SHEIN Shows us the Sinister Side of Artificial Intelligence in Fashion
SHEIN has ruthlessly ripped off another independent designer, raising further questions about the online retailer's use of data scraping and AI
As some of you who follow me may already know, for the past year, I’ve been working on a book on fashion and technology. The book is called Electric Runway and it looks at how emerging technologies are transforming the business of fashion around the world. In the chapter on artificial intelligence, I detail how the fashion industry has leveraged Big Data and AI over the years and warn about the implications of generative AI and data scraping.
If you’ve never heard the term before, data scraping is the process of automatically extracting information or data from publicly available websites. This can be text, but also image and video data. A recent story posted on TikTok from creator Helene Myhre illustrates the more sinister side of data scraping in the fashion industry:
Myhre is an online creator and digital tour guide in Norway. She sells downloadable maps, filters, presets, and guides for the Scandinavian country.
Recently, she collaborated with Skappel, a knitwear brand based in Oslo, to sell a knit pattern with wool (for context, knitting and pattern-sharing are a big part of Norwegian culture). The sweater is hand-knit and uses 100% Norwegian wool. It features a pink and purple design.
To Myhre’s surprise, she found a dupe of her sweater on SHEIN. The SHEIN design is not just “inspired by” her sweater—it’s a complete copy—only made of 100% polyester and mass-manufactured in China. To add insult to injury, SHEIN even used Myhre’s photos on their eCommerce website to market the item and sell it for €20 (Myhre’s original sweater design package was €120).
“This is not how you do business,” Myhre says in the video.
This isn’t the first time SHEIN has stolen from independent creators. In April of this year, Connecticut-based artist and designer Alan Giana filed a lawsuit against SHEIN, alleging the retailer “copied and displayed [his] artwork on [its] website without any authorization or permission [and] manufactured products bearing [his] artwork.”
What’s more, Giana alleges that the company’s use of AI, machine learning, and algorithms systematically infringes on his copyrighted work and that widespread copyright infringement is baked into SHEIN’s business model.
A year before Giana’s lawsuit in 2023, three independent creators, Krista Perry, Larissa Martinez, and Jay Baron sued SHEIN for stealing their designs and alleged the company’s widespread use of AI for copying amounts to racketeering. Racketeering, simply put, is engaging in illegal schemes repeatedly and consistently to earn a profit.
The argument is that AI-based image recognition technology and sophisticated electronic monitoring systems allow ultra-fast-fashion companies like SHEIN to analyze images from social media and quickly recreate popular styles.
SHEIN is the largest fashion retailer in the world, with annual sales of almost $30 billion— more than H&M and Zara combined. Part of how the company grew to such a behemoth is by producing 6,000 new items each day. For context, competitors like Fashion Nova produce 600 to 900 styles per week.
Fast fashion is not known for its originality; Zara grew to dominance circa 2017 by copying designs from the runway and selling them at a lower price point. SHEIN has replicated this model but put it on steroids. To produce 6,000 items daily, SHEIN needs endless content to draw from or, in some cases, copy directly. While SHEIN isn’t explicit about how they use AI in the design process, it does seem that scouring the web and systematically ripping off independent designers is part of their business model.
Like the technologies that came before it, AI is not inherently good nor evil, but it has the potential to do harm as well as good. As we are on the precipice of an AI boom in fashion—and every other industry—we ought to carefully consider this emerging technology’s power and how we should use it.