Where the City’s movers and shakers have their say. Today, it’s our deputy comment editor Anna Moloney with the pen, talking Labour stash, penguin architecture and Sheerluxe’s AI editor When criticising AI , there is always the risk of looking like a cranky Luddite, but sometimes there really is reason to smash that cotton mill – and the latest move from women’s lifestyle publication Sheerluxe might be one of those. The online publication this week announced it had hired a new fashion and lifestyle editor: Reem.
The catch? She’s a robot, or as Sheerluxe put it, an “AI-enhanced editor” . What exactly this means is unclear, but the bot takes the appearance of an extremely attractive Arab woman, dressed in Sheerluxe-approved clothing with AI-generated images of her posing for selfies in the publication’s Clapham office. Her inaugural post, published on the website on Tuesday, outlines her favourite designers (Gucci), food spots (The Park on Queenway) and makeup products (the Fenty contour match stix) – all despite the fact she is not a real person and cannot possibly use makeup or go to restaurants.
The reaction has been predictably negative. Not only does an AI-generated influencer do nothing to relieve what has long been women’s magazines’ greatest criticism – the setting of (in this case literally) unobtainable beauty standards – there is also simply no demand to be recommended ‘lifestyle’ choices from a robot. While the bot’s ‘ethnicity’.
