AI Promised the Audemars Piguet x Swatch Wristwatch. China Will Deliver It
Key takeaways
- When Swatch and Audemars Piguet confirmed their Royal Pop collaboration on May 8, the teaser campaign left just enough ambiguity to allow the watch web to fill the void with its own vision.
- So, when the real Royal Pop collection dropped on Tuesday, ahead of schedule (perhaps forced by the volume of fake images circulating), yes, it turned out to be genuinely different and interesting.
- When Swatch launched the MoonSwatch with Omega in 2022, publicly available AI image generators capable of flooding the zone with photorealistic versions of the watch from single-line prompts didn't exist.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Photograph: Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story For a week now, Instagram’s watch fans have been losing their minds over what looked like leaked product images. Vivid plastic Audemars Piguet Royal Oak wristwatches in bright colors: navy and orange, pink, yellow, and green. Captions guessed about prices and launch queues. Comment sections argued over colors. None of it was real. Every image was AI-generated.
When Swatch and Audemars Piguet confirmed their Royal Pop collaboration on May 8, the teaser campaign left just enough ambiguity to allow the watch web to fill the void with its own vision. The result has been a weeklong hype cycle built not around the actual product but an AI-generated simulacrum of it.
So, when the real Royal Pop collection dropped on Tuesday, ahead of schedule (perhaps forced by the volume of fake images circulating), yes, it turned out to be genuinely different and interesting. But for a significant section of the audience that had already fallen for the fakes, it was genuinely disappointing.