An algorithm will aim to make you look similar to what other people like you look like. It will not push boundaries or riff on creative 'happy accidents' because it can't.
A real stylist will do those things and more.
I don't know whether it's an age thing or just pure cognitive dissonance because people in tech have the hubris to think we can optimise and improve everything because technology, but this machine-learning nihilist thinking is profoundly sad.
> Unless you want to be a trend-setter or do some artistic expression through your clothing. In those cases a human stylist does make sense. But for the regular Joe, I think a well trained algorithm can perform better than a human.
And your comment:
> An algorithm will aim to make you look similar to what other people like you look like. It will not push boundaries or riff on creative 'happy accidents' because it can't.
Correct - I think that's what most people want. Style is defined at the high end to a very limited audience and derivative variations of it are built on further derivative variations as it flows down the classes until it so distorted it simply dissolves. Every turn of that crank is another group of people trying to look like other people (and thus offending the tastes of the group being copied).
That is a very clichéd haute couture definition — a la “Devil Wears Prada - Cerulean Top” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL-KQij0I8I
That trickle-down definition of style is relevant perhaps within some groups of people.
I think that most subcultures have their own highly independent styles, and within that you have people with their own independent riffs on the general subculture style.
Do you not think that many subcultures have their own style that isn’t derivative/trickle-down?
Other subcultures of course never break through.
Regardless, most clothing is purchased from retailers that mass produce things. You could probably tier rank them accordingly from designers to boutiques to small retailers on up to big box shops that you can find anywhere.
You see the same thing in other cultural artifacts like cuisine. Haute Cuisine doesn’t start every trend but it isn’t afraid to discover something outside the mainstream, riff on it, and then it works it’s way into the middle.
An algorithm can aim to push boundaries and riff on creative 'happy accidents' in ways that people like you like. It's not even that explicit with typical supervised learning/recommenders. It will find things people like you like, whether that means pushing boundaries in ways those people like or just making you look like they like.
I feel the same as you do about ML being in too many places too confidently, but you're assuming a lot about the kinds of algorithms used.
> Creativity is the preference for low(er) priority edges in a graph
There is virtually no difference between an algorithm and a human except that the human may have better heuristics for what "works", which by definition is a form of bias and an algorithm can assess many orders of magnitude more nodes.
If Lee-Sedol the world champion at Go could be left dumbfounded by what he claimed to be a creative move, a move generated by a laptop performing monte-carlo tree search with an ANN doing pruning, and have his world shattered, then I don't see how anyone else could claim that algorithms can't be creative.
If we go by something like this [1]:
> Creativity is defined as the tendency to generate or recognize ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining ourselves and others. (page 396)
Then the tendency is reweighting of priorities of heuristics, the generation of ideas is walking the varius edges, recognizing is nothing but an evaluation of the new state, and alternatives and posibilities that may be useful is nothing but searching deeper within the graph.
Grand parent comment claimed that believing algorithms (and computers) can perform better than humans is hubris, I claim that believing humans are special, is hubris.
Although I believe there is creative merit in composing an clothing outfit I don't believe that merit is even remotely close to things such as designing the actual clothes or creating the drawings and art that goes into the clothes or designing the stores in which these clothes are sold...
So I stand by my original statement. I do believe an algorithmic stylist for the avergage person can be vastly superior than a human stylist, because the inputs that the former takes are not that different than the inputs of the latter. Furthermore, the reasoning is essentially the same:
People want good fitted clothes, that are in fashion and that go in accordance to what they like. I don't think there's a lot of room for creativity here. I'm sorry that it sounds like a machine-learning nihilist take, but in practice I don't believe there's a good match between what people want from something like Stitch Fix and what a human stylist can do for them.
I dooubt that someone who relates to clothing in an artistic way would ever use something like Stitch Fix, so my assumption is that for the average Stitch Fix user, an algorithmic stylist could give them the same desired output at a better cost.
