We do not use generative A.I. in any of our clothing or designs because that is not what Lonely Kids Club is about. It's just about the most soulless thing I can imagine, and trying to remove the entire creative process from the design experience to save a few dollars is against our values on pretty much every conceivable level. Without creativity and human expression, the life would just be sucked out of Lonely Kids Club.
We know we are swimming upstream as we notice A.I. used more and more by other clothing brands, but we feel like this will become a point of difference as people are smart and know authenticity when they see it. This brand started from people connecting with something real. A drawing, a story, the pursuit of a very human dream. Every shirt, every scribbly drawing, and every weird little idea we print comes from someone’s actual brain, their lived experience, their mood that day. You cannot fake that. Nor should you.
A.I. feels like the opposite of what we are trying to do. Completely inauthentic work, that often features weird additional limbs, or otherwise nightmarish anatomy, that strips away the value of artists, turning creativity into something disposable. We value the work of the artists we employ and collaborate with, which you simply can't do if you choose to use A.I. Most of the work it creates is built from stolen art and ideas, taken without credit or consent from real people who poured themselves into their craft. And the servers running it chew through astronomical amounts of power and water, piling on to the same environmental damage we already fight so hard to prevent.
We want to be messy. We like it raw. I know what I said. We want the imperfections that make a drawing feel like it has been loved. We want to design clothing that has heart, means something, and is genuinely ethical from the production process all the way to the designing and printing. Taking out the artists is just not ethical, and not something we could ever get behind. We don't want to take that shortcut to save a few bucks.
There is something special about keeping that human touch. About knowing real people designed, printed and packed every order right here in Sydney. So when you wear our stuff, you are not wearing an algorithm. You are wearing something that has been sustainably made and designed by a human being, and that will always be the most important thing to us.
- Warwick™
