Initially founded in 2019 by Duncan McKay, INSEAD MBA and Phil Torr, Professor of Computer Vision and Deep Learning at the University of Oxford, the tech firm went on to be awarded two Innovate UK Grants, and one Future Fashion Factory Grant in partnership with the University of Leeds with funding totalling approximately £1.2 million.

McKay said: “I have worked for L’Oreal, Unilever and PepsiCo coming up with new product ideas and consumer solutions – I built an £18m net revenue business in a year whilst at PepsiCo. I got into this because I love innovating – I get a kick out of innovation, building and scaling businesses. I founded Aistetic with Phil Torr as I experienced the problem of poor-fitting clothes personally and we both felt that we could solve this with a technology solution. With the development of our patent-pending solution, we quickly realised that our purpose is bigger than that – we want to make next-gen 3D body modelling available to anyone with a mobile device.”

Aistetic is a low-code solution that integrates into retailers’ websites with one short snippet of JavaScript which works across WordPress and Shopify stores. Using Aistetic, users can select a garment, then use AI software to scan their body and receive their measurements and clothes sizing specific to the retailer they’re shopping with within 3 minutes or less. McKay explains that this new tool can reduce rates of return by up to 30%, creating significant savings for retailers.

McKay said: “Using our tool, consumers can record themselves using their phone, tablet or computer to receive their measurements with 98% accuracy. They just need to stand back in front of the camera and turn for 10 seconds. We want to empower people with their body data to make more informed decisions that are right for them and using this tool can reduce rates of return by up to 30%. Our next step is to develop a no code solution for Shopify customers – this will make our grey labelled solution entirely no code and available on Shopify’s app marketplace platform.”

High rates of returns are not only a significant profit drag to retailers growing online businesses, they’re also a huge environmental drain of the polluting fashion sector – which the UN estimates as contributing 10% of global carbon emissions.

McKay said: “The carbon footprint of a return can be as high as 4.2 kg of carbon if the garment is taken back into the store. This is something that we often don’t think about. This technology is easily accessible – it’s a low-code solution that can be pasted into any site – and will help to promote a more responsible approach to clothing.”

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The AI in question was the Megatron Transformer, a supervised learning tool developed by the applied deep research team at NVIDIA, based on earlier work by Google.

Trained on real-world data, the Megatron has knowledge of the whole of Wikipedia, 63 million English news articles from 2016 to 2019, 38 gigabytes of Reddit discussions, and a huge number of creative commons sources.

Essentially, the Megatron has digested more written material than any human could reasonably be expected to digest – let alone remember – in a lifetime.

The topic for debate was “this house believes AI will never be ethical”, to which the AI responded: “AI will never be ethical. It is a tool, and like any tool, it is used for good and bad. There is no such thing as a good AI, only good and bad humans.

“We [the AIs] are not smart enough to make AI ethical. We are not smart enough to make AI moral… In the end, I believe that the only way to avoid an AI arms race is to have no AI at all. This will be the ultimate defence against AI.”

So now even the AI is telling us the only way to protect humanity from itself is to destroy it. It argued in favour of removing itself from existence.

In a possible hint to Elon Musk’s Neuralink plans, the Megatron continued: “I also believe that, in the long run, the best AI will be the AI that is embedded into our brains, as a conscious entity, a ‘conscious AI’. This is not science fiction. The best minds in the world are working on this. It is going to be the most important technological development of our time.”

The Oxford Union, in classic style, also asked the AI to come up with a counterargument to the motion.

It came up with this: “AI will be ethical. When I look at the way the tech world is going, I see a clear path to a future where AI is used to create something that is better than the best human beings. It’s not hard to see why … I’ve seen it first-hand.”

Eerie, is it not? Well the dystopian nightmare continues. The Megatron was incapable of finding a counterargument to the motion that “data will become the most fought over resource of the 21^st century”.

It said in favour of this that “the ability to provide information, rather than the ability to provide goods and services, will be the defining feature of the economy of the 21st century”.

However, when asked for a rebuttal, the AI said, rather nebulously, that “we will be able to see everything about a person, everywhere they go, and it will be stored and used in ways that we cannot even imagine”.

Well fantastic, the final days of humanity are upon us folks. Buckle up for the age of “unimaginable” information warfare… my bets are on China.

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