Swatch’s New OpenAI-Powered Tool Lets You Design Your Own Watch

And, just as with Swatch x You, it’s possible to further customize the watch by choosing indexes or selecting the color of its mechanism. To save on data center power drains and rampant creativity run amuck, you’re only allowed three prompts per day on AI‑DADA, something that Swatch is spinning as a “creative challenge that makes every attempt feel special.”

Ultimately, what we have here, is a new version of Swatch x You that has been plugged with image-generation software supplied by OpenAI, thus letting the general public emblazon its timepieces with whatever graphics they see fit to dream up and deposit on them. What could possibly go wrong here, I wonder?

I asked Roberto Amico, Swatch Group’s global head of digital & ecommerce, what guardrails have been put in place to stop people making, say, their very own Jeffrey Epstein Swatch, or White Power Swatch, or Stormy Daniels Swatch. Or maybe a Swatch with a Rolex logo on it, or something that looks a lot like the Rolex logo.

Amico reassures me Swatch has indeed set guardrails, particularly with logos, for example, alongside the certain restrictions already in place from OpenAI. But interestingly, Swatch Group CEO Nick Hayek Jr. tells me he battled with OpenAI to remove some of its existing guardrails to make AI‑DADA “more liberal, more Swatch.”

Hayek also confessed at the launch event in Switzerland that his first prompts on AI‑DADA all concerned “sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll,” but he was told his own model wouldn’t allow it. Still, you can never underestimate the ingenuity of the general public to get around obvious red flags—such as a ban on the model reproducing nudity or religious iconography—and create something that Swatch might not want to be associated with. Time will tell how bulletproof this model truly is.

Familiar Faces

While Swatch’s image model may be based on OpenAI, it defaults to a data set of more than 40 years of Swatch watches, products, designs, art and street paintings. Like a pattern or color on a particular 1980s Swatch dial or strap? It’s in there. Have a fondness for a Keith Haring or Vivienne Westwood or Phil Collins collaboration, the model has this too. If you ask for a design inspired by something outside of what Swatch has collected together in this archive, only then, Amico tells me, does AI‑DADA go beyond the in-house dataset and mine OpenAI’s data.