Artificial Intelligence in 2025 is a pervasive force reshaping fashion, editorial imagery and other creative works across the industry. From AI-generated magazine spreads to deepfakes, the technology challenges ethics and accountability. Men’s Folio asks: Is losing the ability to discern aiding innovation, or are we silently surrendering control over what we see, value and trust?
It’s about time we reopened that conversation. In the last few years, the general consensus when it comes to the usage of AI in creative fields was that it’s bad. The output looked mediocre, clockable, and it’s not worth the environmental cost of deforestation or the extensive threats to global ecosystems.
That was at least two years ago, when the limitations of AI meant you could tell an AI-generated photo via a missing finger or an extra ear on a subject. However, with advancements in technology, the conversation has shifted, and it’s become much more sinister in nature. With the release of GPT-5, Grok and the improvement of other image generation models like Dall-E and Gemini, discernment became harder even to the trained human eye. AI detection essentially became a forensic exercise: zooming into pixels, checking shadow alignments or reflections.
Creatives and artists alike have begun to ask themselves, “Perhaps, this is worth it?”
Over the past months, brands and publications alike have integrated AI into their recent social media posts and other published work. It all started when American Vogue released its August 2025 issue. It was business as usual, except for an outlier: a double-page spread of a Guess advertisement that was fully AI-generated. The internet rightfully responded, and you best believe there were scathing thinkpieces on X and other internet forums. “Vogue is dead,” proclaimed one user, and it was an appropriate contextual response, given that ex-Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour had departed her role just a month earlier. That advertisement was pure simulacrum: bearing no attachment to reality, yet its intended purpose was to connect to reality by wanting to sell you clothes.
Then, following suit, i-D released ‘The Beta Issue’ in the first week of September, featuring a less-than-one-year-old baby girl on the cover to mark the first generation born in 2025. It all seemed fine, the winking baby, shot by Torso Solutions, gets a full editorial spread, except for an AI-assisted video of the baby talking. This is an independent set of problems in itself. Setting aside the efforts put into the cultural alchemy, is it justifiable to lend images of children, particularly to a baby who cannot even consent to their own image rights, to AI algorithms? Deepfakes of children have much more sinister intent than the one i-D had prepared.
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Factor in the irony of it all. In a conversation with several cultural correspondents to tie in with the editorial, a few celebrities have choice words to say. “Turn back,” cautions Nan Goldin. “Stay off the internet,” says Courtney Love. But Mindy Seu, author of the Cyberfeminism Index, says it most poignantly. “The tools (AI) themselves are not evil — these technologies are reflections of societal systems.” It is a shame that the child’s first interaction with these new technological tools is one where the cost is not borne by the adults who made that decision.
Other uses of AI in this respect are much more on the nose: Luigi Mangione’s AI modelling debut on Shein’s E-commerce website sparked significant controversy and public online discourse. Mangione’s likeness was used to sell a floral shirt, and subsequently blew up when Pop Base tweeted about it. Even when incarcerated, the exploitation of people and its tools continues.
Shein’s website appears to use Luigi Mangione’s face to model a spring/summer shirt. pic.twitter.com/UPXW8fEPPq
— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) September 3, 2025
It cuts deeper; more casual usage of AI image generation are evident in brand campaigns. Mowalola compiles editorial images into a singular continuous AI video for an Instagram post. Barragan’s entire shtick relies on AI imagery of his garments to sell in a post-ironic way. Lotta Volkova reposts AI art on her account. Solange reposts an AI-generated video of her DJing in a 2000s PS2 video game graphics aesthetic.
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You ask yourself, “Is it because they have embraced it, or that they simply cannot tell?”
No matter how we feel about AI, it begins with acceptance. From here on out, AI is the unending future that we will have to face, and the changes are the different innovations that come with this burgeoning technology. It seems unfortunate that we have lent ourselves to predictability and objectivity in our livelihoods. The greats, the artists, photographers, musicians and painters that we have loved and adored for decades will still be revered for their human-generated work. Now, that appreciation endures, with the possibility of an asterisk to denote that machine integration has played a part in the process of their making.
There is a quote from IBM’s Training Manual from 1979 that reads, “A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”
A computer can never feel emotion; therefore, a computer shall never, with its own independence, invoke emotion.
In all examples mentioned above, humans were the ones involved in the decision-making, the ones who provided the data points to be studied, and the ones who wrote the prompts. The emotion, outrage, passion, and drive behind every AI-mediated outcome remain human. AI is a tool, not an autonomous agent: it mirrors, it amplifies and it simulates, but it does not originate intent or feeling. We will do well to remember that, no matter the response we hope our AI creations elicit.
The ethical, legal and cultural responsibilities rests entirely with those who deploy it. Whether it is an AI-generated editorial, a deepfake, or a commercial campaign, the consequences are borne by people, not machines. Understanding this distinction is crucial if we are to set meaningful boundaries and safeguards around the technology, ensuring that innovation does not eclipse accountability.
Once you are done with this story, click here to catch up with our October 2025 issue.