Vibes & Lies: On J.Crew, A.I. and Us
Are we all guilty of not looking deeper when the 'vibes are on point?'
Right so, according to the lads over at Blackbird Spyplane, J.Crew have seemingly used AI to generate images for their J.Crew x Vans campaign that was popping off on people’s IG stories a while back (mine included). The article is one that’s definitely worth reading. It’s a great piece of investigative work by one of the best voices in culture and fashion right now (at least I think so anyhow), and it prompted me to think about why myself and others so happily shared the images without question.
I consider myself an aware and observant person when it comes to AI slop nonsense. I thoroughly detest the stuff. And yet in this instance, no red flags sprang up at me. Why? I think a lot of it comes down to that oft-used and quite abstract term: 'vibes'. The vibes of the images seemed spot on. They fit J.Crew as a brand, they had similar features to previous (actual human-created) adverts from the 90s. On a small screen on your phone, it’s definitely a bit more difficult to tell sometimes, but if we’re all being honest with ourselves, even if we’d viewed these images on our desktop or laptop monitors, I don’t think we would’ve really noticed that they were AI-generated.
Vibes, those accursed vibes. Vibes now ruined (to echo a point in the original B.S. piece) by the fact they were assembled and churned out by a computer. If this whole thing has taught me anything, it’s that none of us are going to be completely immune from simply assuming something is real if it fits the vibe. I don’t want to give the so-called ‘AI photographer’ any form of credit, but whatever images they generated clearly fooled a lot of people (including myself).
To paraphrase the great Will Halbert’s video on this: we’re all knee-deep in the moodboardification of the menswear space. They have their place, the moodboards and nostalgia accounts, but if all we’re left with is vibes that are now being generated by a machine to the point of banality, that’s probably not a good thing.