Four things brands should consider when developing ethical AI protocols

LVMH, in turn, has an AI factory dedicated to establishing and implementing the group’s AI strategy and education. The L’Oréal Group is establishing the uses of what it calls “intentional AI,” while the Estée Lauder Companies has an AI Innovation Lab and has evolving internal guidelines and principles for generative AI across the enterprise.

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Inside LVMH’s AI Factory

Director Axel de Goursac outlines the key opportunities for AI in luxury fashion and reveals the one use LVMH brands will stay away from.

Brands have an ethical and reputational impetus to proactively establish ethical protocols and AI best practices, says Vicky Brown, general counsel and chief commercial and privacy officer at advertising agency WPP. “To operate in this space in a transparent and ethically sound way, and to encourage consumers to want to buy your brand, think about AI and your business through a practical lens, and the brand values ​​you have had, in some cases, for hundreds of years. years. The first principle is not: ‘Can we do this?’, but rather ‘Should we do this?’ and, ‘Does it feel right?’ The answers to this are often extremely clear.”

Here are four key areas to consider when implementing AI protocols.

Disclosure and transparency

California regulations, which will take effect in 2026, require developers to disclose AI system training data and when the content was generated by AI. Disclosure and transparency also emerged as key themes among consumers; TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram require people to label AI-generated content or automatically detect whether content appears to be AI-generated. Google’s AI-generated search results now include information sources.

Many brands have found that their customers care more if they are informed in advance than if their creative output is impacted by AI. For example, a recent collaboration between Collina Strada and Baggu revealed that customers were unhappy when they learned that some of the prints used in a series of bags had been created, in part, using generative AI (product description pages revealed that some had been “conceptualized in AI”).

Eponymous designer Norma Kamali has enthusiastically embraced AI to inspire designs and created a model (with consultancy Maison Meta) whose contributions are limited to Kamali’s 57-year catalog of work. Still, customers want to know. “You can get criticized for something that’s AI, even though it’s all my intellectual property,” she says, pointing out some comments the brand has received on social media, including some misguided assumptions that it’s “using AI to sell clothes.” .

“Transparency for the consumer is essential,” says Brown. She recommends an icon to indicate an AI-generated image and its sources. This disclosure extends to when customers interact with an AI chatbot, or when and how a brand uses customer data, says Gina Bibby, head of the global fashion technology practice at law firm Withers.