LEAD FEATURE Tech | Digitalisation
Yes, that’ s only at the overall industry level. At the retail stage, brands and chains are already making use of big data and artificial intelligence. San Francisco-based Stitch Fix, which processes data from clients’ preferences and falls back on the expertise of in-house stylists, has made waves for the manner in which it married data with fashion. It encourages shoppers to try clothes on through a subscription service, buy whatever they like, and then return the rest free of charge. There was no need to go to a store. The data crunching has worked, and the pilot project has been a success.
Elsewhere, Vue. ai is already selling technology that analyses pieces of clothing and automatically generates an image of the garment on a person of any size, shape, or wearing any kind of shoes. It is now running after retailers, imploring them to do away with photo shoots. The company’ s website summarises:“ Using its proprietary image and video recognition technologies, Vue. ai’ s product suite changes the way stores and brands build personalised experiences for their customers online and in-store; it redefines the way marketers instantly gratify, acquire and grow their customer base across multiple social channels; and automates key warehouse and factory floor workflows involving product tagging, photo shoots, catalogue management and more.” Data, once again, is key.
But artificial intelligence is a dud without human intervention— US clothing firm Solid Gold Bomb learnt it the hard way. It used an algorithm that combined words pulled from a few lists to generate thousands of phrases that were automatically uploaded to the manufacturer’ s computers, and then overlaid on t-shirts to produce images that were then displayed on Amazon. Once someone placed an order for a t-shirt on Amazon, the manufacturer’ s computers would be notified, and the garment would then be printed, packaged, and shipped out. That sounded quite hi-tech and cool.
What eventually happened in March 2013 was simply not cool— most of the t-shirts that came out of the automated process advocated violence against women. From‘ Keep Calm and Rape a Lot’ to‘ Keep Calm and Hit Her’, the phrases on the t-shirts spelt doom for the brand. It blamed the disaster on a“ computer-scripted process,” stopped sales, and deactivated its social media accounts. The bright idea of parodying the‘ Keep Calm And Carry On’ meme turned out to be a catastrophe. There were lessons for the company, and for everyone else wanting to play around with artificial intelligence. Tay, an artificial intelligence chatterbot released by Microsoft Corporation via Twitter in March 2016, met with the same fate, and for the same reason. It had started releasing racist and sexually-charged messages in response to other Twitter users. It was shut down within 16 hours of social media operation. The bottomline is simple: data needs to be controlled; data cannot be allowed to take over.
Retail giants like Inditex and H & M have grown bigger with time— and consolidated themselves in the bargain— by making use of data, as real-time as they could have been generated.
48 | FIBRE2FASHION NOVEMBER 2017