Motion x AI: Part II
How does our community feel about AI a year on?
Published
April 2025
The speed of AI development in the last year has been remarkable. Although motion design hasn't been as immediately affected as some related sectors, the increasing traction of platforms like Runway signals a potential shift.
A year ago, we engaged our community in a discussion about AI's influence on our industry (MotionxAI: Part I). Given AI's pervasive impact on our lives, we felt it crucial to revisit this conversation. Have our community's feelings evolved in the past year?
The following section presents the responses we received, along with additional thoughts shared by participating members.
How has your perception of AI in motion design evolved over the
past year?
2. Do you think AI will become an essential tool for motion designers,
or it will it remain an optional supplement?
3. How do you predict AI will impact motion designer over the next
five years?
Commentary from our community
I have a complicated relationship with AI that I’d recap as “Intrigued & Terrified”. Not really about losing my job, more about the long term implications — but also about the consequences on designers today: the bad & the good ones, like pushing designers to focus on what hasn’t been done before (as AI masters every tutorial out there & commoditizes everything that’s already widely adopted).
At Algo there’s no team member that isn’t using it daily. Especially the dev team. Not really as a creative output. We feel a responsibility to help designers stay in the driver’s seat in this new era — to keep creatives to define the rules of the visual system first, and then let the AI join the band later. To help editors (our clients) use our tools and generators to output better content with less work everyday — making creating motion more accessible to non designers.
In this context, we’ve recently experimented with creating a data visualization agent for an Algo project, and the experience was mind blowing.
If we agree that very few companies have the resources and know-how to compete on making the foundational models (and they get disrupted too like OpenAI with Deepseek) it’s becoming clear that the moat in AI applications is the user experience. This means that even small teams can train agents for very specific purposes and maybe succeed with them. Are agents the new App Store apps? Not sure, but agents are surely here to stay.
Luca Gonnelli
@algo.tv
CEO & Creative Director at Algo
“We’re optimistically open-minded about incorporating AI into our workflow and there are certain apps we use daily. Everything we’ve adopted either speeds something up, removes a repetitive task, or allows us to do things that weren’t possible before.
Topaz helps us solve a range of problems across production. Whether we’re upscaling lower-quality footage from a client, or generating extra frames to slow a clip down smoothly, it makes a real difference. We also use it to cut down 3D render times by outputting at a lower resolution and then upscaling to 4K using Topaz in a few minutes.
In all cases, it’s not replacing creativity, but enhancing an existing input and building on the original work in a very procedural way.
We also use tools like Runway to quickly add movement to stills, which can transform certain projects because we’re not limited to fixed imagery. Because it’s so accessible, I believe this will create an industry shift where more branding agencies enhance static design mockups with motion to enrich their case studies and showreels.”
Tom Allen
@buffmotion
Founder
“I've been excited about AI since it started gaining attention, feeling like I’m witnessing a major technological evolution. As someone in the creative industry, I’ve seen how people are integrating AI into their workflows in different ways, and its rapid development is truly fascinating. Some motion designer friends use AI to generate helpful After Effects expressions, though I’ve tried it myself and found it doesn’t always work for me and it's hard to make specific adjustments.
A few others are incorporating AI-generated assets into their work, while I occasionally use AI as a supportive tool during the concept phase. It doesn’t always inspire me directly and can sometimes take ideas in unexpected directions, but even a single spark can be valuable.
I see AI as a supportive tool in motion design, not a replacement. While some lower-level and templated tasks may eventually be taken over by AI, I do have concerns about the public becoming overly drawn to the “AI style” of work and the fast-paced, efficiency-driven production process it promotes. That said, I still believe that the most impactful creative work will always rely on a strong sense of aesthetics and the thoughtful, human mind behind it.”
Yiting Nan
@ninteen_nan
Motion Designer
“I’ve been using AI for simple tasks in my motion design workflow, initially for production mistakes which would require considerable work to correct. We used it for audio correction on a project where we needed to separate a voice from a lot of background noise and for simple upscaling where footage has not been up to scratch.
I’ve also found it’s can be useful for exploring expression writing, when I need a quick expression for experiment or template it can be very useful to get a base and then exploring from there.
Overall I’ve not found it useful for any creative work yet, it’s more useful as a technical tool for fixes and basic coding assistance. I could not imagine it taking over advanced coding, design, or nuanced motion treatment where an eye for detail and following direction is required.”
Stephen Ong
@stephenonguk
Freelance Motion Designer & Illustrator
“As it is for a lot of artists, even for me AI is a tool which lets me explore the depths/possibilities of expanding my idea and gives a lot of options on how that can be done.
It might definitely lack the practicality of execution sometimes but that's where the designer has to make the most choices and has to see how those ideas can be brought forward.
I personally don't take AI as a competition or something that can ruin designers because I believe in human capabilities and there are so many other ways t o make money in today's world rather than just taking the conventional route of working for someone else. That's why skills are very important and to keep updating yourselves to new trends and new technologies is so important.
As for me, I keep myself very updated because even though my professor or some other authority won't like or accept me using a certain platform but that's what everyone else is using too and trying to get ahead in the race. So might as well just keep up with the race and keep moving forward rather than being in the group that does not prefer change.”
Diksha Sadhwani
@dcre.ight
Student/Motion Designer
“It’s a super useful tool we can use daily, but no longer fear it will replace humans. Its abilities were overly hyped, it will remain very powerful for specific aspects of our job, and never be a total plug ‘n’ play solution for good motion design. It’s also great to speed up the process, or quickly test things out.
But since it’s not doing anything differently, or adding anything creative, just a time saver - I would say it’s an optional supplement. It will also expand the volume of things we make, and in turn I fear we may lose some thinking, heart and character behind the work.”
Draeger Gillesipe
@draeger
Motion Design Director
“My perspective on AI in motion design remains unchanged, as I have yet to find any AI-powered plugins, programs, or web-based tools that meaningfully enhance my workflow or significantly improve the way I work. I’ve always believed that as long as AI-generated videos and content remain uneditable and low quality, AI in motion design will continue to be a “nice to have” rather than a “must-have.”
In my workflow, when it's in the conceptual stage, I will use AI to help generate ideas. But from a production standpoint, I rarely use AI tools unless I need specific footage or assets that I can't find online. For example, in a project last year that relied heavily on collage as a design element, I used a large number of AI-generated images as collage assets. On this occasion, it saved time while providing exactly what I needed.”
Justin Zhang
@just1nzhang
Graphic & Motion Designer
“I don’t really get why people panic about AI in the creative world. Progress is not something you can stop by just complaining online. So I choose to go with it and use AI in my work. For me, AI is just a tool. It saves time and helps with boring tasks. I don’t like writing expressions in After Effects, but I still need them - so I ask ChatGPT and it works great. In my last project, I used some AI-generated images.
And honestly, I’m happy to let robots help me more. Same with quick storyboards - they don’t have to be perfect, just fast, so I can focus on the creative part. AI videos also look nice, but let’s be real - they still need a person to control the process. AI doesn’t invent new things - it just mixes stuff that already exists. That’s why for real creative work and client projects, we still need people with taste and vision.”
Alena Leleka
@al_leleka
Motion Designer
“No matter what, AI will continue to be soulless. As it’s merely an imitation, and I believe consumers will grow more skeptical about generative art, labelling them as cheap.
What really concerns me is that big brands might not care. In an age of consumerism and social media, it isn’t about the quality, but how much and how fast you can make it. Ultimately, big companies just need to pump out the next 50 promos just to grab people’s attention through a 10 second tik tok.
Unfortunately, it falls to us to prove companies wrong. We need to show that hand crafted art is better than AI, by having original art perform better than them.
I like tell myself that this would only elevate the bar of handcrafted art, but I can see the irony in proving ourselves as better than a machine churning out imitations, and it’s the very companies that we need to prove to that have created this problem for us.”
Yat Fung Leung
@yattytheman
Freelance Motion Designer
“I use AI to generate ideas and nurture the conversation internally and with my clients, but won’t deliver AI generated content as final assets.
First, for complex legal reasons. We need to be very careful about where the data is coming from, which is almost impossible to define. Secondly, and most importantly, for control. AI moving imagery is, as of today, hard to edit, extend, change. It's somehow good for footage rendering, less for animated graphic assets. We need to be mindful that our clients and partners will use our files as motion templates, and this needs to work easily for them.
Ideally, companies like Adobe or Maxon would need to create bridges between AI and editable elements - generating a 3d animation that can be opened in Cinema 4D, for example, or moving graphics which have keyframes available in After Effects. But I'm optimistic that this is only a matter of years, or months, for it to come to this stage.”
Etienne Godiard
@etiennegodiard
Senior Motion Designer
I’ve been using AI more and more lately, mainly for the parts of freelance life that eat into design time.
Tasks like writing emails, structuring written concepts for client presentations, and even creating or editing stock imagery used to take up more of my day than I’d like. Now, AI helps me move through those quicker so I can focus on the design work.
I don’t use AI for motion or video generation, truthfully, I enjoy that part of the process too much to hand it over. But where it’s really helped is turning my early-stage ideas into something structured and presentable. As someone who thinks in visuals first, AI helps me get those ideas out of my head and into words that make sense.
It’s also been helpful for cleaning up rough notes and breaking information down into digestible, actionable steps…especially useful for me as a dyslexic.
Overall, it speeds up the early conceptual stages of a brief, giving me more time and headspace to focus on the design and motion work.
Pauline Baines
@paulabaines
Motion Designer
I would be optimistic in the sense that there’s a lot of room for the optimisation of kinetic typography and the animation and workflow associated with it, particularly within After Effects. I would be wary that as much as AI has the potential to speed up workflow and keyframing, it could lead to a lot of animations possessing similar if not identical easing and interpolation. I believe the way to combat this could be the creation of bespoke motion languages for brands. Easing percentages could become an integral aspect of brand guidelines going forward.
Jack Mckeon
@jackmckeondesign
Branding & Motion Designer
