Nick Knight Is Building His Own AI

The Business of Fashion Podcast

In this episode of the Business of Fashion Podcast, Nick Knight discusses his pioneering work in building custom AI datasets from scratch, usi

Key takeaways

• Nick Knight is creating a unique AI medium by training models on his own photographic data, bypassing internet-scraped content.
• AI is not just a tool but a transformative force redefining imagery, communication, and human relationships.

Main topics

• AI-generated art and custom datasets
• The evolution of the metaverse in fashion

Notable quotes

Stop trying to be a 20th century image maker or photographer. Stop trying to work for magazines.

If we said metaverse is just a digital version of life, absolutely happening.

Conclusion

Nick Knight envisions a future where AI enables entirely new forms of

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Introducing Meta Glasses. You have questions? They've got answers. Speaker 4 (0:05) Hey, Meta, what's the capital of Peru? Lima. How do you say, where's the restroom in Spanish? ¿Dónde está el baño? Hey, Speaker 2 (0:14) Meta, is a hot dog a sandwich? Speaker 4 (0:17) Technically, no. Spiritually, yes. Speaker 3 (0:20) Hey, Meta, what should I do with my life? Speaker 4 (0:22) That's one of life's biggest questions. What do you think? Speaker 3 (0:26) Ask anything with the new Meta Glasses. Speaker 2 (0:34) Hi, this is Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion. Welcome to the BOF podcast. It's Friday, August 21st. I've been interviewing Nick Knight for more than 15 years. This is our fourth in-depth sit-down interview. And at this stage, it's becoming something closer to a running conversation about how technology is reshaping fashion. This time around, I wanted to know where Nick is focusing his energy now. It turns out he is building his own AI data sets from scratch, photographing a model over and over so the machine sees the world only through his references and never scrapes the internet for somebody else's. He takes his own still image and asks the AI to make it move, producing something that is neither a photograph Speaker 4 (1:28) nor a Speaker 2 (1:29) film. I also asked him for the advice he'd give to young image makers starting out today in the age of AI. Speaker 1 (1:37) Well, drop the past. Stop trying to be a 20th century image maker or photographer. Stop trying to work for magazines. Stop trying to pretend that they still have some relevance. Stop trying to look backwards, look forwards with enthusiasm. If you can compare rather badly. the AI revolution to the industrial revolution. This is like sitting, standing in a field, looking at the first kind of locomotive going by saying, so what do you advise somebody in the future? It's like, we don't know what's coming. It's changing so fast. Speaker 2 (2:05) This week on the BOF podcast, Nick and I get into what happened to the metaverse, how Nick believes AI is creating an entirely new medium, somewhere between photography and film, and what fulfillment really means to one of fashion's defining image makers. Here's Nick Knight on the BOF podcast. Nick Knight. Hello. How are you? Yeah, good. Speaker 1 (2:32) Thank you. How are you? Good. Welcome Speaker 2 (2:33) to the BOF podcast. My pleasure. Actually, I should say, I feel welcome to your podcast Speaker 1 (2:40) in my studio. Yeah, my Speaker 2 (2:42) podcast in your studio. And luckily, it's a beautiful summer's day. It Speaker 1 (2:48) is. We've had a few of them this summer. Yeah. Speaker 2 (2:52) I think it's been like six weeks of nice days at this stage. Speaker 1 (2:55) Yeah. Speaker 2 (2:57) So I was looking back. This is our fourth sit down interview. Is it? Our first one was in 2010. Yeah. Live streamed from the Hospital Club. Do you remember that one? Speaker 1 (3:10) Marcus Werner had filmed it. Speaker 2 (3:12) Exactly. Then we did one in 2018. Speaker 1 (3:15) Right. Speaker 2 (3:16) For the BOF podcast. Speaker 1 (3:17) Right, right, right. Speaker 2 (3:18) Then we did another one in 2022. Speaker 1 (3:21) Right. Speaker 2 (3:21) Also for the BOF podcast. So this is now my fourth sit down, in-depth chat with you. Speaker 1 (3:28) Excellent. Well, how nice of you. I want to come back and ask more questions. Yeah, Speaker 2 (3:31) well, Speaker 1 (3:31) you know Speaker 2 (3:31) what? It feels like... What this is becoming is an extended conversation now over the course of 15 or so years about how technology is changing fashion. Speaker 1 (3:47) And Speaker 2 (3:47) that technological change and evolution is only accelerating. Speaker 2 (3:57) So rather than go back through your early career, which I normally do on this podcast, we've done that before. So if Speaker 1 (4:05) anyone's... See past episodes. Exactly. Speaker 2 (4:07) If anyone's listening or watching and they want the history of this now legendary photographer, then you should watch parts Speaker 1 (4:15) one, two and Speaker 2 (4:17) three. Speaker 1 (4:18) But Speaker 2 (4:18) I want to dive right into like everything that's happening. You know, the last time you and I sat down, It was just as at the time that the metaverse was this word that everyone was Speaker 1 (4:33) talking about. A very Speaker 2 (4:35) famous technology company from Silicon Valley actually changed its name to link itself permanently, it seems, to the metaverse. And at the time, you were quite bullish about it. You know, you were talking about perhaps there could be. Speaker 2 (4:53) a time when we wouldn't even need physical fashion shows anymore. But the metaverse has kind of drifted away. Like, what do you make of what happened to the metaverse? Speaker 1 (5:04) I don't think it's necessarily drifted away. I think the term's been some degree cancelled because it had too many bad connotations. I don't think it helped that Mr. Zuckerberg named his platform after it. I think that put off a sway of the people. So I think... It's still there. NFTs are still going. Avatars are still happening. There's a virtual world all around us, et cetera, et cetera. So none of that has gone away. It's Speaker 2 (5:31) not gone away in theory. And I know that there's Speaker 1 (5:34) small Speaker 2 (5:35) -ish groups of people that are still very interested in that space. But when I said it went away, fashion's interest in that space and like, you know, does fashion have a role to play in? video games or creating NFTs or twins of their products. All of that seems to have gone away. The only thing that seems to be left is this idea of a digital product passport to help track a product. And there's all sorts of things related to that. I Speaker 1 (6:03) don't know. I think it depends on what you think is fashion. Fashion is just a desire, a certain way of being. I think part of our problem is we are slightly stuck in the 20th century. And that's coloring a lot of how we're viewing the 21st century. And I think all those things that we talked about are still very current, still very much happening. People still have an online identity, et cetera, et cetera. Every change. doesn't bring forward everybody. So I think there are people who hanker for even stuff they haven't lived through. So a sort of passéiste kind of, oh, magazines were great, or so nice to have something you can physically touch and all those sort of things, which is a true feeling. So there are those sort of people. And there are those people who have a vested business interest in keeping things, keeping the status quo. So either power or money or fame or whatever it would be. Or their jobs. or their jobs. Speaker 2 (6:59) But Speaker 1 (6:59) that isn't a long-term view. That's a short-term view of where we are. I think my excitement is that we are redefining our relationship to imagery. We're redefining our relationship to each other. We're redefining a way of talking. We're redefining a whole range of quite basic things that we've had for hundreds of years, except it were the best ways of doing things. probably the only ways of doing things. And now it's completely changed. All the possibilities are there. And I think part of my excitement is it just feels like we're starting to see new things. We're not just rehashing. If you look at the state of fashion imagery now, it's very referencing the past. So here's another Avedon type shoot. Here's another Bruce Weber type shoot. Here's another, you know, but it's referencing 20th century photography. And that's fine. And, you know, having seen that transition from totally sort of analog to totally digital, I don't have that sort of desire to go back to analog. There's lots of talk around how AI should be taken out of, you know. the way we work but i don't know how you start to do that because ai is in everything i sort of funny you see people commenting on instagram and saying you know ai slop and all these sort of things you think what you're looking at it on the television you're seeing this because you have an AI-driven algorithm on an AI-driven platform taken on a camera, which is using AI, whether you're using your iPhone or whatever. So your Speaker 2 (8:43) view is the metaverse is still something that exists. It's just not talked about that way anymore because the name changed. Speaker 1 (8:52) If we said metaverse is just a digital version of life, Speaker 2 (8:55) that's Speaker 1 (8:56) absolutely happening. Okay. Speaker 2 (8:57) One thing that you and I talked about. Speaker 1 (9:00) Way Speaker 2 (9:00) back in 2010 was Plato's Atlantis and the first live stream shows. Speaker 1 (9:08) That Speaker 2 (9:08) is one area where we have seen a continued engagement from the fashion world and fashion industry. But I'm curious, when you see the shows now, how they're live streamed, what's being live streamed, the creativity or lack thereof that goes into those live streams, how do you... Speaker 2 (9:31) kind of makes sense of the way that technology is now being used in the fashion industry versus say the way you and Lee McQueen Imagined it could be used when when you were doing Plato's Atlantis. Well, Speaker 1 (9:45) I think Plato's Atlantis Changed fundamentally how the fashion industry was formed So before it was a closed circuit, a closed hat, a closed shop, you know, only 300 people or it would be invited to a show Nobody else be able to see it Players of Lance opened all up and said to the public, come and see it as it's happening. So that fundamentally changed things. It changed the sort of distribution, schedules, and when clothes were made, and how they got out to the public, and when you talked about things. All that fundamentally changed, and literally from season to season. So that was a huge change. Now you've got where everybody has their own phone, everybody's got their own broadcast platform, etc., etc. Everybody has the ability to be able to live stream themselves, to be able to review the show, which is great. That's democracy. The democratization of fashion and the democratization of imagery is great. You know, prior to people having an Instagram or TikTok account and an iPhone, they had very little ways of even starting to articulate image. So people weren't used to expressing themselves through imagery. Writing was fine because most people had access to a pen. It wasn't always the case. Most people had access so they could write. But actually... Taking pictures to express yourself was quite,