Olympic Athletes Design Custom Nike Sportswear with AI

Sportswear brand Nike has launched a pop-up lab at its Athlete House at the Olympic Games in Paris where athletes can customize their own apparel using AI.

Nike-sponsored athletes can use Nike’s proprietary AI tool on a tablet to design custom clothes and sneakers. 

Users can enter a prompt which the AI will turn into custom images that can be printed onto apparel in minutes.

The underlying AI is trained to generate content using Nike’s iconography, including the Swoosh logo and slogans like “Just do it.”

“At Nike, we exist to serve athletes, both in the every day and in their most important sports moments,” says Tanya Hvizdak, Nike’s vice president for global women’s sports marketing. “The Athlete House in Paris is a direct reflection of what athletes are telling us they need in this moment: a dedicated space where they can rest, recover and prepare using industry-leading services.”

An example of Nike's AI-generated designs | Credit: Nike

Several of the athlete-designed sneakers will be put on display at the Pompidou Center, a contemporary art gallery in the center of Paris.

Nike’s “Art of Victory” exhibition, which runs until August 11, features a range of prototype shoes specially designed for basketball stars A'ja Wilson and Victor Wembanyama and French soccer icon Kylian Mbappé.

Each shoe was designed using Nike’s A.I.R. creation process, which leverages cutting-edge technologies including AI to design new ideas for sneakers.

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First showcased in April, Nike’s A.I.R. unit uses detailed AI prompts to refine design ideas for sneakers, with athletes able to pick from hundreds of examples to create custom shoes.

Designs can then be 3D printed to enable athletes to have their say on the designs in the physical world

“AI exponentially increases our creative process,” Roger Chen, Nike’s vice president for digital product creation said upon the project’s unveiling. “Creating these starting points used to take us months to do. Now, we can create them in seconds. We liken AI to a sharper, more intelligent pencil. The designer is still in control. It’s what you do with the pencil that creates the magic.”

An early AI-generated concept for basketball player A'ja Wilson | Credit: Nike

Competing sportswear company Reebok previously used AI to design sneakers for consumers. However, these designs weren’t available physically, users instead received a digital sneaker featuring their design for use in virtual environments such as Open.

“Our mastery of our generative tools allows us to hear athletes with a specificity that’s unmatched,” said John Hoke, Nike’s chief innovation officer. “In unskilled hands, AI can create designs that are full of generalities. But after listening to our athletes, we harness the conceptual power of AI and use it to get at the heart of what an athlete needs, creating a new working process. We can obsess over a product, and AI becomes a creative co-conspirator with us.”

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