Welcome to the Scoop: a weekly email series in which I quiz fashion insiders on the stories of the week. This will be a way for the Vogue Business community to synthesize and reflect on the latest headlines and get a little inside scoop every Friday.

This week, we have two guests, photographer Shahram Saadat and Vogue Business’s art director Niall Wilson. They are here to talk about a subject close to my heart, and likely on the nose and navel, too; the images we created for our latest series, The Future of AI.

We do a few of these series every year, which aim to answer the questions the industry is grappling with at a specific moment. When Matches collapsed, for instance, we published The Future of Shopping. Or when, as a team, we couldn’t stop trying to guess how Ozempic and tweakments would change our beauty standards, we put together The Future of Appearance.

Getting the images right for this project was a journey in itself, revealing a lot about the current debate surrounding AI and image creation. But I will let Shahram and Niall explain.

Hi Niall and Shahram! Tell me about the idea behind the photos. What were you trying to achieve?

Niall: Last year, we published a series on Vogue Business called The Future of Appearance. To create the accompanying visuals, I prompted ChatGPT’s image-generation tool with appearance-based predictions lifted from the articles, which were focused around what we’ll look like in 10 years as technology advances. This time around, with the series being about AI, the obvious route would have been to do something similar. But we wanted to do the opposite and work with a photographer to create something analog, and in a way ‘anti-AI’.

We did, however, brief Shahram in the same way that you would an AI tool. We kept the instructions very top line, in single-sentence prompts that still allowed him to be more creative.

Shahram: I was intrigued when Niall emailed only text prompts as a brief. Normally, as a photographer, you get a mood board, and a more specific image outline. I’ve been interested in the evolution of AI and the odd images that those tools often produce. I thought it would be interesting to try and recreate those odd moments in a tangible way, using physical techniques.

Niall: Shahram’s work stood out to us because he has a slight dystopian, futuristic style in the way that he distorts some of his images. For example, he did this really cool shoot with a car wash that I initially thought was CGI, but was actually photographed from outside the car looking in, as the water was washed over the windscreen. It created this really cool distorted effect.

Shahram, this dystopian aesthetic that Niall described: is it a conscious choice?

Shahram: Not explicitly, what interests me is the every day and trying to capture it in a more surreal manner. The car wash photo he mentioned: I was asked to do a series of pictures based on people taking a break, and I thought, when do you take a break and not feel guilty? And my mind went straight to a car wash. If you need to take a shower, you can do it faster or slower depending on whether you have to be somewhere.

Nowadays, you need to make the most of your time. But a car wash is a forced moment of pause. My practice is rooted in documentary, but leaning on different tools, whether it’s cameras, lenses, or lighting to try and make everyday moments seem a bit out of the ordinary.

Niall, you’re by trade a designer. Do you use AI in your practice often?

Niall: For The Future of Appearance, I generated the visuals using ChatGPT. That was a year ago, when image generation was becoming popular and people were tapping into AI trends on social media. ChatGPT had just introduced its own image generator. So it was more of an exploration and it made sense to use that tool, because the series itself was so focused on something that didn’t exist yet.

But let me tell you, it was not easy at all. It took a lot of tweaking. AI is made out to be the easy way out, but I really do feel that to get anything worthwhile, or that looks even slightly decent out of it, it takes a lot of prompting and tweaking — a lot of back and forth. I wouldn’t say I would use it as part of my day-to-day practice — apart from writing boring emails and the occasional image retouch.

Shahram: I use it a bit for retouching. It’s changed the whole landscape of the industry, because retouchers used to be inundated with comping and extensions, but more of them are now leaning into AI and using it to ease their workflow. When it comes to my own practice, I was into the early forms of image generators, which made images that looked so absurd — almost like a digital Salvador Dali. Now, the images look a bit too real, a bit too much like the adverts that you see on TV, but lacking the human touch. You can see the lack of empathy in people’s faces. For a lot of people, when it came out, it was a bit of a fad. Now, people are slowly shifting back to their old ways or learning to work with it.

Can AI ever crack taste?

Shahram: If it’s guided, maybe. Then again, humans don’t always have taste. As we work our way up and expand our own practice, our taste expands as well. So perhaps a similar thing will happen with AI as it gains more input, more information. That’s how the tool operates and that’s how it’s expanded so much in the last five years. It’s not making Salvador Dali eggs and chickens any more. I think over time, it will develop its own taste. As it stands, AI needs someone with taste to operate it.

How do you see AI shaping luxury and fashion?

Niall: Luxury and AI feel on opposite ends of the spectrum. To me, luxury is built on scarcity and exclusivity. AI is available to everyone. There’s nothing luxurious about a £20 subscription to OpenAI. It needs to blend in the background, otherwise I don’t see how those two things can work hand in hand.

You can catch up with last week’s Scoop with Asics SportStyle’s Anissa Jaffery here.