Botika’s fashion forward approach to AI model generation

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) is changed how retailers approach everything from marketing to inventory management. Botika, a trailblazer in AI-generated model technology, has recently partnered with Shopify to enhance the e-commerce experience for fashion brands.

Botika's integration with e-commerce signifies a leap forward for fashion retailers seeking to overcome the limitations of traditional photo shoots. The company's proprietary technology focuses on photorealism, ensuring that generated images are virtually indistinguishable from real-life photos. It also prioritizes accuracy, preserving the integrity of garment textures and designs to the finest detail.

What is Botika?

Botika has developed a platform that allows online fashion retailers to create stunning, photo-realistic images using AI-generated models. The company was founded by Eran Dagan and Yarin Didi Meir, who brought together a team of experts with extensive experience in computer vision, AI, and media. The technology enables businesses to save time and money on traditional photoshoots while maintaining high-quality product imagery. 

These AI fashion models can generate endless professional fashion photos, thus empowering retailers to better connect with their customers. It is designed to produce hyper-realistic, high-quality model photos that are diverse and customizable in terms of ethnicity, skin tone, and more.

How it works

Fashion retailers can upload their current on-model images, regardless of the angle or pose, even if the photos are headless. Botika's AI automatically generates new images by enhancing these uploads, allowing creative flexibility while maintaining image quality. The platform also allows swapping backgrounds, transforming standard studio shots into striking lifestyle photos with just a click.

Botika's solutions are designed to help retailers enhance customer engagement, enter new markets more easily, and improve conversion rates by providing diverse, royalty-free AI-generated models with a natural look.

Additionally, the diversity of the AI models helps brands appeal to a broader customer base, potentially entering new markets and improving engagement. The high-quality images produced by Botika AI can enhance product pages, which in turn can boost sales.

In an exclusive interview with Vice President of Marketing at Botika, Avi Friedman we delve into how fashion retailers can take advantage of their AI-generated models technology, AI's benefits, and common misconceptions.

Can you elaborate on how Botika's AI model technology specifically caters to the needs of fashion retailers compared to other generative AI solutions in the market?

The Generative AI visual technology most of us know and use, like Midjourney, DALL-E, etc, is very powerful and can do amazing things. The challenge arises when fashion retailers try to use them for their specific needs like to create clothing photos for their e-commerce business. Most AI solutions still have challenges in three main categories:

1. 1. photorealism - how real and natural the photo looks and it is indistinguishable from an actual photo taken in real life
   2. Accuracy - Do the elements in the photo look like the real ones, in our case, the clothes being sold? Does the garment texture keep true to the original item? Is the design preserved up to the smallest detail?
   3. Consistency - How much do the results vary? for example, a series of product photos with the same model and clothing item rarely looks the same and controlling AI to get it is very complicated.

We built Botika specifically to address these challenges and solve these pain points, shared by fashion brands and retailers using the platform. Our proprietary AI-generated model portfolio and custom backgrounds are developed in-house to look hyper-realistic, natural and indistinguishable from actual studio shots.

How does Botika's AI technology help fashion retailers overcome the limitations of traditional photo shoots while maintaining the quality of their product images and lowering costs?

Traditional photoshoots are very expensive and complex to produce: Aside from the photography studio, the fashion retailers need to hire a model agency, hair and makeup artists, a location for the photoshoot, post-production retouching services and the list goes on. This quickly amounts to thousands of dollars.

With Botika, all they need is an on-model photo (a photo of a person wearing the clothing item), and Botika does the rest. They can select their desired AI-generated model and background from Botika’s gallery. Within a few clicks and several minutes, they get a studio-grade professional product image at a fraction of the cost and time.

Most importantly: Botika requires no technical or creative skills, and anyone can use it.

In light of concerns about AI's potential to reduce human influence, how does Botika balance the use of AI with the need for human creativity and empathy in fashion?

Our approach as a company is to combine human creativity and feedback with advanced AI computer vision models. Botika’s employees come from diverse backgrounds, such as cinematography, linguistics and academic research. We chose this approach to guarantee we represent many opinions and ideas in everything we create.

Lastly and most importantly, we always leave room for our users' feedback whenever we add something new to the platform, from what kind of models and backgrounds they would like us to add: sizes, ethnicities, ages, expressions and more.

What are some of the biggest misconceptions you've encountered from fashion retailers regarding the implementation and benefits of AI model technology?

The number one misconception is that AI models are “fake” and easy to detect. In almost all of the tests we ran, from trial users to large enterprise AI experts, most of them got the answer wrong when we presented them with our own version of a Visual Turing Test: They were required to pick out the AI-generated model out of a random model line up.

The second one would be the concern of user backlash following the usage of AI technology in general and fashion models, specifically in product visuals. In reality, most of our clients rarely report issues they experience with users and in fact most can offer them visuals and looks they can relate to when browsing their stores.

What steps has Botika taken to address common challenges in AI, such as data privacy, security risks, and ethical concerns within the fashion industry?

We were well aware that with the great promise of AI, we need to address big risks and threats. As far as security and data privacy is concerned, Botika’s founders have a solid technical background, which led them to build the platform using the latest cloud security technology, making sure both Botika’s proprietary data, as well as our users data, are both kept securely and separately.

We have a clear company policy to ensure we keep the number of employees and cases that justify accessing user-generated data to a minimum. We recently added an extra safety NSFW filter to guarantee our AI always remains accurate and safe. We just started planning a module for the kids category based on strong market demand, and we will launch it only when we’re 100% certain that it is safe to do so using our technology.