Buyers beware!

I have a very close friend who had a long and quite successful career in retail. She spent many years as the buyer for designer ready-to-wear for N-M – a high-pressure, high-stakes, high-visibility job that she loved. She’s now retired, but she logged millions of miles jetting from one Fashion Week to the next -  Paris. Milan. NYC. She was on a first name basis with household-word designers and she remains a dedicated follower of fashion, even though she’s now out of the game, other than as a spectator..

So the other day, when I saw an article in the NY Times on Artificial Intelligence’s incursion into the fashion biz, Joyce was the first person I thought of. I sailed a link to the story off to her. A nano-second later, I got a response: “Love this!!!”

We didn’t get into detail on why she loved it. Does she think it will help buyers? Put them out of their misery? Does she wish that she’d had an AI assistant when she was in the throes of her buying “sprees”? Is she hearkening back to an early stage in her career, when she actually did design work for a sweater company?

One of the best-selling T-shirts for the Indian e-commerce site Myntra is an olive, blue and yellow colorblocked design. It was conceived not by a human but by a computer algorithm — or rather two algorithms.

The first algorithm generated random images that it tried to pass off as clothing. The second had to distinguish between those images and clothes in Myntra’s inventory. Through a long game of one-upmanship, the first algorithm got better at producing images that resembled clothing, and the second got better at determining whether they were like — but not identical to — actual products.

This back and forth, an example of artificial intelligence at work, created designs whose sales are now “growing at 100 percent,” said Ananth Narayanan, the company’s chief executive. “It’s working.”

…The fashion industry illustrates how machines can intrude even on workers known more for their creativity than for cold empirical judgments. Among those directly affected will be the buyers and merchandise planners who decide which dresses, tops and pants should populate their stores’ inventory.(Source: NY Times)

The AI guys, of course, keep assuring us that AI will only partially automate jobs like clothing design and buying. It will augment the way human works, make them better at their jobs.

Maybe for a while, but as AI gets smarter and smarter – and there’s an underlying AI technology called Machine Learning that helps make AI smarter and smarter as it goes along – the human role will inevitably diminish further and maybe even disappear.

Again, the counterargument arises: we’ll need more human intermediaries between companies and consumers. AI may make  all the decisions about what’s going into your closet, but there’ll be a human being to check on whether you really do like that yellow, blue and olive color-blocked shirt, a human being devoted to keeping you brand-loyal and spending away.

The same day I spotted this Times article, I caught a headline somewhere that wasn’t quite click-baity enough for the mood or the moment, but it was something along the lines of when AI and robots take all those jobs away, there’ll always be the need for home healthcare attendants to see to aging Baby Boomers.

Trouble is, of course, two-fold.

One, these jobs don’t pay as well as the skilled blue-, pink-, and white-collar jobs they’ll replace. And two, what make anyone think that robots won’t be taking care of a ton of what healthcare attendants do.

I suppose I’ll see for myself one of these days. But if I don’t recognize the difference between a human wiping the drool off my chin and a robot, what difference will it make anyway?

Sigh.

Glad that I won’t live to see the full culmination of the brave new world.

Meanwhile, buyers beware. AI’s coming for you, and it’s coming fast.