by Dr Luo Li, Assistant Professor in Law at Coventry Law School and Associate Member of the Centre for Dance Research
On 31 August 2021, Dr Luo Li delivered her recent research at the 112th annual conference of the Society of Legal Scholars with the presentation title: Artificial Intelligence (AI): An Innovation or Revolution to the Fashion Industry – An Intellectual Property Analysis Perspective.
Dr Li said the appearance of AI brings significant changes and concerns since humans realise what AI brings is not only convenience and enhanced technology experience but also an advanced independence capability of completing tasks with less or little human engagement. Such independence capability shows a less connection between the resulting productions and human direct controlling and operation (or so-called human intervention), which makes AI look more creative and innovative.
Then Dr Li analysed that AI has been applied in many stages of the fashion industry – a sector labelled “active creativity”. The first aspect of AI application is to help with predicting fashion trending and demand forecast such as long-short-term memory (LSTM) models being applied for time-series forecasting; second is to engagement of creative design (this includes both assisting human designers to fashion design and a foreseeing generating design independently); third aspect of frequently application is inventory, operation and supply chain management; and AI can also enhance customer experience through advising customer personalised shopping and recommending consumers fashion products.
One of the concerns with the application of AI, is about AI produced fashion design. There is a fear that AI may in future replace largely the human designers in the designing process. If it does, then whether such AI-produced design should be protected by copyright. After briefly introducing the historical copyright issues in fashion design, Dr Li discussed who or what is the author of AI-produced design by analysing international, regional and national copyright systems. While Dr Li concluded that most copyright laws in this world do not provide a door for the machine designer, she mentioned a recent patent case (DABUS) recognising AI as an inventor would perhaps give us some consideration in this aspect.
Besides, Dr Li also analysed the nature of AI in the design activities and she compared the different developed stages of AIs in aspects of self-making, operation and output-producing process and proposed that the legal response shall reflect the different features of the different types of AI.
Finally, she concluded that, the engagement of AI system in the fashion industry would bring both opportunities and challenges; both innovations and revolutions. The applications of AI in both assisting design and independent design is and will be a new normal in the fashion industry. Therefore, specifying AI’s functions in the creative and innovation activities as well as recognising AI’s partly or largely or even fully engaging in the design process would be the key for all human legislators and industry workers to consider an appropriate legal system to respond the radical changes due to technology contribution. One thing that must be recognised is that a single law can resolve some issues but not all.
You can find out more about Luo’s research through her Pure profile, which sets out her research interests, publications, and contact details. You can also find out more about Coventry University’s research through our dedicated research pages.
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