AI Company Aims to Remove Photographers and Models From Fashion

Israeli artificial intelligence (AI) company Botika secured $8 million in seed funding to help it further develop its generative AI technology that can turn a simple product shot of clothing into an entire fashion shoot, complete with AI-generated human models.

Clothing designers and retailers can capture images of their products, upload them to Botika, and then select an AI-generated model and background for their new “real world” product photos. The company, now $8 million richer, says it can help companies reduce “visual production costs” by 90% and improve time to market by a factor of three.

Of course, it reduces costs and improves turnaround time because it eliminates actual people from the equation, including fashion and commercial photographers and models. If a company has photos of its clothing on a person, it can also use Botika to fundamentally change the model’s appearance, changing their size, shape, and skin tone.

Shoppers rely heavily upon images of clothing on people to make buying decisions, and Botika argues that its AI platform makes selling clothing more accessible, especially for smaller online-only fashion brands.

“The production cost of a photography shoot for e-commerce can range anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars per shoot,” Botika says. “Botika’s AI Generated Fashion Model addresses this critical pain point for fashion brands and breaks down the barrier to high-quality, on-brand images at a manageable cost and timeline.”

Thanks to its new injection of funding, Botika has launched a new mobile app, putting the company’s AI-Generated Fashion Model tools “directly into the hands of users.” The app allows brands to access “their own AI-powered virtual studio.”

Botika includes a “diverse” range of AI-generated models, including people of varying appearances, ethnicities, sizes, and ages. The AI models are generated in-house by Botika, presumably to overcome some of the biases inherent to generative AI.

Many photographers are concerned about generative AI’s impact on their careers and livelihoods. Generative AI has already had indelible effects on product photography, and now it is coming for fashion a significant subset of commercial product photography.

It is not just smaller brands that have begun dabbling in AI, either. In 2023, Levi Strauss & Co. dipped its toes into generative AI to, as it says, “increase diversity,” a move PetaPixel called “tone-deaf.”

In any event, companies like Botika are growing rapidly. Botika says it has increased its revenue by nine times and its customer base by a factor of 11 in the past year. The company is responding to a demand that exists and exploiting a growing market, as many companies are keen to cut costs as quickly as possible, and that means ditching real photography and not hiring actual human models.

Image credits: Botika