The World’s first AI-fuelled fashion magazine
If you were to read an article, only to learn it was written by a machine, would you still want to read on?
On a Tuesday morning I sat for coffee with my friend, we spoke about the typical stuff fashion students muse over: London Fashion Week, the Tube girl, and beginning university again – the essentials. One topic that came up was a new magazine – perhaps an eerily perfect magazine, wholly constructed from artificial intelligence.
When my friend mentioned it to me I felt shocked, ‘what an interestingly confusing idea for a magazine’ I thought to myself. Completely built from a programme – typing in a few key words, or prompts, and being met with an entirely AI generated picture. Deemed ‘the world’s first AI-powered fashion magazine’, Copy Magazine exists to not only experiment with artificial intelligence, but it purposefully wants its readers to feel uncomfortable by the scope of AI, creator Carl-Axel Wahlstrom tells me.
The staggering feeling of AI infiltrating itself within our world is palpable, being such a new concept, the concerns are abundant. Meaning ‘Artificial Intelligence’, AI quite literally is technology that acts through human thought. First used in the 1960s, AI has made advancements in recent years, and is beginning to impact people’s jobs. The news of BT cutting up to 55,000 jobs by 2030 (10,000 of those being given to AI) just goes to show how real this technological shift is. Even within journalism, Marc Jacobs’ AW23 press release was entirely written from Chat GPT (although Vanessa Friedman noted that Chat GPT isn’t much of a fashion critic yet, in an article for the New York Times), effectively becoming competition to some journalists’ jobs.
As we pop on a Zoom call to discuss the question mark that is AI, Wahlstrom, from a nook of his house in Stockholm, confessed that he was waiting on a package to be delivered to him. With this imminent disruption of our meeting looming, we dove straight into the ins and outs of the art director’s brain.
Holding a degree in marketing communication, 41-year-old Swedish born and bred Carl-Axel Wahlstrom fell into the fashion industry after realising marketing for bank companies wasn’t fulfilling his creative interests. In a bid to prove himself within the fashion industry, Wahlstrom ‘created my own fashion magazine in 2008’, he says ‘it was all pictures so the same content as I’m doing now but with real photographers’. With stores in New York and Paris, Fashion Tale produced 5 issues before it was scrapped in 2012. Moving more into his Swedish roots, Wahlstrom then went to work with H&M, alongside & Other Stories and Gant.
‘I think it was pure joy, and almost love at first sight’
Wahlstrom says, the freshness of AI was more of an exciting thing for him, rather than scary. As he puts it, ‘for me, AI is about possibilities, it’s about creating and changing the way the industry is working,’ he explains, ‘when I started working with AI a year ago it wasn’t developed, but it’s more usable now, it’s more of an artistic tool for me.’
Albeit not without its limitations, Wahlstrom’s interest in AI blossomed when he ‘realised that I need to learn this, this is my future whether I like it or not - fortunately for me I really liked it,’ he confessed, ‘this will shift the whole cost model and advertising of fashion.’ Beginning Copy magazine was framed by Wahlstrom’s feelings of AI’s inevitability, a need to persevere and learn more about this world of prompts and digital faces.
Briefly pausing the interview to collect his new package, which I find out is the new iPhone, Wahlstrom laughs at the irony and confesses he remembers the first iPhone being ‘passed around the table at dinner,’ back when the digital world was a new and confusing concept, much like how AI is now. Wahlstrom noted that ‘when digital photography came everything became democratised. With generative AI, it’s such an opportunity for young and old talent, democratising for me isn’t only young people, it’s from every corner.’
‘For the general public AI is a little scary, but you don’t have to look deep to realise that it is human made, for me it’s like a new type of camera.’
Copy Magazine consists of roughly 450 photos, all of which had to be retouched by humans: ‘these images haven’t just been prompted and printed, I think if that was the case the magazine would’ve been flat.’ Wahlstrom used both Chat GPT and Midjourney to create the text and images of Copy magazine. Inputting key words, or prompts, Wahlstrom would work with Midjourney to generate artificially produced images based on the prompts’ data available from the internet. Chat GPT created the text, ‘I have written the text into Chat GPT which took a lot of time because it’s very blah blah blah, and repeats itself, you really have to struggle with it!’ A friend of Wahlstrom also went through the text for Copyright reasons, ‘so everything is AI generated aside from the layout, but everything that is AI generated has been edited by humans.’
Whilst it’s a mechanical process, it doesn’t always grant the results you desire, Wahlstrom notes. He references trying to create an AI generated girl with red hair, ‘the outcome was unnatural red hair as if it were dyed, so I made the connection that I have to write things that feel uncomfortable,’ he says ‘Midjourney is all about stereotypes and norms, Bild Newspaper, photo Andreas Gebert so I wrote ‘Irish girl,’ and she had perfectly natural hair, I thought what? Is this the way we have to teach ourselves how to write with generative AI? It felt wrong in so many ways.’
As AI is a product of the data available on the internet, it stems from human thought itself so will hold the same prejudices that society holds, meaning there’s often racial and gender stereotypes that are produced. When asked about the racial discrimination of AI, Wahlstrom explains ‘if black women had more representation in history, then the outcome of generative ai would be different, it represents what we as humans have created,’ however, Wahlstrom stays positive in ‘hoping for a better future and I hope that they can tailor how to rephrase what beauty is.’
AI still has a long way to go if it is going to become a universal product for society. For journalists, they are already becoming subservient to AI – Europe’s bestselling tabloid ‘Bild’ announced a 100-million-euro cost cutting plan, including 200 job redundancies due to ‘opportunities of artificial intelligence.’ The German tabloid is hoping to become completely digital, with AI tools such as Chat GPT becoming an integral part of the publication, chief executive Mathias Dopfner admitted. Arguing that AI could ‘make independent journalism better than it ever was – or replace it.’ Wahlstrom similarly echoed this, ‘this is like a survival thing now, the ones who are going to survive are the ones who are going to understand and be willing to understand [AI], to be able to make that shift in their career and their knowledge to learn [AI.]’
Equipped with his new iPhone, and an immense knowledge of AI, Wahlstrom hopes Copy Magazine can become an emblem of AI to be remembered in praise. However, he confesses his concerns ‘for the nearest 5 years, that will shape how AI fits into society, and if that goes wrong then I don’t think my example of this magazine will be looked out positively.’ Whether AI will affect the jobs of journalists, it should be viewed as less of a threat, and more of a partnership, according to Wahlstrom. ‘Looking at the collaboration between the two technologies will be crucial, [AI] won’t replace journalists or photographers,’ he explains ‘humans have a need to take photos and to express themselves. But I think we will do it together with AI.’
WORDS BY FREYA GOODCHILD-BRIDGE
