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Everyone needs a hobby, and for 40 years mine was booze. I was 17 when I drank enough to throw up for the first time, and 57 when I stopped. In between I spent most nights, and thousands of lunchtimes and afternoons, with at least a gentle buzz on. One cheeky pint would turn into three, four, a binge. I blacked out. I had fumbling, regrettable sex. I vomited out of cars and on to lawns. I drank wine at 50p a bottle and £15 a glass – and a sea of lager, lager, lager. There was vodka flavoured with everything, from raspberries to rhubarb and bacon, plus gin and armagnac and amaretto and tequila and eggnog and crème de menthe and Baileys and sherry and blue curaçao and bourbon and cider and Kahlúa.

Some evenings I would laugh and laugh and laugh; other times drinking felt more like a grim duty.

I talked bollocks, I slurred my words, I lost the ability to speak, I had drunken arguments. I stole a huge block of cheese, a library book, a punt, a traffic cone. (I was arrested for the last one, and when I was being cautioned the officer said I seemed like a bright lad, and had I considered a career in the police?) I slept terribly, waking to a splitting head and a sweaty fear of what I might have got up to.

All this again and again and again and again. Account for inflation, and I spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on drinks I didn’t particularly enjoy, meals I didn’t need, clubs, taxis, all the crap you’d never buy if you were in your right mind. That’s the price of a house down the drain.

Most of this happened in London, when I worked in an office and there was always someone to drink with, but in my 40s I lived on my own in deepest rural France, and that wasn’t much better. Drop in on a neighbour, even at 10am, and you’d be offered a tumbler of wine. My little house in the woods had a cellar, and booze flowed in and out of it like the tide: beaujolais, bordeaux, bourgogne, côtes du Rhône, corbières, corbières-boutenac; Grimbergen, Blanche de Bruxelles, Leffe Blonde, Leffe Brune, Leffe Triple …

I arrived in 2003, and sat out that year’s heatwave in a deckchair, drinking Pelforth in the shade of my favourite spruce, and using the bilberries that grew all around to flavour supermarket spirits. Every now and again, I would send photos of dewy glasses to friends back in Britain: look at me, I’m living the life, this stuff is practically free!

My home was in the mountains, on the side that caught the storms. On summer nights lightning would hit the power lines, plunging the house into darkness. One August, as thunder shook the forest, I sat under the tallest tree, thrilling to the flashes, knocking back the vodka and oblivious to the fact that the next bolt might be aimed at me. Most evenings, though, I would open a bottle of rasteau and sit on the terrace to enjoy the sunset. One night, polishing off a last few glasses by starlight, I spotted a man with a rifle lurking near the house – and decided it would be a good idea to chase him through the woods, while shouting that I had a gun of my own, which I didn’t. Most shamefully of all, I’d been drinking with my grownup daughter, and I dragged her along with me.

I didn’t wrong anyone so badly that I can’t look myself in the face, but there are a lot of people I ought to say sorry to.

It wasn’t all bad. I had some lovely drunken meals, drunken chats and drunken romances. I’m shy, and booze helped me unbend, make friends and meet women. Without it, I might never have got more than a hug from the woman who is now my wife. All the same, the more I drank, the more I tired of the crap that went with it – not just the misbehaving and the hangxiety but the knowledge that none of this was good for my health.

Ask Dr Jeevan Fernando, an associate at the charity Alcohol Change UK, how booze can damage your body and he’ll mention liver disease, of course, and sleep problems, and osteoporosis and drunken falls. “But one that I worry about most is the risk of dementia and cognitive decline,” he says. “Heavy alcohol use is very strongly related to the decline and atrophy of your brain. There is a normal shrinkage that occurs with age, but alcohol can increase that – and the risk of dementia later in life. Then there’s mental health. There is very, very strong evidence of a link to increased anxiety and rates of depression.”

There’s more. “Also, chronic alcohol use is related to cardiovascular issues. You have a much higher rate of heart attacks, strokes; your blood pressure is worse. Alcohol is also a known carcinogen – heavily related to breast cancer, liver cancer, bowel cancer …”

By my mid-50s, I had seen one close friend drink herself to death. Had I already pushed my own luck too far?

I would occasionally attempt to cut down, to have just a few drinks rather than a session, but never got very far. One mouthful was enough to get me in the zone and wash away my resolve. “This is nice,” my mind would say. “More will be even nicer.”

As for stopping completely, that wasn’t on my radar. Booze was how I switched off after a stressful day, how I put a smile on my face. How would I relax without it? How would I fill the evenings? I could hardly become Teetotal Phil if I couldn’t even visualise Teetotal Phil.

But then, five years ago, on 2 August 2020, I just packed it in. This may not mean much unless you’re a hardened drinker, but I have got through Christmas parties sober, and office leaving dos. I have survived two wedding receptions on nothing more than alcohol-free wine and beer. Oh, and cocaine, but I never set out to give that up.

Joke! I have barely touched drugs in my life, apart from the liquid, legal, socially acceptable one. I’m not about to start now.

I’m not going to lie: I don’t socialise as readily as I used to. Right now, as I write this, I could be at a summer drinks party with my workmates. But I know that as the evening wears on we’d drift apart, like radios that can’t hold a frequency. I’d bring everyone down, the dry ghost at the feast. This is a me-problem, as other non-drinkers seem to cope. Practice would help – but, although I have never thought of myself as tight, the new me struggles with the idea of paying 30 or 40 quid for a round when I’d be knocking back Diet Coke.

How have I filled the hours when I would have been drinking? I watch more TV than I used to, and fuss over our two dogs, who soak up attention like hairy sponges. And I exercise – running, yoga, Hiit, calisthenics. A class here, a workshop there. I’ve set up some gymnastics rings in the garden. I’m studying to be a personal trainer. I’d like to learn to juggle. I meet more people than I ever did, and I can actually remember their names afterwards. I’m happier and more stable than I used to be, and now that I have learned there are other ways to handle stress, I don’t worry that some disaster will send me back to the bottle.

I was struck – and inspired – by something that the personal trainer Tara LaFerrara posted on Threads last month, after the sudden death of her mother. The two had a “tough” relationship, which left a lot to untangle. “I could have easily drunk alcohol during this time of grief, family drama and loss,” LaFerrara wrote, “but I have not. Not one sip of alcohol in almost 1,000 days. Proud of that.”

She gave up on her first wedding anniversary, almost three years ago. “I just realised it wasn’t serving me any more,” she tells me. “I didn’t like the taste or how it made me feel during or after. Now I sleep better, have more energy, more clarity, better relationships with my friends and my partner.”

How did she take her mind off her mum? “Getting outside in nature, walks, meditation, and working out has helped more than anything else.” And drinking? “I wasn’t tempted. Sitting in this pain and really feeling your raw emotions is wild.”

The wild thing about my own journey, at least to me, is not that I gave up, but how easy it was. I had – still have – the occasional wistful longing for a cold beer on a hot day, or a glass of red when I’m cooking, but that’s it. I didn’t need hypnosis, medication or a support group, although I am not against any of those things. I didn’t feel ashamed about taking antidepressants when I needed them, or getting therapy for insomnia and anxiety. I am aware of how very lucky I have been. Cold turkey will not be right for everyone. “If you are a very heavy drinker,” Dr Fernando warns, “abruptly stopping may cause withdrawal symptoms, so you should speak to your GP.” All that said, and without wishing to trivialise anyone dealing with addiction, not everyone will find abstinence an uphill struggle.

What helped me? Clearly – and miraculously – my dependency on alcohol was far more psychological than physical. Despite the amount I had been drinking, stopping didn’t give me headaches, or jitters, or overpowering cravings. And I was lucky enough to have a good marriage, to a woman who had also drunk her fill. Hannah was the one who first decided to take a break from booze, and I just tagged along, partly to support her. She wasn’t a world-class boozehound like me, but she did enjoy a drink. “Ever since I was little,” she says, “it has been the ultimate treat, the ultimate reward, the ultimate celebration, the ultimate commiseration.”

On the downside: “As I got older,” she says, “my hangovers were fucking biblical.” The day after my 57th birthday, “absolutely annihilated”, she announced she was taking three months off the booze. Ten days later, when I got back from a long-planned holiday, I followed suit.

When the three months were up, we both decided to carry on. “After a while,” as Hannah puts it, “the idea of going back becomes absurd. And you think, ‘Well, I could maybe drink on special occasions’ – but I don’t know what occasion could possibly be special enough.” There have been no dramas, no relapses, none of that tension you’d get between a spouse who gets sloshed every night and one whose body is a temple. We’re closer now than we were five years ago. The only fly in the ointment is that 10-day head start. Unless she falls off the wagon, she’ll always be slightly more awesome than me. I’m trying to get over it.

A survey of British drinkers last year found 48% wanted to cut down or stop entirely. It’s a similar story in the US and Australia. Do I have any advice for them? Nothing that would qualify me to open a detox clinic. But I will say that even if you think you can’t give up, there may come a point when you find yourself pushing at an open door. And, however much you wish you had done it before, you may not have left it too late. I’ve had a lot of tests in the year or so since I started writing about health, and as far as I can tell my liver, brain, heart etc are all in good shape. My teeth are yellower than I’d like, which I blame on the wine, and there are broken veins in my nose and cheeks, but that’s all the obvious damage.

Despite those 40 stupid years, I’m hopeful I dodged a bullet. Maybe I was staggering so much it didn’t hit me.

Sarah Murray recalls the first time she saw an artificial model in fashion: It was 2023, and a beautiful young woman of color donned a Levi’s denim overall dress. Murray, a commercial model herself, said it made her feel sad and exhausted.

The iconic denim company had teamed up with the AI studio Lalaland.ai to create “diverse” digital fashion models for more inclusive ads. For an industry that has failed for years to employ diverse human models, the backlash was swift, with New York Magazine calling the decision “artificial diversity.”

“Modeling as a profession is already challenging enough without having to compete with now new digital standards of perfection that can be achieved with AI,” Murray told TechCrunch.

Two years later, her worries have compounded. Brands continue to experiment with AI-generated models, to the consternation of many fashion lovers. The latest uproar came after Vogue’s July print edition featured a Guess ad with a typical model for the brand: thin yet voluptuous, glossy blond tresses, pouty rose lips. She exemplified North American beauty standards, but there was one problem — she was AI generated.

The internet buzzed for days, in large part because the AI-generated beauty showed up in Vogue, the fashion bible that dictates what is and is not acceptable in the industry. The AI-generated model was featured in an advertisement, not a Vogue editorial spread. And Vogue told TechCrunch the ad met its advertising standards.

To many, an ad versus an editorial is a distinction without a difference.

TechCrunch spoke to fashion models, experts, and technologists to get a sense of where the industry is headed now that Vogue seems to have put a stamp of approval on technology that’s poised to dramatically change the fashion industry.

They said the Guess ad drama highlights questions arising within creative industries being touched by AI’s silicon fingers: When high-quality creative work can be done by AI in a fraction of the time and cost, what’s the point of humans? And in the world of fashion, what happens to the humans — the models, photographers, stylists, and set designers — performing those jobs?

Sinead Bovell, a model and founder of the WAYE organization who wrote about CGI models for Vogue five years ago, told TechCrunch that “e-commerce models” are most under threat of automation.

E-commerce models are the ones who pose for advertisements or display clothes and accessories for online shoppers. Compared to high-fashion models, whose striking, often unattainable looks are featured in editorial spreads and on runways, they’re more realistic and relatable.

“E-commerce is where most models make their bread and butter,” Bovell said. “It’s not necessarily the path to model fame or model prestige, but it is the path for financial security.”

That fact is running in direct contrast to the pressure many brands feel to automate such shoots. Paul Mouginot, an art technologist who has worked with luxury brands, said it’s simply expensive to work with live models, especially when it comes to photographing them in countless garments, shoes, and accessories.

“AI now lets you start with a flat-lay product shoot, place it on a photorealistic virtual model, and even position that model in a coherent setting, producing images that look like genuine fashion editorials,” he told TechCrunch.

Brands, in some ways, have been doing this for a while, he said. Mouginot, who is French, cited the French retailer Veepee as an example of a company that has used virtual mannequins to sell clothes since at least 2013. Other notable brands like H&M, Mango, and Calvin Klein have also resorted to AI models.

Amy Odell, a fashion writer and author of a recently published biography on Gwyneth Paltrow, put it more simply: “It’s just so much cheaper for [brands] to use AI models now. Brands need a lot of content, and it just adds up. So if they can save money on their print ad or their TikTok feed, they will.”

PJ Pereira, co-founder of AI ad firm Silverside AI, said it really comes down to scale. Every conversation he’s had with fashion brands circles around the fact that the entire marketing system was built for a world where brands produced just four big pieces of content per year. Social media and e-commerce has changed that, and now they need anywhere from 400 to 400,000 pieces; it’s too expensive for brands, especially small ones, to keep up.

“There’s no way to scale from four to 400 or 400,000 with just process tweaks,” he added. “You need a new system. People get angry. They assume this is about taking money away from artists and models. But that’s not what I’ve seen.”

Murray, a commercial model, understands the cost benefits of using AI models, but only to an extent.

She lamented that brands like Levi’s claim AI is only meant to supplement human talent, not take away.

“If those [brands] ever had the opportunity to stand in line at an open casting call, they would know about the endless amounts of models, including myself, that would dream of opportunities to work with their brands,” she said. “They would never need to supplement with anything fake.”

She thinks such a shift will impact “non-traditional” — think, diverse — commercial models, such as herself. That was the main problem with the Levi’s ad. Rather than hiring diverse talent, it artificially generated it.

Bovell calls this “robot cultural appropriation,” or the idea that brands can just generate certain, especially diverse, identities to tell a brand story, even if the person who created the technology isn’t of that same identity.

And though Pereira argues that it’s unrealistic to shoot every garment on every type of model, that hasn’t calmed the fears many diverse models have about what’s to come.

“We already see an unprecedented use of certain terms in our contracts that we worry indicate that we are possibly signing away our rights for a brand to use our face and anything recognizable as ourselves to train their future AI systems,” Murray said.

Some see generating likenesses of models as a way forward in the AI era. Sara Ziff, a former model and founder of the Model Alliance, is working to pass the Fashion Workers Act, which would require brands to get a model’s clear consent and provide compensation for using their digital replicas. Mouginot said this lets models appear at several shoots on the same day and possibly generate additional income.

That’s “precious when a sought-after model is already traveling constantly,” he continued. But at the same time, whenever an avatar is hired, human labor is replaced. “What few players gain can mean fewer opportunities for many others.”

If anything, Bovell said the bar is now higher for models looking to compete with the distinctive and the digitized. She suggested that models use their platforms to build their personal brands, differentiate themselves, and work on new revenue streams like podcasting or brand endorsements.

“Start to take those opportunities to tell your unique human story,” she said. “AI will never have a unique human story.”

That sort of entrepreneurial mindset is becoming table stakes across industries — from journalism to coding — as AI creates the conditions for the most self-directed learners to rise.

Mouginot sees a world where some platforms stop working with human models altogether, though he also believes humans share a desire for the “sensual reality of objects, for a touch of imperfection and for human connection.”

“Many breakthrough models succeed precisely because of a distinctive trait, teeth, gaze, attitude, that is slightly imperfect by strict standards yet utterly charming,” he said. “Such nuances are hard to erode in zeros and ones.”

This is where startup and creative studio Artcare thrives, according to Sandrine Decorde, the firm’s CEO and co-founder. She refers to her team as “AI artisans,” creative people who use tools like Flux from Black Forest Labs to fine-tune AI-generated models that have that touch of unique humanity.

Much of the work Decorde’s firm does today involves producing AI-generated babies and children for brands. Employing minors in the fashion industry has historically been a gray area rife with exploitation and abuse. Ethically, Decorde argues, bringing generative AI to children’s fashion makes sense, particularly when the market demand is so high.

“It’s like sewing; it’s very delicate,” she told TechCrunch, referring to creating AI-generated models. “The more time we spend on our datasets and image refinements, the better and more consistent our models are.”

Part of the work is building out a library of distinctive artifacts. Decorde noted that many AI-generated models — like the ones created by Seraphinne Vallora, the agency behind Vogue’s Guess ad — are too homogenous. Their lips are too perfect and symmetrical. Their jawlines are all the same.

“Imagery needs to make an impact,” Decorde said, noting that many fashion brands like to work exclusively with certain models, a desire that has spilled over into AI-generated models. “A model embodies a fashion brand.”

Pereira added that his firm combats homogeneity in AI “with intention” and warned that as more content gets made by more people who aren’t intentional, all of the output feeds back into computer models, amplifying bias.

“Just like you would cast for a wide range of models, you have to prompt for that,” he said. “You need to train [models] with a wide range of appearances. Because if you don’t, the AI will reflect whatever biases it was trained on.”

The usage of AI modeling technology in fashion is mostly still in its experimental phase, Claudia Wagner, founder of modeling booking platform Ubooker, told TechCrunch. She and her team saw the Guess ad and said it was interesting technically, but it wasn’t impactful or new.

“It feels like another example of a brand using AI to be part of the current narrative,” she told TechCrunch. “We’re all in a phase of testing and exploring what AI can add — but the real value will come when it’s used with purpose, not just for visibility.”

Brands are getting visibility from using AI — and the Guess ad is the latest example. Pereira said his firm recently tested a fully AI-generated product video on TikTok that got more than a million views with mostly negative comments.

“But if you look past the comments, you see that there’s a silent majority — almost 20x engagement — that vastly outnumber the criticism,” he continued. “The click-through rate was 30x the number of complaints, and the product saw a steep hike in sales.”

He, like Wagner, doesn’t think AI models are going away anytime soon. If anything, the process of using AI will be integrated into the creative workflow.

“Some brands feel good about using fully artificial models,” Pereira said. “Others prefer starting with real people and licensing their likeness to build synthetic shoots. And some brands simply don’t want to do it — they worry their audiences won’t accept it.”

Wagner said what is becoming evident is that human talent remains central, especially when authenticity and identity are part of a brand’s story. That’s especially true for luxury heritage brands, which are usually slow to adopt new technologies.

Though Decorde noted many high-fashion brands are quietly experimenting with AI, Mouginot said many are still trying to define their AI policies and are avoiding fully AI-generated people at the moment. It’s one reason why Vogue’s inclusion of an AI model was such a shock.

Bovell pondered if the ad was Vogue’s way of testing how the world would react to merging high fashion with AI.

So far the reaction hasn’t been great. It’s unclear if the magazine thinks it ride out the backlash.

“What Vogue does matters,” Odell said. “If Vogue ends up doing editorials with AI models, I think that’s going to make it okay. In the same way the industry was really resistant to Kim Kardashian and then Vogue featured her. Then it was okay.”