That has fundamentally changed.
Large fashion companies and mail-order retailers are now openly announcing that they're using AI-generated models. Lower costs, no contractual drama, full flexibility when it comes to looks, available around the clock. The image generators have learned to depict characters consistently from different angles, and they've become so good that the human eye can no longer tell the difference between a real photograph and an AI-generated image. Not even someone like me, who works with image editing every day and is trained to pay attention to details.
But something has been bothering me. For weeks now. That creeping feeling that something is off.
I went looking for the source.
When I browse apartments on a real estate portal these days and they suddenly strike me as oddly appealing, it's because they have been AI-optimized, often without any label or disclosure. Straightening converging verticals was familiar territory. Those were optimizations that served pure aesthetics. Now we're looking at lighting situations that could never, ever be achieved in the actual apartment. And it makes apartment hunting exhausting. As a prospective tenant I now have to keep an eye on what's real and what the AI might have faked, incredibly convincingly.
An acquaintance recently showed me a photo he had uploaded as his profile picture on a dating platform. It shows a man in his mid-fifties with an excessively trained torso under a white shirt, an expensive watch on his wrist, leaning against a sports car. Look closely and you'll notice: this car doesn't exist. Neither does the watch. The torso isn't quite right either, and the face looks a few years younger than it should. The platform, by the way, verified the profile by video and declared it genuine. But that's just an aside.
It works splendidly. Gold diggers, as they call women who are after their partner's money, are getting in touch by the dozen. So many, in fact, that he's now embarrassed to have put up that fake picture in the first place.
So it's no longer just about the perfectly fitting clothes in the online shop, which would be annoying enough on its own. More and more areas of daily life are being quietly infiltrated by AI-generated images. Housing. Dating. Probably plenty of other things I haven't even noticed yet.