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Shoe company Allbirds pivots to AI compute in sign of a totally normal and healthy economy
(www.engadget.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2026
311 points (98.7% liked)
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I'm pretty sure sometimes what happens is they don't want to pay their quality designers. So they bring in cheap foreigners to use the og designs and modify them or build from them.
But then claim it's "AI" so it's not theft of design or style from og designers.
AI can't even handle fingers. It can't do high quality design work. Especially 3d.
Lots of ai 3d stuff floating it around. Looks okay in the render photo but when you open the file it's crap and poor quality.
It’s not that they’re using AI to replace designers, that would at least make a little sense. They sold off the shoe designs and manufacturing to a Venture Capitalist company and Allbirds is now purely an AI company, they have nothing to do with shoes anymore.
Well a few legit game review websites were sold off. Fires all staff writers and now all content is AI.
The reason is you can't make a reputation if you start as AI. You need humans to make something good first and establish reputation.
So the whole point is to buy legitimacy by buying out existing established companies.
Do you think that's what is going on here ?
It's a dumb strategy. People quickly learn and reputation can literally tank in 24 hrs. No matter how big the company's reputation and following was.
Once it comes out it's all AI garbage. It's over.