Cultural Appropriation

Ali has been making clothes since she was a kid. Now, she’s a graduate student at the best fashion design school in the country, where she has been experimenting with how to incorporate AI into making a new clothing line. She draws from cultures around the world and wants to create a collection that genuinely represents all cultures and respects all body types. Her professors tell her that it's impossible, but she persists. Ali programmed her AI tool to include many data sets representing traditional garments and patterns and a broad range of fashion history.

When Ali’s AI tool began generating design renderings, she was initially impressed by the range of patterns and styles. However, one of her close friends in the program pointed out that some of the renderings looked similar to garments that some consider sacred. They represented cultures that Ali knew little about and was not represented by.

Her critique sparked an inquiry about cultural appropriation in her collection and in AI-generated art. She quickly realized that the model she trained needed to include the kind of nuanced understanding of different cultures and symbolism that those cultures would not want to reproduce. In her research, she read articles about cultural appropriation in fashion and academic papers, such as those about digital cultural heritage, hoping to find insights to help navigate the ethics of these issues.

Ali also reached out to a few friends in her program. A casual afternoon coffee conversation became a disagreement about the benefits and pitfalls of representing cultures with AI tools in the fashion industry. One friend said that AI’s ability to process large amounts of data might create more authentic and respectful cultural fusions. “AI tools could break cultural barriers through fashion,” she said. Another friend argued that algorithms could not fully capture all of the nuances contained in culture and mentioned that AI-generated designs might trivialize cultural symbols and elements.

Ali organized a panel of experts to discuss this. It took place at her school, and three experts debated the issue: a fashion designer, a cultural anthropologist, and a professor who teaches AI ethics. The discussion revealed the complexity of the issue. While one of the panelists mentioned that human designers struggled with cultural appropriation and questioned whether an AI tool could be programmed with more comprehensive cultural knowledge than a human, another pointed out that simply feeding cultural designs into an AI tool required separating the designs from their cultural context and was, therefore, a form of appropriation. Ali was left with a deeper appreciation for her responsibility as a fashion designer.

Ali revised the tool to include specific ways of filtering out imagery that might be culturally sensitive but couldn’t fully address some of the issues the panelists brought up. The experience made her consider the importance of being culturally aware as she designed, but she remained frustrated by the process.

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