Welcome to the Scoop: a weekly email series in which I quiz fashion insiders on the stories of the week. This will be a way for the Vogue Business community to synthesize and reflect on the latest headlines and get a little inside scoop every Friday.
This week, we have two guests, photographer Shahram Saadat and Vogue Business’s art director Niall Wilson. They are here to talk about a subject close to my heart, and likely on the nose and navel, too; the images we created for our latest series, The Future of AI.
We do a few of these series every year, which aim to answer the questions the industry is grappling with at a specific moment. When Matches collapsed, for instance, we published The Future of Shopping. Or when, as a team, we couldn’t stop trying to guess how Ozempic and tweakments would change our beauty standards, we put together The Future of Appearance.
Getting the images right for this project was a journey in itself, revealing a lot about the current debate surrounding AI and image creation. But I will let Shahram and Niall explain.
Hi Niall and Shahram! Tell me about the idea behind the photos. What were you trying to achieve?
Niall: Last year, we published a series on Vogue Business called The Future of Appearance. To create the accompanying visuals, I prompted ChatGPT’s image-generation tool with appearance-based predictions lifted from the articles, which were focused around what we’ll look like in 10 years as technology advances. This time around, with the series being about AI, the obvious route would have been to do something similar. But we wanted to do the opposite and work with a photographer to create something analog, and in a way ‘anti-AI’.
We did, however, brief Shahram in the same way that you would an AI tool. We kept the instructions very top line, in single-sentence prompts that still allowed him to be more creative.
Shahram: I was intrigued when Niall emailed only text prompts as a brief. Normally, as a photographer, you get a mood board, and a more specific image outline. I’ve been interested in the evolution of AI and the odd images that those tools often produce. I thought it would be interesting to try and recreate those odd moments in a tangible way, using physical techniques.
Niall: Shahram’s work stood out to us because he has a slight dystopian, futuristic style in the way that he distorts some of his images. For example, he did this really cool shoot with a car wash that I initially thought was CGI, but was actually photographed from outside the car looking in, as the water was washed over the windscreen. It created this really cool distorted effect.
