Vivian Wilson against AI: Man, Machine, Fashion

He was designed to obey," Vivian Wilson says to the camera as she sits at a garden table. Behind her, a humanoid robot mows the English lawn. "Not me," says Wilson, pressing a red button - the sprinkler system turns on and the robot falls over with sparks. The clip is part of the new clothing line from the fashion brand Desigual. And many people are currently celebrating the campaign.

“A machine obeys, a queen rules,” writes one user under Vivian Wilson’s post. “This is the best advertising campaign I've seen in a long time,” another said. It's well done, it comes at a time when many workers are racking their brains about how they're going to fight the advance of AI - and above all, it has Vivian Wilson. Using Elon Musk's estranged daughter as the face of an anti-AI campaign while he pours billions into AI projects is genius.

After all, the 22-year-old is not just any daughter of the tech billionaire. She is the daughter who Musk said was infected by the “woke mind virus” after publicly coming out as trans. Musk said his son was dead when he came out. He was tricked with hormones when signing the documents for Wilson's transition. Wilson has publicly distanced herself from him, changed her last name, lives financially independently of her father and repeatedly expresses criticism on social media, for example about US policy on queer rights.

Now she's running a campaign in which she uses robots to hold a golf ball, walks him around the garden on a leash, tries out a sex pose with him and tries to teach him the word "desigual."

So she asks the AI ​​robot in the clip to resist. Resistance that could probably be used against the AI ​​industry. Just on Wednesday, Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic employee, quit his job and publicly warned about the dangers of the technology. He accused companies like Anthropic and OpenAI of a lack of responsibility and warned that in the worst case scenario, AI could wipe out humanity.

Elon Musk is also massively pushing forward the development of AI and humanoid robots. Tesla, for example, is developing its own humanoid robot, Optimus, and Musk has built one of today's largest AI companies, xAI.

Desigual calls the advertising campaign “Born to Disobey”. And uses slogans like “Own the code”, “Dress to disrupt”, “System failure” or “Free will activated”. And on the website, the brand works with a motif that is familiar from the Internet: “I am not a robot.” So: Prove that you are human.

A press release about the campaign said: The greatest rebellion today is no longer fighting the system, but refusing to be part of the system. That sounds heretical, but it's just a pretty comfortable position.

Because of course Desigual is part of the system. Not just any system, but the capitalist fashion industry – an industry that thrives on global supply chains, huge production volumes and constant consumption. Desigual produces a large part of its clothing outside of Europe. So you can ask yourself: How credible is it when a fashion brand claims to be outside the system? Killing a human robot in an advertising clip and printing “Resistance” on a shirt doesn’t make you a system buster.

But what the campaign does, like all good advertising campaigns, is create awareness. On the brand, but also on the topic. Wilson's personal conflict with Musk makes visible what abstract debates about AI often fail to do: there are still people behind the technology. Extremely rich people with money, power and evil intentions. And sometimes a father who has humanoid robots built, while his daughter publicly embodies the exact opposite.