[fxtentacle]

I know this is supposed to be a joke, but I feel like it's too close to reality to be funny.

I recently ordered a custom tailored set of shirt, trousers, and belt. Their site was bragging about their great AI technology, but sadly I didn't notice that red flag early enough.

The results were nothing short of disastrous. I sent in my measurements and they sent me a trouser with wrong measurements and a postcard that said that they adjusted my measurements with AI for a better fit. The belt they included was a completely different size than the trouser and I'm still waiting for the shirt to arrive. And now I'm fighting the usual uphill battle to talk to a human and get this mess fixed or get a refund.

The core of Stitchfix is personalization, as they say. But that means an individual solution for each individual customer, and not AI for memorizing generic trends in a huge dataset.

[bambax]

> I sent in my measurements and they sent me a trouser with wrong measurements and a postcard that said that they adjusted my measurements with AI for a better fit

That is nothing short of hilarious. The machine knows best! Who are you, human, to pretend you are able to measure yourself?!

> AI for memorizing generic trends

It's possible "AI" may be just a pretext to sell mass-made junk and pretend it is adjusted to each individual.

[TeMPOraL]

> It's possible "AI" may be just a pretext to sell mass-made junk and pretend it is adjusted to each individual.

It's also an internal distraction. They'd achieve something much closer to what they promise if they just threw some old-school regression analysis at the problem. But that's not cool these days, plus it's hard to relabel as AI even for the marketroids these days, and would involve actual work :).

This applies to many "AI companies" - so many want to either have easy process (throw data at some random Kaggle model and hope it sticks) or just a buzzword to bullshit investors with. Sometimes both.

[marcosdumay]

What problem is there to apply regression at? You get the measures, and make the cloths fit to those measures. If there is any measure missing, you can't just go and guess it, because you are not fitting a population.

Talk about distraction...

[lupire]

People probably have a measurable bias in self-measurement, on average.

[lostcolony]

Sure, but just like people's measures tend toward a distribution, an "on average" bias is still going to be distributed. Trying to throw statistics at it is still going to lead to off the rack style sizing, and NOT individually tailored clothes.

[geoduck14]

How about a neural network trained on thousands of fashion trends?

And by "neural network", I mean my brain.

And by "thousands of fashion trends ", I mean I look at people in the mall.

[ampdepolymerase]

Yes, see https://shoesize.me for how it is properly done.

[numpad0]

Something similar happened in Japan with Zozosuit, they tried to use 3D reconstruction from smartphone camera for basically two piece business suits in $399, and the end result resembled texture file for your body in ugliest posture stitched together.

Maybe it could be considered class of fallacy, a kind that one would say the most popular choice of integers between 1 and 2 is 1.5000001.

[antoniuschan99]

They announced the release of v2 (might not be available yet though) the first one was a disaster.

Was excited to see how the pants and shirts fit (on the site it looked awesome, but then the actual user reviews on some were so bad lol)

Also, the founder is the Japanese guy going to the moon.

[toxik]

“Regression to the mean” is the technical term

[minikites]

>Who are you, human, to pretend you are able to measure yourself?!

A lot of people do not in fact know how to measure themselves properly for clothes (many people measure the wrong part of their body for the "waist"). Perhaps even more people think they're a certain size, but have never actually measured themselves, they just go by the measurements on clothes they already own, which are frequently "vanity sized" to make people feel better. I don't envy solving this problem between two sets of users: people who actually have the correct measurements and people who believe strongly that they do, but are quite wrong. Imagine how far off you would be if you went by your Old Navy pants: https://flowingdata.com/2010/09/30/advertised-vs-actual-wais...

[crocsarecool]

You’re right! I sew infrequently as a hobby. I always thought my waist was just above my hips. When it comes to sewing, it’s actually closer to my belly button.

The size of the clothes also need to account for the fabric type. If it stretches x%, then you’ll want to maybe make it smaller, so it stretches to fit, or it will look frumpy. If the fabric doesn’t stretch at all, you’ll need to make sure there’s enough ease in the garment so you can bend and move your arms naturally.

[fxtentacle]

I guess I forgot to write

"I, For One, Welcome Our Robot Overlords"

into the comments field when ordering :)

> It's possible "AI" may be just a pretext to sell mass-made junk and pretend it is adjusted to each individual.

Actually, I wouldn't mind that too much. It is difficult for me to find well-fitting trousers, so if they can supply those for me, I'm happy as long as the quality is acceptable. Plus their price is roughly half of what a proper tailor would cost me, so I kind of expected them to cut some corners.

[DonHopkins]

Generative Adversarial Customer Support!

[bckr]

I laughed out loud at this

[tomxor]

> they sent me a trouser with wrong measurements and a postcard that said that they adjusted my measurements with AI

This brings a whole new meaning to "over fitting"

[agnosticmantis]

I find it amusing that this new meaning is exactly the opposite of the way it’s used in statistics. (Discarding an individual’s particular measurements as noise sounds like under fitting in this problem.) I wonder if this discrepancy has caused any misunderstandings between the AI team and customer service.

[hardwaresofton]

There are two areas of technology I avoid these days -- blockchain and AI.

It may very well be to my own detriment (there is a lot of promise in either) but fortunately there are lots of interesting problems outside these areas and I can just treat the mention of either of those topics as red flags.

That said, I want to note that I have had good results with Stitchfix but that was due to entering professionally-taken measurements. I got even better results however, from a local to-order suit maker and bought the full suit there, but basic shirt(s) from Stitchfix

[fxtentacle]

I also had a good experience with shirts, which is why I decided to give the trousers a try.

And yes, my measurements were also from a professional tailor. But the resulting trouser has (among other issues) been "corrected" to a 15cm shorter outside leg length, so I wonder if a professional vs. an amateur measuring it would have made much of a difference.

[anticristi]

No startup is disruptive enough nowadays without 5G and IoT.

[systemvoltage]

Add Quantum to the list.

[Sodaware]

My new startup uses machine learning built on Quantum Blockchain technology (patent pending).

I'll take my VC money now, please.

[mromanuk]

> I sent in my measurements and they sent me a trouser with wrong measurements and a postcard that said that they adjusted my measurements with AI for a better fit

Whoa.

customer: Please, I need a trouser size 34"

AI: Thank you sir, but according to my data, a 33" will better suit you

[Cthulhu_]

And sometimes they would be right; speaking for myself, I've worn baggy clothes for a long time, but at some point I finally managed to lose some weight and got down below 90 kilos, and was able to go down a size pants and shirts (size L), which fit and looked a lot better. Great confidence boost at the time, didn't change anything for my er, relationship prospects though.

It's WFH time now though, I'm wearing 2/3XL shirts (good cut though, they don't look baggy) and pajama pants and have done so for over a year now. I am here for the comfort.

[jelling]

"Vanity sizing" is a real issue in clothing. Sizes were always abstractions but now measurements are an abstraction as well.

[DonHopkins]

Indeed!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanity_sizing

[bachmeier]

> they adjusted my measurements with AI for a better fit

I'm trying to think of a way this makes sense. Do they have access to some big database about you that they can use to predict how you'll screw up your measurements?

[sumtechguy]

Oh good I am not the only one. Direct measurement would produce the best result here. Not a guess that AI has with 83% confidence level. I usually find a tailor and buy something from them and in the process they will give me all the measurements for everything else.

[kd0amg]

My guess would be their system decided OP's measurements were unrealistic and adjusted them towards their more "typical" body shape.

[npongratz]

I wouldn't give their system that much credit -- the belt OP received doesn't even fit the trousers.

    ;laskdfjls;adkfasd;lfj

That incomprehensible line above was written by my advanced AI. Or I was just lazy and wanted to sell something with a cool marketing buzzword, and without regard to ethics.

[inglor_cz]

Your AI seems to have two hands on a standard QWERTY keyboard :)

[npongratz]

Looks like I'll have to feed it a few million more data sets to train it on.

[bachmeier]

I thought that at first, but it doesn't make any sense, because:

You don't have any way to know which of the measurements is wrong.

You don't know what correction to apply. The best you can do is shrink along one or more of the dimensions in the direction of a mean of something, which may or may not be relevant to that customer. In return you intentionally mess up the orders of many customers, wasting their time in the process.

[murphyslab]

I'm envisaging those cliché stock photos of a robotic hand engaged with a shape sorter toy being used widely on that company's internal presentations.

[fxtentacle]

Me, too. I'm also guessing they will have one of those huge bulky laundry folding robots [1] when a well-trained human could do it much faster [2].

I kind of get where they are coming from, though. I myself also love over-engineering solutions ^_^

[1] https://youtu.be/dTcPxzK0c2g?t=156

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz6rjbw0ZA0

[romanows]

They're clearly taking a reinforcement learning approach. Just a few thousand more returns and you'll be good to go!

[raverbashing]

> they adjusted my measurements with AI for a better fit

Cool, what they mean is they probably have some (barely) linear fits of people to some dimension, but of course that breaks down quick as the USAF found out in the 40s https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...

[zdw]

Gives new meaning to Overfitting being a problem in AI research.

[plumsempy]

I had a similar problem with StitchFix way back when; after finding out about my profession they truly pigeonholed me into a generic software engineer's fashion, almost caricature-esque.

I switched to Bombfell and I had been very happy until my cancellation.(canceled cause I wanted to explore fashion myself)

[FalconSensei]

I don't get it... If you send your measurements, why adjust the measurements. I would understand using AI to guess measurements based on a photo - let's say you want to give a surprise gift to someone, so not asking their measurements - but otherwise, it's just unnecessary

[hodgesrm]

To err is human. To really foul things up requires a computer.

- Bill Vaughan (https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/12/07/foul-computer)

[GoblinSlayer]

It's a homage to Rambo II, classic.