篇目1
The Myth of Sustainable Fashion
时尚行业，能否实现可持续发展？
Few industries tout their sustainability credentials more forcefully than the fashion industry.Products ranging from swimsuits to wedding dresses are marketed as carbon positive, organic, or vegan while yoga mats made from mushrooms and sneakers from sugar cane dot retail shelves.New business models including recycling, resale, rental, reuse, and repair are sold as environmental life savers.
The sad truth however is that all this experimentation and supposed “innovation” in the fashion industry over the past 25 years have failed to lessen its planetary impact — a loud wake up call for those who hope that voluntary efforts can successfully address climate change and other major challenges facing society.
To fully understand just how drastically the market has failed the planet in the fashion industry, let’s look more closely at why sustainable fashion is anything but sustainable.
Environmental Impact
The precise negative environmental impact of the fashion industry remains unknown, but it is sizeable.The industry’s boundaries spread globally and its multitiered supply chain remains complex and opaque.Thanks to trade liberalization, globalization, and enduring cost pressures, very few brands own the assets of their upstream factories, and most companies outsource final production.
It’s not as if “sustainability” isn’t on the agenda for fashion companies.But several common steps that companies are taking are not having their intended effect:
Transparency: As a recent Business of Fashion report noted, "with no standardized language or regulated frameworks, deciphering what companies are actually doing is extremely challenging."Most CSR reports do not accurately quantify the full carbon emissions profile of fashion brands and remain unaudited by external parties.
Recycling: Recycling is oversold.This is due to a host of reasons including the inability to plan design at scale due to the variability of supply; limits to recycling technology (e.g., it remains near impossible to recycle goods made from multiple inputs); limited infrastructure; and shorter, lower-quality fibers resulting from recycled inputs and high cost.As a result of these obstacles, less than 1% of all clothing is recycled into new garments.
Bio-Based Materials: Another response to address the growing environmental footprint of fashion is the "next-gen materials industry."Innovators are now fermenting and growing bio-based substitutes for conventional livestock derived materials (e.g., leather) and fossil fuel-based synthetics (e.g., polyester).Some of these new bio-based textiles can be engineered to deliver performance features alongside properties such as biodegradability.
Unfortunately, these innovations are plagued by high initial costs (relative to well-established alternatives that benefit from scale economies), large requirements for capital (to fund new production sites), resistance to change, and the lack of pricing for externalities (that allow fossil fuel-derived alternatives to be priced to exclude their true social costs).
New Business Models: Recognition that infinite growth on a planet of finite resourcesis a powerful impetus to develop new business models for fashion.As was the case with shared transport, these models tout their ability to dampen consumption of virgin resources and extend product lifecycles — but do they?
What Next?
Projections that I have developed forecast that the fashion industry will continue to grow over the next decade.The same trends that have powered its growth will more than overwhelm gains associated with bio-based materials and new business models.Unit growth will continue to be concentrated in lower cost, more damaging synthetics fiber products thereby exacerbating a raft of other environmental challenges including water scarcity and the growth of microplastics.
Fashion is often said to both reflect and lead culture — the industry has a once-in-history opportunity to demonstrate that creativity and respect for boundaries can lead to authentic sustainability.
篇目2
Welcome to the Golden Age of Clichés
科技时代的“陈词滥调”
Clichés aren’t necessarily inherently bad turns of phrase — in fact, they’re generally good, and that’s how they become clichés.The first person to say “in the wake of” should have been proud of themselves.It was an evocative boat metaphor.But now it is horrible.
And, sadly, this human failing is spreading via machine.ChatGPT, the popular bot released to the public by OpenAI late last year, is obsessed with clichés and uses them all the time.Perhaps it is no coincidence that use of the chatbot has already become common in areas of life where people write formulaically and blandly — student essays, cover letters, BuzzFeed quizzes, etc.
ChatGPT has been in the news near-constantly during the past several months, because a future full of chatbots raises many complicated, existential questions about how humans can coexist with artificial intelligence.But it also raises another question, to which there is an obvious, simple answer: Are chatbots ushering in a new golden age of clichés?Yes.
A chatbot isn’t going to come up with many creative turns of phrase on its own, because it’s not, technically speaking, coming up with anything at all.Created using the technology of so-called large language models, ChatGPT starts sentences based on prompts and then predicts the likelihood of each successive word, trying to guess what a person would say based on a massive amount of information it’s seen from the internet.
The problem isn’t that ChatGPT has no idea what a cliché is.It can tell when a phrase is super common, and it can find out whether a word has been described as being overused.“I have been trained on vast amounts of text, which includes many examples of cliches,” the bot told me when I asked whether it was aware that it was using a lot of clichés.
But it sometimes equivocated about whether something was definitely a cliché or not, and it also struggled with clichés that came from specific source material.
For example, when I asked ChatGPT about the phrase Reader, I (as in, “Reader, I married him”), it recognized the line from Jane Eyre and said that it was a well-known literary device."But is it a cliché?"I asked again.“If you’re asking whether ‘Reader, I married him’ is a cliche, then the answer is no, it’s not a cliche,” the bot told me.“This is a famous line from Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, and while it has been widely quoted and referenced, it hasn’t lost its originality or impact.”
Reader, I finally asked ChatGPT the most straightforward version of my question I could think of: "ChatGPT, why do you love clichés so much?"First, the bot reminded me that it’s not accurate to say that an AI language model “loves” anything.Fine.Then it told me that none of the language it generates is a reflection of its own preferences.
“The way I respond to prompts is based on the patterns and relationships I have learned from the vast amount of text that I was trained on, which includes both good and bad writing,” it went on."This means that sometimes, my responses may include cliches or overused phrases simply because they are common patterns in the language I have learned from."If I would rather the bot use fewer clichés, it suggested, I might try prompting it with some different — presumably more creative — questions or topics.
If its outputs are predictable, that’s because the inputs are too — both the sentences I’m writing now and the billions it was trained on.And as people like me continue playing with chatbots — asking them for a generic piece of writing to help appeal a parking ticket or thank a distant relative for a gift, accepting whatever ordinary phrases they give us — we will bring about the further proliferation of clichés.
