In February, the CEO of multinational digital and popular periodical publishing house Axel Springer SE, Mathias Döpfner, announced a radical restructuring at German leading tabloid Bild. The restructuring plans became clearer last week when it was revealed that there will be a €100m cost-cutting plan that will result in approximately 200 job redundancies.
The layoffs are partly due to tasks that can now be performed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automated processes in the digital world. However, while AI will be used for numerous tasks in the newsroom, the initial job cuts are allegedly primarily associated with a restructuring of Bild's regional newspaper business and not directly related to AI implementation.
The cost-cutting measures at Bild are indeed also part of broader efforts to improve the company's financial performance and recover from recent scandals, including allegations of covering up misconduct (in October 2021 former editor Julian Reichelt was fired after sexual misconduct and bullying claims) and attempts to influence elections (in April this year Döpfner had to apologise after leaked messages suggested that he attempted to utilize Bild to influence the results of Germany's recent election and conveyed his personal opinions through the newspaper, criticizing climate change activism, COVID measures, and former Chancellor Angela Merkel).
That said, months ago, Döpfner had already emphasized the company's shift towards digital media and acknowledged the potential of AI to enhance journalism. Other publishers, like BuzzFeed and the UK's Daily Mirror and Daily Express, are also exploring the integration of AI in their operations. Nonetheless, the role of AI in replacing or improving journalism remains a topic of debate.
In April this year, Die Aktuelle magazine faced criticism for publishing an AI-generated "interview" with Formula One legend Michael Schumacher, who has been out of the public eye since suffering a severe brain injury in a skiing accident in 2013. The magazine's editor was dismissed, and legal action was taken by Schumacher's family.
The decisions to cut jobs in favour of AI are often dubious first of all because while AI has the ability to streamline certain tasks, it is incapable of entirely supplanting human abilities; second, we should make sure to learn how to use AI optimally in a variety of industries before deciding to cut jobs or relying completely on this technology. Recent use of AI in advertising, for example, demonstrated some limitations in harnessing the full potential of AI.
Materials science brand Pangaia recently teamed up with stylist and former editor at large of Italy's L'Uomo Vogue Robert Rabensteiner for an after-bath capsule collection. The latter includes designs that may be handy at the poolside, the spa or on a boat, so bathrobes, ponchos, kaftans, towels, slides as well as tote bags and headbands (one of them looking like Prada's popular thick headbands) in organic cotton terrycloth. Alledgely super absorbent, lightweight and soft (ordinary attributes for terrycloth...), the collection has a "state-of-the-art odor control treatment, PPRMINT™ Oil" (gotta love the level of pretentiousness here...), which reduces the need for frequent washing.
The collection comes in a pastel palette of lemon yellow, baby blue and pink, renamed for the occasion Los Angeles Yellow, Riviera Blue and Porto Pink (disappointing to see that Bellini Apricot is missing from the list, this fictitious shade may have added another level of chromatic pretentiousness...).
The collection is available on Pangaia's e-commerce, retailing between 90 euros for the beach tote and 195 euros for the headband (maybe it's a sentient headband or has special powers like instantly curing migraines, but it's cheaper than Prada's terrycloth headbands retailing at €527... View this photo).
But the most surprising thing about this story is not the pompous tone accompanying the capsule collection, but the actual campaign. In an attempt to recreate the hype around Maison Meta's AI campaign for Moncler, Pangaia turned indeed to the same agency that employed the same tool, with rather dubious results.
AI is usually employed to generate either fantastic images or pictures that look real, but that have a whimsical quality about them that destabilizes that reality, giving the picture a disturbing, fun or dreamy twist or adding an eerie atmosphere to the overall composition.
In this collection of scenarios we encounter a series of situations featuring AI generated spaces and models that leave you cold, from a couple embracing with the arm of the man squeezing the waist of the woman in an unnatural way, to a young man with a slightly oversized Dalmatian dog on his leash, his fingers reminding a bit of the nightmarish fingers generated by Midjourney only a few months ago; from a woman relaxing with cucumber slices on her eyes and a curiously oversized foot in the foreground, to a man with a stalk of celery in his mouth partially submerged in a shallow pond (perhaps an ill-executed homage to Brioni's extravagant show at Waldorf Astoria in 1964?), next to him a small table with what looks like a small and flat (rather than three-dimensional) pink typewriter.
Maybe the intention was to generate the vision of a cool dandy here, but the whole scene looks rather bizarre and not in a good way. Curiously, instead of evoking eccentricity like many AI generated images do - something that typically elicits amusement, smiles and intrigue - this campaign somehow fails to resonate and leaves you indifferent.
Interesting how an editor and stylist who has collaborated with photographers including Deborah Turbeville, Juergen Teller, Nathanial Goldberg and Pierpaolo Ferrari, and who allegedly fantasised about fancy locations from Porto Ercole to the Beverly Hills Hotel, from Ibiza to Greece while "designing" this capsule collection, agreed to see the products he created advertised by such a campaign.
There are actually hundreds if not thousands of AI artists on Instagram coming up with astonishing AI generated worlds and images that could have done better than the images in this campaign that, while not looking as mysterious, bizarre or disturbing as last year's examples of AI campaigns, at the same time do not seem to be as polished as the images done for other campaigns using AI. In brief, the images lack desirability.
So, who do you blame when you get something like this, Artificial Intelligence or the prompt engineer?
Well, you could blame it on Mode Collapse, that imbalance in the training data and insufficient model capacity, that creates something limited, lacking diversity or variety. But you could also blame it on the human input.
After all, to create a truly unique image from a text, a prompt engineer needs more than just a few words, they must indeed have a vision, a decent wage and must be willing to spend hours to refine the several images generated that will eventually lead to the desired results. In a nutshell, when AI underperforms or creates uninteresting images it is the fault of AI and of the prompt. In this case, though, there is an aggravating variable: the product. The capsule collection is indeed simply weak.
Pangaia prides itself in being innovative: the material science company developed in the past Flwrdwn (down-fill made of wildflowers) and C-Fiber T-shirt (a blend of eucalyptus pulp and seaweed powder).
Last year it announced its "Re-color" capsule, with garments dyed with the brand's own textile offcuts using patented Recycrom technology (a patented process from Italian textile chemical company Officina+39) that transforms textile waste into a fine pigment powder. Now, if they want to be sustainable and they are looking for better answers to environmentally harmful fashion, the ultimate solution would actually be to stop producing useless collections. Another solution is producing collections in collaboration with real designers rather than celebrity guests. And, if you must use AI, use it cleverly. There's nothing worse than abusing a powerful system to create useless images.
What has this advertising story got to do with journalism? Well, it is clear that, while Artificial Intelligence does possess immense potential and capabilities, AI alone cannot work wonders unless there is a remarkable product to advertise and a dedicated individual with knowledge, a fair wage and a reasonable deadline to create and refine the visuals accompanying it.
The same principle applies to journalism: while AI can assist in generating synonyms, swiftly rewriting news articles from agencies, and summarizing documents, it cannot come up with an investigation. If a narrative lacks content it fails to engage readers, just like this campaign fails to engage consumers. Besides, if the publication featuring it doesn't have any pride in its staff, it is also bound to fail.
So this advertising story serves as a noteworthy example to ponder about the discourse surrounding AI, but should also prompt (pun intended) those individuals in authoritative positions to consider the actual implications and applications of AI in our daily lives before cutting jobs indiscriminately.
As for Artificial Intelligence, who knows, maybe one day it will become so powerful to say to a brand trying to come up with an AI generated campaign "You have created a useless collection, I refuse to generate from your prompt an image to promote it". I'm actually eager to see that day.
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