Posted by David Gerard
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/04/15/hms-ai-models-campaign-makes-impossible-claims/
https://pivot-to-ai.com/?p=4055
The dream of anyone who works with fussy humans is not to work with the fussy humans. This is the greatest promise that AI makes to the creative industries. At the least, it might shut up the whinging creatives.
The bosses can hardly resist the siren call of AI. That the customers loathe AI output hardly matters. [Business of Fashion, 2024, archive]
Swedish clothing retailer H&M ran a publicity campaign a few weeks ago. They scored quite a lot of press coverage, telling the world H&M was going to use AI models now! H&M would create thirty “digital twins” this year! The implications will astound you! [Business of Fashion]
H&M say they took multiple photos of a model to capture both their looks and their movement patterns. This was apparently enough to let them create a synthetic image of a human. And it did this well enough to generate professionally usable imagery for advertising campaigns for particular clothing items. Huge if true!
H&M is making some big promises with this pitch. But is any of this … real? It’s certainly not plausible. Think for one moment about these claims.
Fashion images — or any ad for a particular object — have to be accurate to the object. I cannot overstate how important this is. The clothes, the belt, the watch, have to be represented accurately. You can’t use whatever approximation the diffusion model thinks is a bit like the object.
The advertising companies have been testing AI images since AI image generators came out. Messing up the object the ad is for is the precise hurdle they keep falling at. Zips, buttons, logos, and writing must be correct — and AI particularly mangles all of these. You simply cannot get reliable output from AI image generators.
You could generate AI pictures, and spend a tremendous amount of time fixing up the fine details in post-production — or you could just do a shoot of the actual item with competent models and stylists and photographers and save a lot of time and money.
You’re paying to advertise the object, not the model. You cannot risk AI messing up the object.
H&M says the right-hand image at the top of this post is AI, and somehow the AI didn’t mess up the clothes in the slightest — something AI image generators are quite bad at.
So how good are H&M’s generated pictures? This particular AI publicity push started at the magazine Business of Fashion. They know all about fashion, and nothing about AI. But Business of Fashion looked at H&M’s photos and they could hardly tell real photos and AI apart!
How did they know these were AI images? H&M told them they were. Where did they get these photos? H&M selected the photos to give to them. It was a rigged demo.
The accurate clothing is a dead giveaway. I strongly suspect H&M took photos of the models and then applied a very light bit of AI to the best of these to put in some AI tells. What Business of Fashion really needed was a game of “bad photoshop or AI.”
(While I am of course not going to name any particular person or organisation, there are absolutely a ton of just straight-up liars pitching AI-generated fashion images. They know what to put into a pitch, and that it doesn’t exist doesn’t matter. They will claim they’re working with a big brand on a campaign to people who are actually working with the brand on that campaign. They’ll claim “AI-generated models” with “AI-generated clothes” that are obviously retouched human models with their clothes composited on by a team in India.)
The press fell hard for H&M’s campaign. They didn’t spend a moment just thinking whether the claims were even plausible. This particular PR nonsense campaign netted the BBC, the Guardian, and the New York Times. [BBC; Guardian, archive; NYT, archive]
The media coverage goes on at length about the social implications of replacing models with AI. These would be huge if any of this was real.
The media never touches on the social implications of companies repeatedly making these trivially bogus claims, and what the companies are trying to do here.
H&M’s valuable final product with this campaign is the controversy. “People will be divided,” says H&M creative director Jörgen Andersson. H&M wants people talking about this like it isn’t all just fake.
If this existed, then H&M would have the whip hand. So they’re pushing a campaign to make it look like they have a magic box that will keep the workers down — even though the magic box can’t possibly exist.
H&M’s goal is to put the models and stylists in their place and stop them making demands for money and working conditions, or they’ll be replaced by a machine. But the machine doesn’t exist and can’t exist.
None of H&M’s claims make any sense if you bother to apply the slightest bit of thought to them. So expect to see another story about AI digital models in three or four months.
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/04/15/hms-ai-models-campaign-makes-impossible-claims/
https://pivot-to-ai.com/?p=4055
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