Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Screenshot from Blackbird Spyplane, J.Crew Instagram
It seems the AI model that shimmied her way into the pages of Vogue last month has referred her friends from the Uncanny Valley to J.Crew. On Tuesday morning, popular style Substack Blackbird Spyplane published an investigation into a series of nostalgic images recently posted to J.Crew’s Instagram page. The posts, which hawked a collaboration with Vans, appear normal at first glance, in line with the brand’s classic ’80s prepster imagery memorialized on well-known accounts like lostjcrew. But upon further inspection, the folks over at Blackbird identified several quirks that suggest the campaign photos are actually AI-generated.
As evidence, the publication pointed to a rugby-polo-wearing man whose foot “bends backward” and, in another image, identified a “weird underleg” shadow and several nautical inaccuracies, among other glitches. The third image, which is a clear reference to legendary street photographer Bill Cunningham, features one gnarly-looking handlebar and a suspicious white mark on the model’s blue work jacket. In short, the incongruities are aplenty, and commenters noticed, too. One wrote, “I don’t know what’s worse — that you used AI to regurge your own aesthetic in the first place, or that once you did, you couldn’t even be bothered to pay a retoucher to fix the glitches.”
Seemingly in response to Blackbird Spyplane’s reporting, J.Crew updated the Instagram posts on Tuesday to include the credit “Digital art by: @samfinn.studio.” Sam Finn — or, as his website describes him, AI Sam — is an “AI photographer” who “seamlessly merges the real with the artificial, challenging our perceptions of authenticity in virtual worlds.” (It’s unclear what he actually does to accomplish this.) The caption still does not state whether the images show AI models.
When asked about the campaign, J.Crew told The Cut, “We’re always exploring new forms of creative expression, expanding how we work, and finding fresh, innovative ways to create content. This partnership with Sam Finn Studio is one of many examples of how we engage artists of all genres to interpret our brand and experiment with different art mediums.”
The weirdest thing about this debacle is the fact that the vintage imagery J.Crew was trying to re-create is surely right there in the brand’s archives. But why use that when you can cannibalize your own aesthetic to push out imagery that nobody asked for and already exists? Here’s hoping the reputational cost of using uncredited AI imagery will be far more expensive than a shoot ever was.
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