PARIS — The race to create new artificial intelligence tools promises to revolutionize the fashion industry, from product design to brand communication — but will computers eventually replace creatives?

Underpinning the competition between tech giants is a new era of “generative AI,” a creative artificial intelligence that starts from a prompt and produces original output, like ChatGPT, which is capable of generating elaborate written responses on the basis of a few words.

More from WWD

The technology has also been infiltrating fashion, through a variety of apps and platforms including art and image generators Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. The development could upend the industry by reducing the need for many junior positions, such as assistant designers, product developers and graphic designers.

Launched in October, supply chain platform Cala’s generative AI feature is built with the deep learning model developed by OpenAI, the U.S. artificial intelligence research laboratory behind ChatGPT. It can throw out designs in seconds with simple word combinations.

Cala and other image generators have catalogued every image that already exists on the internet, and brings together elements to create new images – reality-based but remixed with the AI’s imagination.

A prompt such as “red jacket” will give a user hundreds of iterations, while a more detailed description such as “jacket like Brad Pitt in ‘Fight Club’” will create original variations on the theme.

“You can iterate very quickly through an idea without ever needing to sketch something,” said Cala chief executive officer Andrew Wyatt. Through Cala’s mobile app, a user can also create a design on the fly. “Instead of drawing on the back of a napkin at a coffee shop or a bar, you could just start rendering a real garment,” he said.

Users can also upload their own image and have the AI produce variations of