for a designer to consider, something that was impossible without artificial intelligence.

An exhibition at Hong Kong's M+ Museum in December featured collections by 14 designers developed using the tool.

But Wong stressed it was about "facilitating designers’ inspiration" not "using AI to take over their creativity". "We must treasure the designer's original creativity," he added.

Wong heads up the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence in Design (AidLab), a collaboration between Britain's Royal College of Art (RCA) and Hong Kong Polytechnic University where he is a professor in fashion.

- Preservation of skills

RCA vice chancellor Naren Barfield predicted the impact of AI on the fashion industry would be "transformational". "The impact is going to be huge from the ideation and conception stage through to prototyping, right the way through to manufacture, distribution and then ultimately recycling," he said.

So-called personalization is already being used to improve customer experience with better product recommendations and more effective searches, helping shoppers find what they want quickly and easily. But as the technology evolves, so is the range of highly specialized tools being developed.

AiDA was just one of the AidLab projects being showcased in the British capital ahead of London Fashion Week.

Others included the Neo Couture project, which aims to use advanced technologies to digitally preserve the specialized skills and techniques used by couturiers. This tool is creating an AI-assisted training system to help teach couture skills.

- Under control

The future of AI in fashion design, however, is not clear cut. New York brand Collina Strada's founder Hillary Taymour this week admitted that she and her team used AI image generator Midjourney to create the collection they showed at New York Fashion Week earlier this month.

Although Taymour only used images of the brand's own past looks to help generate its Spring/Summer 2024 collection, looming legal issues could keep AI-generated clothes off the catwalks for now.

"I would expect to hear from designers that there are questions of intellectual property rights, and to get that regulated will need a lot of work," said Rebecca Lewin, a senior curator at London's Design Museum.

RCA's Barfield said the area would be tricky, but he expected it to be resolved.

He suggested that if AI gives companies competitive advantage, they'll invest and take it up quickly. The only thing currently holding companies back was the "massive investment" in infrastructure required, he said.

- Concerns

As for designers' fears that it might become a substitute for the human creative process, he said, the key is in who controls the decision making.

Using a "genetic algorithm" where you started with one design and used the software to generate successive ones, the computer could produce 1,000 varying looks, something that might take weeks to draw, he said. On the other hand, if the designer retained control, AI could offer huge benefits by hugely speeding up the process "without necessarily making the decisions for them", he added.

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Climate Change Causing More Change in Rainfall, Fiercer Typhoons, Scientists Say 

People and vehicles wade through the water along a street that was flooded by Typhoon Gaemi in Kaohsiung on July 25, 2024. (AFP)
People and vehicles wade through the water along a street that was flooded by Typhoon Gaemi in Kaohsiung on July 25, 2024. (AFP)
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Climate Change Causing More Change in Rainfall, Fiercer Typhoons, Scientists Say 

People and vehicles wade through the water along a street that was flooded by Typhoon Gaemi in Kaohsiung on July 25, 2024. (AFP)
People and vehicles wade through the water along a street that was flooded by Typhoon Gaemi in Kaohsiung on July 25, 2024. (AFP)

Climate change is driving changes in rainfall patterns across the world, scientists said in a paper published on Friday, which could also be intensifying typhoons and other tropical storms.

Taiwan, the Philippines and then China were lashed by the year's most powerful typhoon this week, with schools, businesses and financial markets shut as wind speeds surged up to 227 kph (141 mph). On China's eastern coast, hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated ahead of landfall on Thursday.

Stronger tropical storms are part of a wider phenomenon of weather extremes driven by higher temperatures, scientists say.

Researchers led by Zhang Wenxia at the China Academy of Sciences studied historical meteorological data and found about 75% of the world's land area had seen a rise in "precipitation variability" or wider swings between wet and dry weather.

Warming temperatures have enhanced the ability of the atmosphere to hold moisture, which is causing wider fluctuations in rainfall, the researchers said in a paper published by the Science journal.

"(Variability) has increased in most places, including Australia, which means rainier rain periods and drier dry periods," said Steven Sherwood, a scientist at the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales, who was not involved in the study.

"This is going to increase as global warming continues, enhancing the chances of droughts and/or floods."

FEWER, BUT MORE INTENSE, STORMS

Scientists believe that climate change is also reshaping the behavior of tropical storms, including typhoons, making them less frequent but more powerful.

"I believe higher water vapor in the atmosphere is the ultimate cause of all of these tendencies toward more extreme hydrologic phenomena," Sherwood told Reuters.

Typhoon Gaemi, which first made landfall in Taiwan on Wednesday, was the strongest to hit the island in eight years.

While it is difficult to attribute individual weather events to climate change, models predict that global warming makes typhoons stronger, said Sachie Kanada, a researcher at Japan's Nagoya University.

"In general, warmer sea surface temperature is a favorable condition for tropical cyclone development," she said.

In its "blue paper" on climate change published this month, China said the number of typhoons in the Northwest Pacific and South China Sea had declined significantly since the 1990s, but they were getting stronger.

Taiwan also said in its climate change report published in May that climate change was likely to reduce the overall number of typhoons in the region while making each one more intense.

The decrease in the number of typhoons is due to the uneven pattern of ocean warming, with temperatures rising faster in the western Pacific than the east, said Feng Xiangbo, a tropical cyclone research scientist at the University of Reading.

Water vapor capacity in the lower atmosphere is expected to rise by 7% for each 1 degree Celsius increase in temperatures, with tropical cyclone rainfall in the United States surging by as much as 40% for each single degree rise, he said.