J. Crew Is in Hot Water After Its “Vintage” Ad Turned Out to Be Faked Using AI

The American clothing brand J. Crew is under fire after it was revealed that the company used AI to guzzle up its own aesthetic and promote ads with seemingly fake models.

The images, which were published to Instagram earlier this month, don’t raise immediate alarm bells. Presumed human men are pictured embodying J. Crew’s vintage Americana-prep aesthetic: vibing on boats, cycling past storefronts in muted colors, drawing and painting in their paint-splattered studio, and so on.

But as style blog Blackbird Spyplane first spotted, upon closer inspection the images are absolutely littered with signs of AI slop. The errors range from small oddities — misaligned stripes on a rugby shirt, for instance — to more blatant errors, like one man’s foot facing backwards and another’s hands melting into the handlebars of his bike.

After Blackbird Spylane‘s reporting unmasked the slop, the company updated its Instagram captions to include a callout to someone named Sam “AI Sam” Finn, who refers to themselves as an “AI photographer.” Still, J. Crew didn’t actually cop to the use of AI in the caption; instead, they referred to the campaign images as “digital art.” The captions also don’t acknowledge whether the depicted models are real people or not.

As The Cut pointed out, there were a large number of folks in the comments section who expressed annoyance and anger at the images. Which makes sense! Unbeknownst to J. Crew, it seems, a lot of people do care whether the humans used in the advertisements designed to sell them clothes exist — and, to that end, whether the actual items J. Crew is actively trying to sell them are shown in their real form, or are a hyperreal, AI-generated version.

When The Cut reached out for comment, J. Crew issued a terse response — that, once again, failed to acknowledge the use of AI.

“We’re always exploring new forms of creative expression, expanding how we work, and finding fresh, innovative ways to create content,” the company told the magazine. “This partnership with Sam Finn Studio is one of many examples of how we engage artists of all genres to interpret our brand and experiment with different art mediums.”

We don’t know what’s sadder: J. Crew’s lack of disclosure around AI use, its decision to leave sloppy AI errors all over the campaign, or its belief that its iconic aesthetic, born out of decades of design and creative human labor, should be swallowed up and ralphed back out by AI.

More on AI slop: Wired and Business Insider Accidentally Published AI-Generated Slop Articles by Seemingly Fake Journalist