sigh. ai usage is a moving target, and it is guaranteed this document will change. but i just wanna be real to you all so you get the philosophy.
tl;dr — i don’t want to replace work that needs a human SOUL.
ai usage is hard to avoid as a small, bootstrapped (self funded) team. we do not intend on taking venture capital or private equity deals. so luckily, we can set our own standards and not be forced into bullshit. i’m a technologist in my non fashion life, so i have thought about this a lot and expect addendums to this doc.
—shahzad, zorsay founder, 8/19/26
people:
no ai fuckin humans no uncanny valley shit no fake ass robo ugc no organless snatched waist models no deepfake ripoffs
…that’s a simple one.
manufacture:
avoid image ai for anything the customer touches, ever. in any rare case where it is used, say it clearly.
ai is fine for quick rendering. it cuts down on material waste and shipping.
ai is fine for sketch ideas.
for any final garments with digital prints, embroidery, paint elements, we work with actual artisans and take all those flaws.
visuals:
avoid generating visuals of any product using AI. exception - pre-production renders that are disclaimed as such.
we won’t outright not use AI here. we’re fine with using it more like the photoshop 2006 that we got on a legitimate legal CD-ROM from a karachi market. that means stuff like removals of a background in an ad.
here’s a bit more about how murky this can get. we once used ai to adjust a garment that we already did a photoshoot for, but changed the color of in production. we then offered to pay the model as if she did the shoot with that garment (adding the time it would have taken to the hourly). since the model agreed, we could move forward with their consent. when we used AI to remove some tricky brand logos from the ralli jacket shoot, we received the photographer’s consent before editing it. since both of these examples are photoshoppable, and not distorting the product reality, it feels fair.
if we think any AI usage distorts reality, or promises something we do not make (like all those wonderful spiderman outfits for dachshunds i see on ig), we will not use that embarrassing slop.
productivity and coding:
ai is good for meeting notes. ai is good for busywork. ai helps us manage production todos. and sorry artisan hand coders, but ai is good enough for coding so if you see websites from us, it was made with a robot’s help.
writing:
we care about good writing. anything we write is either entirely human, or a skeleton edited heavily by human to make it weird and personal (this page is entirely human). we don’t know how anyone can tell ai writing from human writing consistently, and it’s gonna get boring defending against this. But we can say all words are reviewed by Shahzad, a human who got published every year of elementary school into college. real, truthful, raw, honest, messy writing means a lot to us.
receipts
this page is timestamped and accessible by archive.org if you want to check any claims. If you have thoughts about this page or our policy, feel free to dm us @zorsay.nyc or email the user hi @ this domain name.
and last thing for the fleshy beings who got here - no, we did not have an ai edit this, but most of the page views this page will ever get, will be robots.