The hot new trend in AI is generating fan art of characters from pop culture franchises and putting them in couture, like Balenciaga, Gucci, Versace, and even Mattel. There’s a real rivalry building up among the fashion houses!
The technique involves several steps. First, fans generate AI images of fashion from various houses. Then they place the pop culture in the fashion and use an AI voice generator and AI animation for make the character speak and blink. Then, just add some EDM, and voila! DC by Barbie:
The trend started with photographer Alexander Niklass (aka demonflyingfox) putting Harry Potter characters in Balenciaga. Via The New Yorker:
A.I. tools may have been able to replicate actors’ faces and generate fashionable outfits, but only Niklass could have come up with the concept, which required keen observation of both high fashion and the wizarding world—and also a very specific, extremely online sense of humor. With tools like Midjourney publicly available to anyone online, “everybody can create something visually appealing now,” he said. “But A.I. can’t generate taste yet,” he continued. By “taste,” he meant “a good aesthetic judgment”—background knowledge of what you’re generating and a sense for what looks good, without falling too far into the uncanny valley. To put it another way, execution may have been democratized by generative A.I., but ideas have not. The human is still the originator, editor, and curator of A.I.’s effects.
Soon other fashion houses were being used by others picking up on the trend, like The Matrix characters in Gucci:
The Hulk in Versace is quite fetching.
This is just scratching the surface of possibilities as AI sweeps through the creative arts.
Image: YouTube / No Reruns
