Real Photography Feeds Generative AI for Fashion eCommerce with Ludovico Benazzo of PixelModa
Ludovico Benazzo is Chief Revenue Officer of PixelModa, which produces visual content for PDP pages and e-commerce in the fashion vertical. We talked with him at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville about combining traditional photography with generative AI.
Precise Pictures Keep AI Honest
PixelModa started in 2020, during COVID, out of founders who had spent a decade at YOOX automating the repetitive work of taking PDP pictures. When generative AI arrived, they found the way they already shot, very precise and very detailed, kept hallucinations out.
Every angle gets captured, so the model has no gap to fill by inventing something. PixelModa runs studios in Milan and Miami.
“We avoid AI hallucinations by feeding the right data into the process,” he says.
The Right Model for Each Detail
“We don’t have a proprietary LLM, you know, we cannot afford that. But we always pick the ones that are most appropriate for every single detail that you need to create,” he says.
Flowers, faces and body swaps each get a different model engine, and depending on the customer agreement the output goes through human quality control or AI sampling.
Defining AI Slop
“I think is a generation at scale of automated content that pretend to mimic some level of consistency in terms of both imagery of or text, and then become completely distorted in a way when it’s at scale,” he says.
Ludovico thinks of generative AI as an amplifier. The purer the original sound, the more consistent the amplification, and the same goes for an image.
From the Gucci Campaign to PixelModa
Ludovico was picked by a model agency at a traffic light in Paris in 1995 and shot the Gucci campaign that year. He later worked at Ralph Lauren, writing the briefs for European shoots and then modeling in the same campaigns. That history shapes why PixelModa focuses on fashion, where companies carry from five thousand to a hundred thousand SKUs and need new views every year, while creativity still sets brands apart.
Watermarks on AI Images
His hot take came from following an actress on Instagram who turned out to be AI.
“I will make a statement and a commitment from my side to really start developing watermarks on AI visual and video,” he says.
Europe is moving to require them, and he hopes the rest of the market follows, because being transparent is the best way to protect the technology.
Find PixelModa at pixelmoda.net, and learn more about our at-event interviews at talk-commerce.com/events.