This story just jolted a memory of being shocked reading about a similar project in Jonathan Crary’s book “24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep” and then breathing a massive sigh of relief that it was abandoned. Guess we're in the century of reviving grotesquely hellish ideas...

Anyway, some more coverage of our project and the Model Alliance's fantastic work advocating for fashion models here in Teen Vogue: www.teenvogue.com/story/ai-cou...

It’s the same stories we heard in early days of the gig economy–unlock side hustles, control your schedule, productivity galore. Playing out now through language around AI tools – our helpful and totally non-threatening digital twins, assistants, co-pilots, avatars, teammates, agents, and so on.

Companies like H&M have posed the idea that models can amplify their earnings w/ “digital twins” – a second self they can put to work. Instead, models end up in a race to the bottom to outbid their own sleepless, poreless AI selves while often losing control of their likenesses in shady contracts.

Fashion modeling might seem on peripheries of a lot of labor struggles, but I'd argue it’s a telling microcosm of some of its most starkly extractive uses in creative industries: baldfaced treatment of precarious isolated workers as little more than data sources for capture in an AI 'assembly line.'