Member-only story
The Future of A.I. Isn’t Quite Human
On the red carpet or the esports arena, the next generation of celebrities could be artificial
Nothing about Shudu is real, exactly. She doesn’t have a physical form, and until now, she has existed only on our screens. She lives, so to speak, mostly on Instagram, where she models clothes virtually tailored to her computer-generated body.
But last month, Shudu stepped beyond our phones and onto the red carpet at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards (BAFTAs). Unfazed by flashing cameras and rendered in holographic form, Shudu, wearing a glittering dress designed by Swarovski, posed with celebrities like Regina King and Salma Hayek.
Shudu is a kind of idealized representation of a woman who would work in the fashion industry, a calculated fabrication from her creator, photographer Cameron James-Wilson. (Technically, Shudu doesn’t have a gender. She’s the image of a black woman created by a white man, a visual media product with about as much of a gender identity as a glossy magazine page. Still, we’re using female pronouns in the story for clarity.) At the BAFTAs, Shudu became the visual representation of an A.I. program that parsed celebrities’ clothes and scanned a database to find affordable alternatives. Folks at home could then interact with a Shudu chatbot online to talk fashion.
At first glance, an A.I. brought to life on the red carpet may feel jarring. But A.I. is already operating in many aspects of our lives: It controls your Facebook news feed, it helps make your salad, and it opposes you in video games. And while a fleet of Protoss carriers gliding across a choke point in Starcraft II may appear less “real” than Shudu in her gown on a real red carpet — or the virtual avatars created by Facebook and spotlighted in a Wired feature last week — cutting-edge work happening behind the scenes in these virtual worlds may actually say quite a bit more about an emerging universe of the almost-human, where the line between person and machine…
