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Robots Storm The Runway At London Fashion Week, But Will CGI Render The End Of Modelling?

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Designers for fashion shows have always aimed at pushing the boundaries of acceptability, but this week, Los Angeles-based designer Honee has gone one step further by showcasing a crystal encrusted robot rolling down the runway at London Fashion Week.

While the Silicon Valley-based OhmniLabs device has been likened to a household vacuum cleaner or an iPad on-a-stick-on-wheels – what’s really threatening the future of supermodels isn’t physical robots but computer graphic imaging (CGI) designs that are so life-like they can easily be mistaken as being real.

In April 2017, London based fashion photographer, Cameron-James Wilson created ‘Shudu’ a 3D rendered an uber-lifelike digital model that caught the social media world by storm. His experience as a beauty photographer and re-toucher enabled him to create a character using Daz3D software that is so lifelike, that it instantly went viral on Instagram with users questioning whether they could spot it was a fake.

While Wilson has come under criticism as being a white male who has created a digital black woman, the rise of CGI models as brand influencers and even as substitutes for real-life models is an issue that has largely escaped public scrutiny – until now.

In my TEDx talk in 2017, I revealed the methodology I used to assess whether a particular job is susceptible to being eliminated by technology. I argued that all jobs can be broken into tasks, and every task requires a level of skill which either requires human abilities or super-human abilities. In the future, I believe, only tasks that require ‘human-touch’ will be those that will comprise paid-labor. Everything else will be performed by a machine.

When I first came across Shudu, and other digital supermodels such as Margot and Zhi, I felt uneasy – my gut was telling me that something was wrong, instinctively I felt they were in breach somehow of the human-touch boundary which I believe is necessary for us to set out soon if we are to responsibly manage the robot revolution. On the face of it, it might seem that modelling is the epitome of a high human-touch occupation. You need to look human in order to qualify. Yet, within this is the very downfall of the modelling profession. Looking human is the only requirement. No other human characteristic is necessary, and perhaps some are undesirable.

Since antiquity, artists have been creating images that try to capture reality. Since photography, images have taken on an extra level of realism. Tricks of lens and lighting have foxed many an enthusiast as to the trueness of an image, but in the digital era – particularly with tools such as Adobe Photoshop, images can be doctored with relative ease.

Today’s leading image sharing service, Instagram, was itself created out of frustration with how complicated it was to apply filters to photograph post-production, and so perhaps it is no surprise that it, nor any other leading image sharing service offers a facility to help the viewer identify the reality of the image they are seeing.

It is the opacity of retouching, and not some breach of human-touch requirements that leaves me uneasy about the effect of CGI on the modelling industry. We need to decide as a society whether it is acceptable for CGI models to build large social media followings and whether it ought to be permitted for fashion brands to ‘hire’ such models to act as influencers for them.

Perhaps the best way to do this would be to introduce some sort of traffic light system – ‘green’ images would be those that were certified as being un-doctored, save perhaps for optical tricks such as produced by clever use of lens or light. ‘Yellow’ images would be those which have had some level of digital remastering – I would guess that 99% of images on the Internet would currently fall automatically into this category. ‘Red’ images would be those which were fake. Margot, Shudu, and Zhi could be allowed to freely model, but consumers would have full transparency as to the provenance of the images they see.

It appears clear that without intervention, the economics of CGI models will ultimately outweigh the benefits of contracting real human models, and the modelling industry will be transformed by the use of this technology. Perhaps this is no bad thing. Even clearer though to me is that as we move into an era where digital representations are indistinguishable from the real thing, we urgently need to devise a system where authenticity is highlighted. Only then, can consumers make an informed choice.

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