Abstract:

The recent developments and rapid spread of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have affected several professional domains, including the Cultural and Creative Sectors (CCS), calling for the upskilling of professionals towards adopting and integrating AI into their competencies. The impact of this transformation is also reflected in the educational sphere, as reported in the Digital Education Action Plan 2021-2027, which emphasises the crucial role of education in promoting the understanding of AI and its application to support new forms of learning and teaching, and to spread a new awareness of the potential development within this domain. Indeed, AI in Education (AIED) can radically transform the role of all the involved stakeholders; more specifically, in the field of Design, the need for designers to interact with different AI systems to remain competitive in the professional field and compete with the technological advancement of the 4th Industrial Revolution has become evident. Indeed, being their nature rooted in the principles of ideation, planning, realisation and evaluation, the Design disciplines are predisposed to intertwine with the emerging instruments for creating visual and conceptual material to support designers' work.

The AI revolution in 2020 saw the emergence of generative AI systems capable of creating original textual and visual content comparable to that produced by humans. This drew attention to Computational Creativity (CC), in which computerised systems are placed at the centre of creative processes. Recent advances in AI text-image generation have demonstrated their "creative" ability based on text prompts in natural language to offer extensive support during the conception and generation of new ideas and the externalisation of human-developed concepts.

In light of this scenario, the article will focus on human-AI co-creation during the Fashion Design creative process, in particular when translating inspirations suggested by mood and lifestyle boards into shape and material inputs as silhouettes, fits, lines, constructions, details, prints, embroideries and applications. On the one hand, this leads to an acceleration and boost of creativity, allowing designers to be easily inspired and quickly visualise prototypes of their designs. On the other hand, democratising designer performance towards machine integration leads to conceptual concerns about the overlap between the real and the copy and practical issues about data privacy and copyright of training datasets.

Given the background, the paper offers an interpretation of the possible implications of integrating AI within the Creative Industries, specifically in Fashion Design, and their inclusion into the Fashion academic curricula. This is achieved by (i) considering AIED state-of-the-art and possible implementation of current AI tools to include fashion knowledge within datasets, going beyond their current ability to generate purely descriptive synthetic images; (ii) codifying the designer's role in co-creation with AI; (iii) define the boundaries between human and computational creative effort to re-evaluate the concept of creativity overall.

Keywords:

Fashion Design, AI Education, Creative Processes, Human-AI, Co-creation.