Pick up an August 2025 issue of Vogue, and you’ll come across an advertisement for the brand Guess featuring a stunning model. Yet tucked away in small print is a startling admission: She isn’t real. She was generated entirely by AI.

For decades, fashion images have been retouched. But this isn’t airbrushing a real person; it’s a “person” created from scratch, a digital composite of data points, engineered to appear as a beautiful woman.

The backlash to the Guess ad was swift. Veteran model Felicity Hayward called the move “lazy and cheap,” warning that it undermines years of work to promote diversity. After all, why hire models of different sizes, ages, and ethnicities when a machine can generate a narrow, market-tested ideal of beauty on demand?

I study human-AI collaboration, and my

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