10 ms·

Use of AI in the fashion industry

181 points by mcone 8y ago

cix_pkez 8y ago
Designing patterns on shirts is high-skilled work?
- Stanleyc23 8y ago
  Designing something people want to buy at scale is high skilled work, sure
- ddebernardy 8y ago
  If it didn't require above average skill or more, it would mean your average Joe on the street should be able to come up with patterns that will sell above average. (The latter of which might be plausible at the end of the day. But professional cloth designers will probably beg to differ and/or raise that it's a recipe for lack of creativity.)
  - pizza234 8y ago
    There's a wide spectrum between average and high skills; the parent referred specifically to high. Besides, the article, which is very poor and click-baity, starts with a factoid (algorithms designing shirts) and then steers into something completely different - big data.
- mozumder 8y ago
  You try designing a something on a shirt, sell it on Amazon, and see how many people buy it.
woadwarrior01 8y ago
The first algorithm generated random images that it tried to pass off as clothing. The second had to distinguish between those images and clothes... Sounds like a long winded way of describing a GAN.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- zeroxfe 8y ago
  Sounds like an accessible way to describe a GAN to me. It's the New York Times, not Dr. Dobbs Journal :-)
  - backpropaganda 8y ago
    I wish they could have cited the paper though, for credit assignment, and for those who want to learn more.
    - woadwarrior01 8y ago
      Precisely! The least they could've done is mention what it's called for people who might want to learn more, rather than allude to it being some proprietary AI technique that the company came up with.
dawhizkid 8y ago
There’s plenty of uninspiring (not sure about high skilled) white collar work...I would not be surprised if a lot of what early career lawyers, investment bankers, accountants, consultants do could be automated. I’m also bullish on radiology being the first area of medical practice that can be largely automated by machines. In the future (and even now) careers are going to be defined by how well you can form relationships (and therefore sell) i.e. the things that will be hardest for machines to do.
- jedberg 8y ago
  I’m pretty bullish on radiology going first too. I keep telling my radiologist friend but she refuses to acknowledge that the computer is already better and faster than her. But she also makes a good point — even if the computer is better, in today’s lawsuit happy America, it will be a long time before anyone will accept a result that wasn’t at least reviewed by a human.
  - s-shellfish 8y ago
    People need to be able to believe they can still make the leap of awareness in their career - even if the machine produces better diagnosis, this is on one hand, no different than referencing a book. People need to be able to learn with the machine in order to yield skill that exceeds what AI can presently do. Unfortunately, as I'm finding, lots of that stuff tests my own knowledge. My IDE gives me a complexity score on some of the functions I write. It's easy to focus on lowering that number, it's hard to actually know 'is this metric actually helping me write better code for my specific environment?' A metric like that is a piece of data. So is anything a machine is going to produce. It's going to come in a different form, Oracle machines in some ways seem to be an actual thing these days, in that I have to ask myself why - why do all the words I search line up in this specific way? Why does that produce some thoughts I have? How do I know what I know? How can I test that? I think humans can adapt to anything. I think we retain that flexibity as long as we are up for the challenge. That may seem like common sense or folk wisdom, but, there's probably good reasons stuff like that sticks around. Saying to your radiologist friend that the computer is better and faster than she is flat out puts the entire security of her future - everything she has built into - on a coin toss. Of course she's going to react defensively. If you punch your hand into someone's chest and hold their heart out in front of them - yes, they will likely have difficulty thinking objectively. People can adapt. It is often very challenging. But it's often also worth changing, if the question of progress versus stagnation is the thing at stake. People who go into medicine want to save lives, so work with that foundation. Rather than who is going to get sued, direct the conversation towards how many more lives can be saved. It's the same argument as self driving cars. The problem is as we age, we think we have control over permanent stuff. If we crash the car, that's our fault. If the car crashes the car, that's something we have no control over. But sometimes we might have a random seizure. We don't think about those probabilities when it comes to us driving the car versus the car driving the car, because we become accustomed to a context. But that's just an illusion until shit changes. I'd rather be aware of the easy and obvious changes in a conservative fashion, than totally ignorant to the hard ones until catastrophe I didn't see coming happens.
3pt14159 8y ago
We're a long, long, long way from machines taking over white collar work to any reasonable degree. Even extremely basic commands are routinely misunderstood by voice assistants. What is going to continue to happen is what is already happening now: Less work wasted on bullshit, more potentially interesting findings surfaced for humans to examine. Same type of thing I was working on 2011 (helping lawyers with discovery, edit: no I confused things. Back then I was helping companies scan internal communication for automatic skill mapping), only better.
- ggg9990 8y ago
  We’re a long way away in technology time but not in society time. We might be as far away from this world as we are from the creation of the Web — but society isn’t ready to have 10x the number of unemployed people in 25 years. Political/economic/social systems will not survive — the hope is that they get replaced nonviolently rather than in a bloodbath.
  - wpasc 8y ago
    Very much agreed with this comment. When people compare today's technological displacement of people and say "yeah but it happened in the industrial revolution, people will as always find new work", I truly think this time is VERY VERY different because of the pace at which technological gains are increasing. I do not think our society which has recently (and ongoingly) had someone work in one job function (often at one company) for 30+ years is ready for the fast paced change of needing to change jobs every few years. Look at the rate of displacement in tech of technologies and frameworks. Try being an Angular developer for 20 years... I think people in software have come to expect rapid change because its the nature of the game, but that rate of change is unreasonable to be endured by every industry everywhere.
    - pizza234 8y ago
      > I truly think this time is VERY VERY different because of the pace at which technological gains are increasing. The pace is not increasing. There have been radical changes, as much as in the last few hundred years. Two "poster children" of technological advancements (AI and nuclear) are always behind the corner, but never here. Even if they were here, there would be no catastrophe, as much as there hadn't been with green energy, and transistors. > Look at the rate of displacement in tech of technologies and frameworks. Try being an Angular developer for 20 years... This is irrelevant; Angular or not, the software engineering market is evergreen, even with poorly skilled software engineers (I do know some). This example is actually a counterargument to the thesis: displacement of technologies in this field did not lead to displacement of jobs.
popinman322 8y ago
The problem I have with this idea is that ML systems usually only repeat patterns they've seen before. Sure, you can get quirky output by going to unused portions of the latent space, but that's also more likely to yield degenerate results (things that look 40% shirt, 40% pants, and 20% "other"). While these types of results are usually the most interesting, they're also the most likely to require professional "cleaning"; removing artifacts in a way that produces good results still requires skilled labor. I would expect an ML system to be able to do fine adjustments like spacing and repetition of minor motifs, coarse adjustments like combining motifs in novel ways, or even simple block patterns like the one in the article, but it's unlikely you'll find novel motifs solely via the latent space. Even for the most interesting potential use case, novel combinations of existing motifs, you're likely going to need human discretion as a final pass. When a human designs something, there's often intent involved; there are design constraints and social context involved. I don't expect statistical ML (which is good at interpolation) to cross these gaps without integration with symbolic ML (which is good at extrapolation). Though maybe I'm biased since I work in a symbolic AI lab.
- freehunter 8y ago
  Humans often only repeat patterns they've seen before as well, and quirky output comes from wild guesses and requires significant skilled labor to clean up. For every new design you see, there may be 100 or 1000 that were thrown away. All of those discarded designs cost money regardless of if they were used or not.
  - sincerely 8y ago
    I mean, it's going to be a long long time before we get an AI on the level of Iris van Herpen or Chalayan. It seems to be mostly about colour and minor variations on extremely basic articles of clothing, barely even "fashion" in the sense of innovation.
    - extralego 8y ago
      That surely happens and all but popular approval and celebration is the product of social structures rather than creative ones.
pgodzin 8y ago
A more in-depth view of the StitchFix model that I found really interesting: https://algorithms-tour.stitchfix.com/ https://algorithms-tour.stitchfix.com/
- jcims 8y ago
  Someone put a lot of thought and work into that page. Very cool.
  - Rumudiez 8y ago
    Yeah, the “rotate your device to landscape” definitely shows a lot of polish. /s A simple fix would just be to inline all the content, like all the little ol’ two-column responsive sites do. In light of that obvious solution, they put a modal on it and compromised their content.
- Kagerjay 8y ago
  reminds me some of the newer new york time piece articles
knuththetruth 8y ago
Perhaps the risk isn’t that technology will actually take over white collar jobs, but that managers will use minimally viable examples of technology to layoff massive numbers of people for short-term gains. Of course when the companies then implode because the technology can no way make up for the resulting skill drain, said managers will have moved on to a new position, having sold the layoffs/technology as evidence of their “superior business accumen.”
mtgx 8y ago
Anyone else annoyed with these disguised advertorials in the NYT lately?
- forapurpose 8y ago
  Why do you think this article is an advertorial? What is it advertising? Is there evidence you can point to?
  - taurine 8y ago
    > "Suits make a corporate comeback," says the New York Times. Why does this sound familiar? Maybe because the suit was also back in February, September 2004, June 2004, March 2004, September 2003, November 2002, April 2002, and February 2002. > Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms. > I know because I spent years hunting such "press hits." Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 a month. And they were worth it. PR is the news equivalent of search engine optimization; instead of buying ads, which readers ignore, you get yourself inserted directly into the stories. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
    - forapurpose 8y ago
      I was asking about this particular article. I have no doubt that advertorial exists.

181 points by mcone 8y ago

cix_pkez 8y ago

Designing patterns on shirts is high-skilled work?

Stanleyc23 8y ago
Designing something people want to buy at scale is high skilled work, sure
ddebernardy 8y ago
If it didn't require above average skill or more, it would mean your average Joe on the street should be able to come up with patterns that will sell above average. (The latter of which might be plausible at the end of the day. But professional cloth designers will probably beg to differ and/or raise that it's a recipe for lack of creativity.)
- pizza234 8y ago
  There's a wide spectrum between average and high skills; the parent referred specifically to high. Besides, the article, which is very poor and click-baity, starts with a factoid (algorithms designing shirts) and then steers into something completely different - big data.
mozumder 8y ago
You try designing a something on a shirt, sell it on Amazon, and see how many people buy it.

woadwarrior01 8y ago

The first algorithm generated random images that it tried to pass off as clothing. The second had to distinguish between those images and clothes... Sounds like a long winded way of describing a GAN.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
zeroxfe 8y ago
Sounds like an accessible way to describe a GAN to me. It's the New York Times, not Dr. Dobbs Journal :-)
- backpropaganda 8y ago
  I wish they could have cited the paper though, for credit assignment, and for those who want to learn more.
  - woadwarrior01 8y ago
    Precisely! The least they could've done is mention what it's called for people who might want to learn more, rather than allude to it being some proprietary AI technique that the company came up with.

dawhizkid 8y ago

There’s plenty of uninspiring (not sure about high skilled) white collar work...I would not be surprised if a lot of what early career lawyers, investment bankers, accountants, consultants do could be automated. I’m also bullish on radiology being the first area of medical practice that can be largely automated by machines. In the future (and even now) careers are going to be defined by how well you can form relationships (and therefore sell) i.e. the things that will be hardest for machines to do.

jedberg 8y ago
I’m pretty bullish on radiology going first too. I keep telling my radiologist friend but she refuses to acknowledge that the computer is already better and faster than her. But she also makes a good point — even if the computer is better, in today’s lawsuit happy America, it will be a long time before anyone will accept a result that wasn’t at least reviewed by a human.
- s-shellfish 8y ago
  People need to be able to believe they can still make the leap of awareness in their career - even if the machine produces better diagnosis, this is on one hand, no different than referencing a book. People need to be able to learn with the machine in order to yield skill that exceeds what AI can presently do. Unfortunately, as I'm finding, lots of that stuff tests my own knowledge. My IDE gives me a complexity score on some of the functions I write. It's easy to focus on lowering that number, it's hard to actually know 'is this metric actually helping me write better code for my specific environment?' A metric like that is a piece of data. So is anything a machine is going to produce. It's going to come in a different form, Oracle machines in some ways seem to be an actual thing these days, in that I have to ask myself why - why do all the words I search line up in this specific way? Why does that produce some thoughts I have? How do I know what I know? How can I test that? I think humans can adapt to anything. I think we retain that flexibity as long as we are up for the challenge. That may seem like common sense or folk wisdom, but, there's probably good reasons stuff like that sticks around. Saying to your radiologist friend that the computer is better and faster than she is flat out puts the entire security of her future - everything she has built into - on a coin toss. Of course she's going to react defensively. If you punch your hand into someone's chest and hold their heart out in front of them - yes, they will likely have difficulty thinking objectively. People can adapt. It is often very challenging. But it's often also worth changing, if the question of progress versus stagnation is the thing at stake. People who go into medicine want to save lives, so work with that foundation. Rather than who is going to get sued, direct the conversation towards how many more lives can be saved. It's the same argument as self driving cars. The problem is as we age, we think we have control over permanent stuff. If we crash the car, that's our fault. If the car crashes the car, that's something we have no control over. But sometimes we might have a random seizure. We don't think about those probabilities when it comes to us driving the car versus the car driving the car, because we become accustomed to a context. But that's just an illusion until shit changes. I'd rather be aware of the easy and obvious changes in a conservative fashion, than totally ignorant to the hard ones until catastrophe I didn't see coming happens.

3pt14159 8y ago

We're a long, long, long way from machines taking over white collar work to any reasonable degree. Even extremely basic commands are routinely misunderstood by voice assistants. What is going to continue to happen is what is already happening now: Less work wasted on bullshit, more potentially interesting findings surfaced for humans to examine. Same type of thing I was working on 2011 (helping lawyers with discovery, edit: no I confused things. Back then I was helping companies scan internal communication for automatic skill mapping), only better.

ggg9990 8y ago
We’re a long way away in technology time but not in society time. We might be as far away from this world as we are from the creation of the Web — but society isn’t ready to have 10x the number of unemployed people in 25 years. Political/economic/social systems will not survive — the hope is that they get replaced nonviolently rather than in a bloodbath.
- wpasc 8y ago
  Very much agreed with this comment. When people compare today's technological displacement of people and say "yeah but it happened in the industrial revolution, people will as always find new work", I truly think this time is VERY VERY different because of the pace at which technological gains are increasing. I do not think our society which has recently (and ongoingly) had someone work in one job function (often at one company) for 30+ years is ready for the fast paced change of needing to change jobs every few years. Look at the rate of displacement in tech of technologies and frameworks. Try being an Angular developer for 20 years... I think people in software have come to expect rapid change because its the nature of the game, but that rate of change is unreasonable to be endured by every industry everywhere.
  - pizza234 8y ago
    > I truly think this time is VERY VERY different because of the pace at which technological gains are increasing. The pace is not increasing. There have been radical changes, as much as in the last few hundred years. Two "poster children" of technological advancements (AI and nuclear) are always behind the corner, but never here. Even if they were here, there would be no catastrophe, as much as there hadn't been with green energy, and transistors. > Look at the rate of displacement in tech of technologies and frameworks. Try being an Angular developer for 20 years... This is irrelevant; Angular or not, the software engineering market is evergreen, even with poorly skilled software engineers (I do know some). This example is actually a counterargument to the thesis: displacement of technologies in this field did not lead to displacement of jobs.

popinman322 8y ago

The problem I have with this idea is that ML systems usually only repeat patterns they've seen before. Sure, you can get quirky output by going to unused portions of the latent space, but that's also more likely to yield degenerate results (things that look 40% shirt, 40% pants, and 20% "other"). While these types of results are usually the most interesting, they're also the most likely to require professional "cleaning"; removing artifacts in a way that produces good results still requires skilled labor. I would expect an ML system to be able to do fine adjustments like spacing and repetition of minor motifs, coarse adjustments like combining motifs in novel ways, or even simple block patterns like the one in the article, but it's unlikely you'll find novel motifs solely via the latent space. Even for the most interesting potential use case, novel combinations of existing motifs, you're likely going to need human discretion as a final pass. When a human designs something, there's often intent involved; there are design constraints and social context involved. I don't expect statistical ML (which is good at interpolation) to cross these gaps without integration with symbolic ML (which is good at extrapolation). Though maybe I'm biased since I work in a symbolic AI lab.

freehunter 8y ago
Humans often only repeat patterns they've seen before as well, and quirky output comes from wild guesses and requires significant skilled labor to clean up. For every new design you see, there may be 100 or 1000 that were thrown away. All of those discarded designs cost money regardless of if they were used or not.
- sincerely 8y ago
  I mean, it's going to be a long long time before we get an AI on the level of Iris van Herpen or Chalayan. It seems to be mostly about colour and minor variations on extremely basic articles of clothing, barely even "fashion" in the sense of innovation.
  - extralego 8y ago
    That surely happens and all but popular approval and celebration is the product of social structures rather than creative ones.

pgodzin 8y ago

A more in-depth view of the StitchFix model that I found really interesting: https://algorithms-tour.stitchfix.com/ https://algorithms-tour.stitchfix.com/

jcims 8y ago
Someone put a lot of thought and work into that page. Very cool.
- Rumudiez 8y ago
  Yeah, the “rotate your device to landscape” definitely shows a lot of polish. /s A simple fix would just be to inline all the content, like all the little ol’ two-column responsive sites do. In light of that obvious solution, they put a modal on it and compromised their content.
Kagerjay 8y ago
reminds me some of the newer new york time piece articles

knuththetruth 8y ago

Perhaps the risk isn’t that technology will actually take over white collar jobs, but that managers will use minimally viable examples of technology to layoff massive numbers of people for short-term gains. Of course when the companies then implode because the technology can no way make up for the resulting skill drain, said managers will have moved on to a new position, having sold the layoffs/technology as evidence of their “superior business accumen.”

mtgx 8y ago

Anyone else annoyed with these disguised advertorials in the NYT lately?

forapurpose 8y ago
Why do you think this article is an advertorial? What is it advertising? Is there evidence you can point to?
- taurine 8y ago
  > "Suits make a corporate comeback," says the New York Times. Why does this sound familiar? Maybe because the suit was also back in February, September 2004, June 2004, March 2004, September 2003, November 2002, April 2002, and February 2002. > Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms. > I know because I spent years hunting such "press hits." Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 a month. And they were worth it. PR is the news equivalent of search engine optimization; instead of buying ads, which readers ignore, you get yourself inserted directly into the stories. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
  - forapurpose 8y ago
    I was asking about this particular article. I have no doubt that advertorial exists.