New study suggests AI will revolutionise fashion design

A new study conducted by the Pusan National University, Busan, South Korea suggests human-artificial intelligence (AI) collaborative designs could revolutionise the future of fashion design and serve as an educational tool.

The research notes the use of AI in the fashion industry has grown significantly in recent years. For example, it is already being used to personalise fashion recommendations for customers, optimise supply chain management, automate processes and improve sustainability to reduce waste.

However, creative processes in fashion design continue to be human driven with little research on how to use AI for fashion design with designers themselves often not being included in the research itself.

Assistant professor and lead author of the study, Yoon Kyung Lee was keen to find out if there could be an effective collaboration between humans and AI for the purpose of creative design, and explained: “At a time when AI is so deeply ingrained into our lives, this study started instead with considering what a human can do better than AI.”

The study started with generating new textile designs using deep convolution generative adversarial networks (DC-GANs) and cycle-GANs. The outputs from these models were then compared to similar designs produced by design students.

The comparison revealed the designs produced by both were similar, but the biggest difference was the uniqueness and originality seen in the human designs, which came from the person’s experiences.

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