Was Vogue Wrong to Publish a Fake Model?

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2:06Hello and welcome to this episode of the Restless Entertainment Questions and Answers Edition. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. Hello, Marina. Hello, Richard. How are you? I'm very, very well. I have a number of questions. Can I start with one that's right up your street? Yes. I see the title, Parliamentary Lobby System, and I think Marina Hyde. Many asked this. I solicited this question. Let's be clear last week. Now, this question is from Al Marston or could be A.I. Marston. Marina, you asked for a question on the parliamentary lobby system last week when talking about the Royal Rota.

2:36So what is the parliamentary lobby system? That's the way to ask a question. How long have you got? Because like the Royal Rota, it is a system of accreditation for journalists to cover a particular thing. In this case, the workings of Parliament and the government. So it's used as a channel of communication between the government, but particularly Downing Street and the press. And if you're in it, you get a lobby pass and you work on the lobby corridor. The lobby corridor? That's confusing. Does it come off the lobby? It's named after the members' lobby. OK, that makes sense. In the Palace of Westminster, where...

3:10Oh, you just said the Palace of Westminster. Hold on a minute. I'll come on to that in a minute, because actually it is a mess. Oh, Amanda, are you listening? Palace of Westminster. Anyway, the members lobby is where politicians and members of the press can interact freely. A bit like the mixed zone in a football match. It's like Box Park and Croydon. Yeah, just like that. The lobby system comprises daily briefings at 11 and at 3.45, which are conducted by the Prime Minister's official spokesman. That's the sort of rubric of it all. But I asked Rob Hutton, who's for many, many years a lobby correspondent for Bloomberg, and he now writes really funny parliamentary sketches, which are so good.

3:46He's a great person for the critic, he writes, and they're very, very good. I mean, the whole thing is falling down, as in the whole of the Palace of Westminster is falling down. Do you know what I call it? I call it the Palace of Westminster. Great. That's a good one. Many times the journalists have tried to get a cat because there are so many mice in the office and in the offices. But basically, the lobby. So, OK, this system. Parliament is like Hogwarts. It's a place, therefore, that you instinctively understand if you're male and went to public school. And you're a Slytherin. Yeah, and you're a Slytherin.

4:15Exactly. Exactly. And if not, it can be a very unfriendly place. There are various rules of what you're allowed to do when you're in the lobby and how it all works. But those meetings are crucial. The lobby briefings, which are, as I say, in the morning and the afternoon. Obviously, the criticisms of the lobby are that it's this cosy club and they all work together. It's hard because they sit with those people sometimes for sort of 30 years. They don't sit with their newspapers, which are located somewhere totally different. So their office is their houses of parliament. Yeah, then you have to troop over to the many of us think of as the Allegra Stratton Memorial Briefing Suite.

4:47Do you remember that during Partygate? Basically, Boris Johnson wanted to break it at all costs. Listen, I like people who like to disrupt and break things. Yeah. I love that. I'm very much looking forward to them putting everything back together again. But the breaking of it, I've loved. Yeah, like someone once said about Stalinism, you know, OK, I see all these broken eggs. Now, where is this omelette of yours? Anyway, wanted to break the lobby and they constructed this huge, sort of nearly£3 million, this briefing suite. They wanted to televise the press briefings, the lobby briefings, which I think is absolutely wild.

5:17I know why they wanted to do it because you look at what happens at the White House, the White House briefings are all televised. Everyone gets one question and it's incredibly genteel. What they wanted to do was kind of civilise the process and make them behave better. The key thing about the lobby briefings is that they have a system where you don't change the subject until it's quite clear that the whole pack want it to change and you're not allowed to say or tweet or do anything about it until the meeting has fully ended. So you hold the floor so people can just keep going and going and going on the same subject and everyone can ask a question.

5:49And so the pack thing works well in that way and they wouldn't have allowed that if they televised it, which they're always trying to do because it's a way of controlling it. It can go on for an hour like that of people doing it. But what happens... That's like the question and answer thing at the end of a book festival. Yeah. that could go on for an hour if you really let it what people criticise the lobby for is the cooperation you work together for a long time as you're trudging back from the briefing you're saying okay what's the line you're always trying to say what's new because that's today's you know where's the movement and because of the way politics is done in this country and particularly political reporting you're talking about millimetres all the time and presumably it's what they've said but also what they didn't say what they said before they're all saying is that new no hang on he said that six months ago they also obviously all have their own stories that they're working on separately.

6:37They're not sitting around going, this is not the only job is listening to these two briefings and writing them down. I mean, in many ways, it's the least worst system. But the big enemy, of course, as always, is the news desk. That is what leads to lots of the stories being very similar, because no disrespect to many of the great news desk figures. I feel like there's going to be a lack of respect here. I'll tell you what people on the news desk love, something they don't have. and when the new editions of the papers or whatever will go, they go online, they love what they don't have so they want to know why has the Times got this story and we don't have that?

7:09It's like, yeah, because that's, but one of the Times is Hobby Horse and they're going to be really interested in that and that's why they've written it up in that way. So what Rob said is that he ended up writing a huge amount of defensive copy because you can see from the briefing, oh, the son of us 10 questions about this, they're going to go really big on that tomorrow. So you think, I would rather write up this version of the story for whoever in a way that will at least address what the Sun are going to go really big with tonight. Because otherwise I'll be doing it at 10 o 'clock at night.

7:35Yeah, so those lobby journalists, quite apart from just listening to what the Prime Minister's spokesperson is saying, are also spotting what stories some of the other papers might have by working out what questions they're asking. Yeah, and so that perception of groupthink in part is a response to, you know, you're all interested in the same subject. And actually, if lots of people asking questions from different angles can sometimes throw up something really interesting, you know if someone else has gone really big on something you're going to be getting a call at 10 o 'clock saying well why didn't we have that and it's the same in football does the same by the way I mean they would carve out lots of different things all together and all agree on it because nobody wants to be at sort of 3am in a different time zone and say why have the sun got this and you haven't so there is some sharing and people look out for each other and Rob remembered one day when he was thinking he rang his wife and said I sort of finished I think I'm gonna go home and rang his wife said I'm gonna go home and Mike White who used to be the political editor of the Guardian literally ran down the corridor after him and said, didn't go home.

8:30And he said, why? And he said, just sit at your desk. Don't do anything. Just sit at your desk. And then there was a really big reshuffle of that. So he knew, he didn't tell him that there was going to be one, but he made sure that he didn't actually go home. So there's a sort of camaraderie. And is that the same Mike White who later wrote The White Lotus? Yes. One and the same. Don't say there's no second acts in political journalism. And he was in School of Rock, of course. Yeah. And not having it televised is good. Yes. And I mean, as we say, the White House ones are just a complete wank and they're just completely useless.

8:58Christopher Hope from The Telegraph, now at GB News, but almost the last question for such a long time, Rob was remembering, was, yeah, but did David Cameron borrow a horse from Rebecca Books and go riding on it? And it was like battered away for honestly weeks, months. And he's just asked at the end every single day. Did he? And in the end, yes. The principle is you do not change the subject to your question unless you're sure that the whole group has finished on that subject. And that allows for much better scrutiny than, as you can see, what happens in the White House briefing, where they allow certain people to be excluded and the journalists don't stand in solidarity.

9:34I mean, it's a mess and their journalism takes itself so seriously. If anybody at home, I know you asked for this question to be asked this week, and I can see why that was fascinating. But if anyone at home wants to ask us if we've ever borrowed a horse from Rebecca Brooks, that would be a good question for next week. It'll be like a really short one. And sent it back in a poor condition, I believe. Did he? Yes. It was a police horse, I think it was called. Wasn't it called Raisa? It was named after Raisa Gorbachev. I don't know. I remember that. Oh, my God. This story is suddenly amazing. And sent it back in a bad condition.

10:02You can't send a horse back in a bad condition. Well, David Cameron can. You have to send them back in a stable condition. okay this is one for you and a really hard one actually a good observation from harriet grace i have a theory that being in cold play but not being chris martin is the best job in the world or at least in entertainment you get to live out your best rock and roll life playing to massive audiences and getting paid handsomely for it but you also rarely get asked to have to do promo and you can probably still pop to tesco's without getting hassle because nobody recognizes you what do you think the best job in entertainment is harriet that's a great call i mean that might be the best job and i know exactly what i mean some people want to be in entertainment to be famous and then therefore being one of the other people in cold play is not the best job then i guess being chris martin would be the best job but yeah i think if you want the joy of being in a creative industry and you want absolute load of money and you want huge amounts of adrenaline but you can also walk down the street then being in cold play is quite hard to beat that as a job in show business i think that's uh that would be very very high to have a live stage experience and all of that is yeah they do have to do loads of promo i'll say that even if you're the bassist in coldplay you're doing promo like constantly my brother was telling me about i'm in the middle of signing books at the moment i'm doing like 18 000 my record was 38 000 because every country in the world wants signed books because and every indie bookseller so you try and do as many as you possibly can you know i can do about a thousand an hour my brother was telling me that Coldplay have just signed 150 ,000 albums each.

11:33Each? Yeah, 150 ,000, which feels like an impossibility. I always thought the best job in showbiz, if what you want is the glamour when you want it and not when you don't want it, if you want a lot of money, if you want everyone to know your name but not know your face, I always thought being John Grisham would be amazing because people who know John Grisham know him. Or Sia. Sia. Oh, my God, that's perfect. so if you're John Grisham you know he's made hundreds of millions if he ever rings up a restaurant where you can't get a table and says it's John Grisham they go oh why John Grisham of course you can have a table but you know he can walk down the street fairly unnolested I can't do you an e-fit of him exactly so you know if you read the books you know what he looks like on the back of the books and so fans will stop you every now and again but most people don't pay that much attention to what authors look like If I am in America, it's just a joy because I don't get stopped on the street and all that kind of stuff.

12:32But if you're stopped at customs and they say you're an author and you tell them who you are, people have heard of you and have read the books. So it's like you are John Grisham, but for America. You just have a whole holiday where you can do exactly what you want, where you want. I would say being John Grisham, Andy Peters, who is such a lovely fella and just gets to do those competitions on GMB. and you know that's a nice gig and everyone loves him and you know he's been in that world for so long and you know is is adored by everyone that's a nice job to have i would say like those magazine journalists from the kind of 80s who'd be paid millions and millions and millions and wouldn't really have to do anything apart from go around the world and be completely unbothered being like yeah being like a travel blogger something like that where everyone knows who you are so you get to spend your entire life on holiday wherever you go on holiday people absolutely love you but outside of your sphere no one would necessarily recognise you.

13:27That would be a nice entertainment job. Just depends what your values are. Yes. Adjusting each of those dials would lead to a different job but I do think the other people in conflict is quite good. But as you said, they work harder than you think. What's the difference between being a podcaster and being an economist? People stop me all the time now and I've never had that, I don't think really, at all. I've never had that. Or sometimes I would, you know, if I was wandering around Islington, joke. But you know what I mean. But this is nice because we're very fortunate in that the people who consume what it is you do are very important as well.

14:03Because for this, I've never had a non-nice interaction with people who listen to the thing. People are always interested, interesting. They've always got something to tell you. How many times do people mention Glenn Powell to you now? Well, not enough times. Not enough times. By all means, come and chat Glenn Powell to me. It's one of those rare questions where Harriet might have absolutely nailed it in the question. Being one of the other guys out of Coldplay must be one of, you know, because what a joy. You're still in a gang with your mates. You're doing this incredible stuff that you believe in and that you're proud of.

14:34You know, every year is bigger and bigger and bigger. You're not really spending a huge amount of time in the studio. It's like being in the masked band that we talked about or the heavily made up bands. But anyway. Which again, for some people would be a nightmare because they want to be famous. Yeah. I mean, most people who start out in rock music do actually want to be famous. being easily disguisable i think would be useful i'm very very hard to disguise or the other best job maybe is is somebody does loads and loads of voiceovers it is alarmingly well paid still people don't really know it's you you get to you just go to soho no they're very little very few jobs in tv now where you don't have to you know be made up and do your hair and worry about what you're wearing uh you know you go on radio shows you go on podcasts i know but like voiceovers it's It's the last thing where you just rock up to a lovely studio.

15:22Someone brings you tea and toast. You read that script. And there are people who do that full time, day in, day out. That's a nice entertainment gig. Right. Shall we go to a break? Yes, that was a long first half. It was. Yeah.

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17:18welcome back everyone marina this is a question that i'm really really interested in so thank you could do better who's written on the the rest of his entertainment discord he says i'm curious what you both make a vogue's choice to include an ad featuring an ai model in their recent issue where's the line between photoshopping a real life model to death to get the look that companies are after and just cutting out the middle man or woman altogether that is a really good question Do you know what? This is a really fascinating one. And it's a huge thing now. And we're right in it. If you didn't see this, this was a guest ad that ran in vogue.

17:50They disclosed it. You have to disclose it under, certainly under EU law anyway. And it said, produced by Seraphine Valora, which were an AI agency on AI. I don't know what they thought the reaction would be, but the reaction has been really big in the sort of fashion community. And there's been a huge backlash, basically. The agency, Seraphine Valora. who? Serafin Valora. Serafin Valora. They're London-based. They're an AI agency. They're just these two women. I saw them interviewed on the BBC and they said, you know, we were asked by a guest to do this and we did it. But the backlash has been significant enough that Condé Nast, the parent company of Vogue, issued a statement to CNN saying that an AI model has never appeared editorially in Vogue.

18:33Okay. Obviously, this is going to be a huge thing. I totally agree with you that things are so photoshopped and have been so modified that what did you expect would happen? And I almost feel, I mean, you know, it's almost like a sort of short story with a painful moral that if you do, women particularly have been modified in this way for so long that eventually this is what happened. But, you know, I can see the benefit of it. They eliminated the casting director, the location manager, the model, every single shoot technician, the travel, of course, they're now selling this as a sustainable and carbon neutral way, you know, but you know.

19:08Oh yeah, because AI is famously carbon neutral. Famously carbon neutral, Richard. And then you don't have the retoucher. And also it saves time because when any of one of these shoots happen, I was talking to someone who basically commissions these things for a Vogue title. There's so many weeks of back and forth in terms of how it will look when it eventually goes in as a campaign. This happened really quickly. You presumably can show a client 30 different models in one set. You know, you just show them lots of different things. Well, there are all of these ethical issues with it. and they're now saying, oh, we can be much more diverse because we use certain platforms.

19:42There's a thing called Fairface. And so the proprietary scans come from diverse models. It's less carbon heavy than having to take everyone on a photo shoot. I mean, in some ways, fashion has done it to themselves. I remember the first time I ever went to a high fashion show, which was in the 90s, and a friend of mine was a very successful model. And it was so weird. You suddenly realise that it's like an alien race, the models. They're not like us at all. You can't really almost. It's like a separate species. And they kind of look incredible and whatever. But you don't really almost feel like you're the same as them.

20:15It's so extraordinary. So we know it's unrealistic. But that's fine. And I get that. And it sells the clothes. And it's wonderful. And then, of course, all the retouching became such a big issue. Because you could do far more than you ever could when people were literally sort of painting things out in the old days. Digital changed everything. I think in 2016, that little Michaela, the CGI influencer, came in. and I mean lots of people have been photographed with her and she's been used to sell all sorts of things. H &M recently said they're going to do twin models so that they can use then your digital likeness in a way.

20:49But if you think of the size of e-commerce platforms now and how many pictures are on say the Zara website, are you going to dress a model up in every single one of those, light her, make her, change it, change the look, do the makeup again for every single one of those items when these people are selling kind of thousands and thousands of things. Now, for a small business as well, if you want to start your small business, you know, I know all the drawbacks of all this stuff, but you have, you know, fashion has always been a kind of quite remorseless business. You can get an AI model for, in the US,$5 a day, and you can get a model model for, if you want to get quite a good one, for$5 ,000 a day.

21:26Well, that's the issue across most industries. It's all very well, you know, for Guess and Vogue, which are huge, and Condé Nast, who are absolutely huge, to listen to a backlash and to put things in place. But our culture doesn't work from the top down anymore. It does work from the ground up. And it is going to happen time and time and time again. As you say, if you've got a small company or a small campaign or something like that, you are going to use AI models because you can. And because suddenly the barriers to entry are much lower, so you're going to do that. So that's going to happen, happen, happen from the ground up.

21:56From the top down, you're going to say, we can't, we can't, we can't. At what point does the line come? At what point do we say everything above here, we don't use AI models, everything below here, we do use AI models. It's sort of impossible, especially other countries will have, it's going to be absolutely impossible to please. Well, the other countries thing is fascinating because so many of these are globalised businesses. So one of the things it allows you to do is tailor it to your regional audience. So say you're selling, Zara is selling something. I'm just using Zara as an example of a globalised firm.

22:24I'm not saying they do do this at all. In fact, I don't think they do, but they will. I think companies like Zara will end up doing this because you'll say you're selling to North America, to South America, to Eastern Europe. You may tailor that completely what you do with the model for the same garment in individual territories. You also can do what actually someone like Rihanna has used for her company Fenty Beauty has done these targeted little micro campaigns. Fenty Beauty is like a huge success story. but she's able to do sort of quite targeted micro campaigns to once they have your data of course they know what sort of things you're into and many of those are ai driven you know as i keep saying they keep going on about oh it's sustainable it's all these sort of things but the model is customizable and they're customizable at scale is something that's very significant for these businesses that have huge amount of individual units and individual styles that they're selling if you think of some a company like asos or something like that if you're a model for that company then you're going to have to get i don't know how many items of clothing on a day so that they can shoot the because they're constantly they don't have like a spring collection and a summer collection the clothes are coming in all the time so there will always be shooting and they will always be putting the stuff out there but it's a completely labor-intensive thing um and those people work very very fast it's almost like the equivalent of shooting a soap opera an ad campaign for guests in the old days would be a massive trip abroad so many people going on it and as i say weeks and weeks and weeks of people tailoring it and trying to get it right because it's the biggest thing that and it's the adverts that keep magazines or keep fashion publications even online going so it's very significant that they use this ad and permitted it and it will will not be the last we see of it it's going to be non-stop right it's going to be non-stop and i also agree with you actually that yes photoshopping and doing all those that all of the digital enhancements that have happened to women um particularly in fashion models is this not i'm afraid this is the next logical step and if business doesn't like it then it opened the door it's awful isn't it because because every single thing you talk about is a job lost yeah but i i don't see a way of putting up the floodgates given that anyone entry level can and will do this and as you say and it's happened in lots of industries um you know books of fashion and all sorts of things where stuff has been done to order and it's done to a certain algorithm.

24:41And you think, well, you've been doing that for ages. This is, as you say, this is the, you know, pigeons coming home to roost, isn't it? There's going to be so many of these stories. But the choice is going to become, as always, do you do this and survive because everybody else is doing whatever? Or do you say, oh, we just don't do this? And as you have said, it will be the more niche people who say, we don't do this. We're the equivalent of arthouse fashion models or whatever it is, or arthouse cinema. We don't do this. but some of the big commercial stuff, it's just too tempting for them to not use this technology.

25:11There is an upside to being a real human being and playing a real piano and being a real model. And have a look at that, Gess. Once you know, you know there is something uncanny and weird about it. But I think that they knew people would talk and they did not issue a statement saying, we'll never do it. They just said it hasn't happened so far. Right, Richard. But Graham Upton has been on with a question about Classic FM. I would be very interested to know, he says, to what extent Classic FM presenters influence the choice of music played on their programmes. For example, Zeb Soans, who's one of my favourite presenters, frequently plays more unusual works on his show in comparison to others on the show, Joel.

25:52Funnily enough, I know a Classic FM presenter. His name is Alexander Armstrong. So I spoke to him. He does the breakfast show there. It is very, very similar to all commercial radio, funnily enough. we think of classical music as slightly more kind of arcane. And, you know, Zana says, well, if you're at Radio 1, if you're at Radio 2, if you're at Classic FM, you know, you've got your A-list, you've got your B-list, you've got your C-list, and certain things are put in rotation. Someone has to be across what gets played on. It's like Vorjag on a plumber or something. Yeah, exactly. Vorjag's got a great PR.