Italian luxury fashion house Valentino has grandly unveiled its “digital creative project” in collaboration with artists and the result – an AI generated visual soup – has been condemned for being “sloppy” and “sad,” to choose some kinder criticisms.
The ad for the Devain handbag, which costs up to £3890, is a kind of surreal swirl of people and bodies and bags. It looks cheap and makes the brand look cheap too. Just when creatives are trying to be positive about AI and business are investing trillions in the technology, this ad seems to set back progress and confirm the bleak prospect of AI slop drowning the world in a stagnant swamp of machine-generated nonsense.
Dr Rebecca Swift, SVP creative at Getty Images, said: “The negative reaction to Valentino’s recent handbags advert validates what our own research has found – consumers predominantly view AI-created works as less valuable than human-made images. While people are excited by AI-generated content for personal use, they hold brands to a higher standard, especially expensive brands. Even full transparency about AI use wasn’t enough to win them over.”
Maybe any publicity is good publicity. Maybe Valentino is leveraging some “rage bait,” which the Oxford Dictionary crowned as its word of the year this week. But when an Italian luxury brand is prepared to muck around with 65 years of hard-earned reputation, it indicates that marketers need to show humans a bit more respect.
