Can Amazon’s AI Designer Replace Fashion Designers?

Amazon’s fashion design-specific AI initiative—AI Designer—has been in development since 2017. This is a program that creates garment designs independently.

Amazon is nearing the trial stage for AI Designer which was developed in Amazon Lab126, a research and development company founded in 2004 by Gregg Zehr, who is the design guru who developed Amazon’s Kindle line of e-readers and tablets.

AI designer uses a generative adversarial network that uses vast datasets and two competing neural networks to distinguish what is stylish and what isn’t. For data, the system has significant data and images that can be harvested from social media and print sources.

Will AI Designer replace fashion designers?

Even bigger questions are likely to arise concerning intellectual property. Will Amazon own the rights to its designs? How will Amazon go about protecting its designs from knockoffs and design pirates?