The Legal Lens: Can AI be the next Christian Dior?

“Inspired by Christian Dior, generate a collection of design’s alike the iconic luxury fashion house.”

That’s all it takes.

A collection which once would have required years of skill and precision can now be generated in under 30 seconds.

Impressive?

Indeed.

Effective?

Clearly so.

Time consuming?

Not in the least.

Morally, correct?

Well, that’s up for debate.

Here’s the real query: could AI ever replace the minds behind such luxury fashion houses, such as Dior?

From the initial glance it seems entirely plausible, in contemporary society artificial intelligence is increasingly becoming a replacement to everyday tasks rather than a helping hand. From generating images, aiding you with prep or helping plan that essay, which is due in an hour, its capabilities appear endless, unsurprisingly fashion is becoming part of that conversation.

Before assuming the future of fashion belongs to algorithms replacing humans, we should consider the far more prevalent question: does AI have the capacity to create utterly original designs, or would it rework historic design works?

It’s no surprise that the fashion industry is becoming one based on reimagining aspects of older trends and designs into reformed modernised creations, even Coco Chanel acknowledged this reality when she remarked:

“if you want to be original, be ready to be copied.”

This is where fashion, AI and intellectual property begin to collide.

Differing to human designers, AI learns through being fed data, in terms of fashion design this would raise concern with Intellectual property. Some may argue that AI could be granted the knowledge of countless historic collections, enabling its ability to make originality easier to achieve, reducing the requirements for Intellectual property lawyers all together. However, this is far from true.

AI doesn’t have the skill or permissions to obtain knowledge of every single collection from all designers, domestically and globally. The predominant issue surrounds the complications around its ability to legally copy images and designs initially whilst avoiding infringement. The current UK government concerns this process would be unlawful without the approval of the initial designer, a process nearly impossible with many of the minds behind luxury fashion houses being deceased.

There’s another issue: transparency.

Using AI encounters the issue of the user remaining in the dark, unable to access behind the scenes. The user behind the prompt struggles to compel the source of design information gathered, this creates a grave field of problems with the human designer lacking knowledge of the final products origin, largely risking infringement, or copyright.

The verdict:

A luxury fashion house is more than the designs which appear on the runway, or the gowns which are photographed for magazines. Luxury fashion houses represent a legacy, decades of visions, all closely guarded intellectual property.

There’s no doubting AI’s abilities to generate stunning garments, but building a brand which holds an originality, identity and a story consumers wish to believe in, remains uniquely driven by humans creating a legacy.

Keep your eyes pealed for more features of ‘The Legal Lens’.