Ellen von Unwerth
Above: An early Guess advertisement with Claudia Schiffer.
Guess has released a video on social media about its origins, going back to the childhoods of the Marciano brothers. It’s all very clever, with some of their most famous campaigns added within, including those iconic ones with Anna Nicole Smith and Claudia Schiffer. It has been done with “AI”, and has the uncanny valley feel, but there are enough real-world inputs (the faces of the brothers, a Ford Mustang, the aforementioned advertisements) to lift it beyond the typical, run-of-the-mill prompted fare.
However, as this “AI” animation style becomes more commonplace—US president Donald J. Trump has shared at least two, to familiarize people who might never have encountered it—we are finding the bar raised, as it’s no longer convincing. Speaking for ourselves, we’d rather see grainy old footage and black-and-white photos of the brothers than the story retold in glossy, shiny “AI” with the inhumanity that its characters have. There is probably more value to the brothers to relive their memories than for the rest of us.
It’s not an invalid form of communication—far from it—and no doubt there will be many people who prefer the shininess of the animations, especially how much work has been put into them.
It’s like those cartoons which gave familiar characters, like the Smurfs or Astérix, a 3D effect their creators never drew. They haven’t been a fad, they have just added to the richness of their creators’ worlds. “AI” animations won’t be a fad, either, but odds are most people will become used to seeing their current form, and they’ll lose their sheen and we’ll lose our wonderment.
All the more important, we feel, for its use to be disclosed, because given the right prompting, and given its advances, our criticism will be overcome. Yet we need to trust what we see, and if the internet becomes a medium of untrustworthy things—as it has already become, outside of certain branded media, cross-media sources, and trustworthy companies and individuals—deceptive footage will drag the whole place down.
Once again we’re reminded of Andrew Niccol’s 2002 film Simone, because we are virtually living it: ‘the death of real’, where the ‘rise in price of a real actor and the fall in price of a fake, the scales have tipped in favour of the fake.’ ‘If the performance is genuine, it doesn’t matter if the actor is real.’ But then Niccol wrote his script when the web was a far cleaner place, disinformation not having been turbocharged by social media. We don’t have the smarts of Evan Rachel Wood’s character in the film, who sees through the charade. We still need trust.
Indeed, we prefer what they posted to YouTube, keeping it real with two of the Marciano brothers recalling the brand’s origins. Of course, it’s all very pro-Guess, and the controversies are omitted.
Jack Yan is founder and publisher of Lucire.
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