Motion x AI: Part III
AI is still a hot topic.
Published
March 2026
Previous articles:
MotionxAI: Part I
MotionxAI:Part II
Over the past year, the conversation around AI in motion design has matured, and with that maturity has come friction. What started as quiet experimentation has turned into open debate, with some artists fully embracing AI as a new creative tool, and others pushing back hard, questioning its ethics, originality, and long-term impact on the craft.
We’re now at a point where opinions are quite divided. Some see acceleration and opportunity, others see erosion of skill, authorship, and respect for human-made work.
We want to open the floor again. Where do you stand now? Has your perspective changed? Are you experimenting, resisting, conflicted, or somewhere in between? The aim is to help open up the the conversation even further and provide insight into community temperament.
As this is quite comprehensive, we’ve split the article into two sections:
1. Overview from our community (responses from our polls)
2. Commentary by community members from various motion design disciplines.
Community Roundtable Questions
Commentary from Our Community
BUCK | Nick Petley
Motion Designer | Maayan Erlich
Motion & Animation Director | Emanuele Colombo
Reece Parker Co | Reece Parker
Motion Designer | Ankit Gajjar
How&How | Cat How
Creative Director | Alfie Bogush
Motion Designer | Joshua Craigie
Mayda | Marcos Silva
Motion Designer | Sayeed Islam
3D/AI Motion Design | Jordan McBarnett
Ravie | Will Taylor / Sam Essanoussi
Studio Kiln | Nathan Smith / Charlie Hocking
1. Has your stance on AI changed?
There’s a tension that’s become hard to ignore. As AI takes over more of the workflow, it can create a real sense of being undervalued, like parts of what we used to be hired for are now automated. Compared to last year, the concern feels louder and more layered: not just about jobs, but about long-term environmental impact and what this shift means for creative livelihoods.
AI can compress huge amounts of creative pressure into a tight space and output something technically “perfect” in seconds. But that raises a bigger question. Do we lose something raw and instinctive in that compression? Or are we simply stripping away parts of the process that were never essential to begin with?
2. Are you currently using AI in your workflow?
More of us have experimented with AI now, but it hasn’t fully taken over. We still value creativity and ownership, that part hasn’t changed. At the same time, there are undeniably powerful use cases. Some tools make projects exponentially easier and faster.
The real tension sits there. If AI removes friction, does it help ideas arrive more fully formed? Or does easier access to the same tools create a kind of cross-pollination that flattens originality into sameness?
Maybe it goes the other way. Maybe AI isn’t replacing inspiration, but amplifying experimentation, pushing ideas further than reference-hunting ever could. The outcome probably depends less on the tool, and more on how deliberately we use it.
3. Do you feel pressure to adopt AI tools?
No one really knows the path forward, and you can see that uncertainty reflected in how agencies and studios are handling it. Some have fully integrated AI into their workflows and openly advocate for it. Others are cautious, trying to balance experimentation with restraint. It’s not an easy line to walk.
Client expectations have shifted too. In some cases, AI is used as justification for tighter budgets and bigger demands, which puts creative value under constant scrutiny. But the impact isn’t uniform. Motion design isn’t one job, it’s a spectrum. Different roles intersect with AI in different ways, and what makes sense for one discipline may not for another.
4. Where do you personally draw the ethical line?
This is where the tension sharpens. Copyright exists to protect intellectual property, so why does that protection feel blurred when it comes to AI? How solid are the claims from tech companies about safeguarding original work? And does that protection realistically apply to independent creatives, or mainly to those with legal budgets behind them?
There have been clear cases of artists’ work being scraped, remixed, and reproduced without credit. Early on, that concern was front and centre. Now, the conversation feels quieter, partly because AI companies have refined their legal positioning and ownership claims around generated content. But quieter doesn’t mean resolved.
For motion designers especially, this hits hard. Years spent refining craft, taste, and technical ability can feel undermined when automation enters the picture. It can feel like another wave of tech compressing creative labour into something cheaper and faster.
At the same time, the counterargument is uncomfortable but valid. The internet has always been open. We reference each other’s work. We remix influences. Inspiration is rarely created in a vacuum. If AI generates something new by recombining vast datasets, how fundamentally different is that from how humans absorb and reinterpret visual culture? Is the distinction about intent, authorship, labour, or simply the absence of a human hand?
Motion designers already work through software. We don’t “put pen to paper” in the traditional sense. Our craft is mediated by tools. So is AI just another tool in that lineage,or does its scale and autonomy change the equation entirely?
This debate could run indefinitely. What’s clear is that, within the community, it doesn’t feel settled. And until questions of ownership, consent, and value are addressed in a way that feels fair, the discomfort isn’t going anywhere.
Community Commentary
Nick Petley
2D Animation Director
@nickpetley
@buck_design
I think my stance has certainly become more nuanced now that I understand the tools better. I was initially very reticent about AI, and I admit the pace at which new tools appear is still incredibly overwhelming. I feel that, much like with bad CGI, bad AI feels so fake and uncanny that all you can think about is that you’re watching AI-generated content. But when executed properly, it still demonstrates a sense of control and craft and can be really successful. That Masaki Mizuno piece Wave really opened my eyes to how one can use AI in this way.
I use AI in my workflow pretty regularly at this point. I have used Krea, Runway and Comfy UI to create video content which I would then comp into After Effects. Mostly I use AI to help me generate tools or expressions to create specific motion setups in After Effects or Cavalry which makes up for my lack of coding skills.
The challenging part for me is how rapidly this technology is embedding into our lives and changing the culture and the industry around the value of what well-executed craftsmanship and creativity looks like. I think there’s an expectation that with this technology we should be able to create animation faster and with less artists, but creativity still takes time and consideration. Is it being creative to leave all decisions up to the computers?
I think when all these new tools like Runway and Comfy UI first came out, I did feel some pressure to adopt these tools. But today, the tools keep coming with even more advanced capabilities. It can be hard to keep up with which tool to use but at this point I feel educated enough to pick up the latest AI model and run with it.
Maayan Erlich
Freelance Motion Designer
@maayan_erlich
I have pretty mixed feelings about the AI shift. On one hand, there’s something a bit sad about losing the 'magic' of building everything from scratch. There’s a specific joy in the craft and the struggle of the process that defines why we do what we do, and you worry that when everything is so reachable, some of that soul gets lost. On the other hand, having grown up through the shifts to the internet and then smartphones, I try to see this as another one of those massive leaps.
I’ve seen how those changes can feel daunting at first but eventually blow the doors off what’s possible. If we approach AI as a partner rather than a rival, it can be a huge creative boost. For me, it’s about finding that sweet spot where the tech handles the heavy lifting, but the human still holds the compass.
Emanuele Colombo
Motion Designer & Animation Director
@ema_colombo
Before I start, I want to name two things that dominate any conversation about AI: environmental impact and copyright. Neither is resolved, and it is hard to feel good about where things stand.
The difficult truth is that we are largely in the hands of a few large companies. We can protest or refuse. Our impact remains limited.
So my perspective tries to set those two questions aside. Not because they do not matter, but because I find it more useful to focus on what we can actually influence: how AI will evolve, and how we choose to meet that change.
AI is the topic of the moment, and in 2026 more than ever. It is no longer a niche conversation among early adopters or a distant promise about the future. It is challenging consolidated paradigms on multiple levels at the same time.
A year ago it still made sense to say these tools were not ready. That they needed time. That the limitations were too many, that the output was recognizable, that a trained eye would always spot the difference. It was a defensible position. Today, not so much. 2026 is, in my view, the year AI stops being an experiment and becomes a production ready tool. That does not mean limitations no longer exist, but the direction is clear, and the speed of improvement leaves very little room for waiting.
To understand where we are, two historical parallels come to mind.
The first is technical: the advent of photography. Nineteenth century painters looked at the daguerreotype with a mix of contempt and terror. A machine that captures reality at the press of a button, with no apprenticeship, no sweat. “It is not art, the machine does it.” And yet we know how it turned out. Photography became an art form in its own right. It developed its own market, language and visual culture. Painting did not disappear. It transformed. It freed itself from the obligation of representation and found new paths.
The second parallel is market disruption: Napster and the music revolution of the early 2000s. Digital piracy blew up a system consolidated over decades. Major labels fought back legally and symbolically. Metallica became the face of the resistance. It did not matter. The technology did not stop. Instead, the market restructured itself. Streaming platforms emerged. Music publishing was democratized. New players, new professional roles and new economic models appeared. What worked before simply stopped working. Better in some ways, worse in others. But no one went back.
I believe we are at that exact moment for the creative world. New roles, new processes and new models will emerge. What worked before may no longer work. And resisting, however understandable or romantic it may feel, will not change the direction.
In visual disciplines specifically, something structural is happening. The technical barrier to entry, which once required years of practice or significant budgets, is dropping dramatically. Anyone can generate something visually powerful. And this is triggering strong reactions, as we have seen in our own community.
There is another aspect worth naming clearly. These new processes imply giving up a degree of control. In exchange for speed, we accept that some decisions are made by the machine. We settle for a result that is not exactly what we had in mind, but that arrives in a fraction of the time. It is a real trade off. And it fundamentally changes the relationship we have always had with our work, a relationship built on millimetric control and intentional decisions on every single frame.
But beyond the ethical questions, which are legitimate and deserve serious discussion, I think the real issue is identity. If anyone can do it, who am I? Does my job title still mean anything?
We have all spent years building technical skills. Today some of those processes are bypassed in seconds by a tool. That is a fact. But maybe the real question is this: what remains when you remove the execution?
What remains is taste. The ability to tell a story. To build rhythm. To understand why something works and something else does not. Those skills cannot be prompted. They are built over years. And they are exactly what, even with new tools, continues to make the difference.
Reece Parker
One-Man Creative Shop
@reeceparkerco
There is a common assumption that those of us protecting human work are disconnected from the evolution of these technologies - 'heads buried in the sand'. Speaking for myself, this is not the case. I recognize how quickly these technologies iterate, and with each iteration, step closer towards being entirely 'convincing'.
Convincing, meaning increasingly 'real', abandoning the obvious early pitfalls. Glitching, artifacting, and other uncanny valley problems, while simultaneously attempting to adopt understanding from our world. Physics & weight, lighting, acting & emotions, IP & pop culture figures. Why am I stating the obvious? Because describing its evolution is revealing. Its purpose is not to create something new or previously unachievable; it's to replace what already exists, by scraping the data from our works, without permission, retribution, royalties.
Art exists as a result of human effort, consumption, creativity, love, passion, commitment, on and on. Its purpose is more meaningful than can be described in words. This is why a prompt cannot carry the same power to resonate, it's removed the humanity and purpose. 'Creatives' adopting Ai in full swing do so with 2 goals, raise profits, reduce overhead.
Let me rephrase to be more clear: reduce the cost of skilled human labor. I get it, overhead, smaller budgets, pressures and promises aplenty. This sacrifice does not come without consequence. Adopting to 'stay ahead of the curve' I believe actually groups your works in with the majority pack. Always generating the mean or 'average' of the same group of data, producing increasingly similar results, over and over, and removing our voices. To sell our voice, our integrity, our creative intuition, is to sell our real value as artists.
Image generation, plagiarism, and replacing skilled human labor (artists especially, but I recognize this is my particular bias and I defend other skilled human labor being threatened). LLMs for specific tasks, I will have open conversations about. Although, its being widely abused, and we are seeing interesting (severe) results from outsourcing our thinking & decision making.
I feel more concrete in my positioning as purely human. Human-made work will become more valuable than ever. Increasing proportionately with the overuse of image generation, which will surely take over social media, and the entire internet. These two truths are interconnected. As AI becomes the commodity, true human creative becomes the luxury.
Ankit Gajjar
Motion Designer/Creative Technologist
@the_art_voltage
Used correctly, it reduces time, removes repetitive tasks, and clears mental clutter. It can compress hours into minutes. But If you let AI generate your ideas, shape your thinking, and control creative direction, everything starts to look the same. When everyone uses the same tools, models trained on the same data, outputs begin to look predictable. My stance didn’t become blindly positive. It became more intentional.
AI becomes what I call “Answer Intelligence.” The power isn’t in AI. It’s in your ability to ask the right questions. I primarily use AI to solve complex execution problems, not for creative ownership, not to generate a AI video/images, and not ask it to make decisions on my behalf. I’ve used AI tools to: Build new workflows. Replace slow, repetitive tasks. Generate scripts, demos, and personal internal tools. Remove friction from technical bottlenecks. If you deeply observe your workflow, you’ll find friction everywhere. And friction is opportunity.
No one enjoys eating the same food every day. AI learns from everything fed into it. Over time, if we rely on it blindly, creative output starts to taste the same. Safe. Structured. Predictable. We are moving toward a world of: Everything. Everywhere. AI. So to stand out, you must protect your edge. Be selective about what AI does for you. Guard the parts that shapes your identity, ideas.
It's just smart to adapt to AI Tools not because of hype. Not because of fear. But because it reduces friction. AI should be used to follow your commands, not think on your behalf. AI is what Motion Design was in 2000s.
Cat How
Founder, CEO & Executive Creative Director
@how___studio
how.studio
When AI first appeared, the conversation was very abstract. Lots of speculation about whether it would replace designers or fundamentally change creativity. Now that it’s creeping into real projects, the conversation is much more practical. What I’m seeing is that it doesn’t replace the thinking, it mostly accelerates certain parts of production. Motion design in particular can be incredibly labour-intensive, so anything that frees designers from repetitive tasks and lets them spend more time shaping the idea is actually quite interesting!
We’re experimenting with it, and we love it. It tends to show up in early exploration such as generating references, testing visual directions, or helping teams prototype ideas quickly. The core of the work still sits firmly with the designers. The narrative, the tone, the pacing of motion, those are still very human decisions, and we very much want to keep the autonomy there. At the moment AI feels more like a support tool around the edges of the process rather than something driving the work itself.
The biggest issue for me is authorship. A lot of AI tools have clearly been trained on creative work without the original artists necessarily being credited or compensated, and that’s something the industry still needs to grapple with. I also think transparency matters. If AI plays a significant role in producing something, there should be an openness about that rather than quietly replacing creative labour behind the scenes. Transparency is definitely key.
There’s definitely a sense that AI is a part of the evolving toolkit and we need to be a part of it. Every generation of designers has had a similar shift: desktop publishing, 3D, real-time tools. AI is just the next wave of that. The bigger challenge for studios isn’t adopting the tools, it’s maintaining taste and judgement when the tools suddenly make it much easier for anyone to generate things quickly.
Alfie Bogush
Creative Director
@alfiemotion
@thedoodles
I think it’s incredibly progressive, and it allows artists to push boundaries that they haven’t been able to previously achieve. Why not create a democratisation of tooling so that, for example, anyone can create a 3D character without spending years learning 3D? Why are we setting rules as to what can and can’t be used. Slop is one thing that I don’t agree with, but that’s just AI that looks bad. If you can create something that looks beautiful, who cares what tools you use? A brilliant creative director once said to me, “as long as it looks great, nobody cares how you make it.” That was years before AI. Same applies now.
I use it to aid my creative workflow, it helps me to execute ideas faster, iterate concepts and get to outcomes quicker, without the menial and tedious tasks that come with creating.
I think creating work that is inherently sloppy is the thing that gives AI a bad rep. Artists see that shit and immediately wave their fists and say AI SUCKS. If we can create a world where innovating with these tools isn’t considered a betrayal, I believe some really beautiful work can come from this era.
I love learning new things and adopting new tools, I always have and always will. I think this era is incredibly exciting.
Joshua Craigie
Freelance Motion Designer
@jcmotion_
When AI first came out, I genuinely wasn’t threatened at all. The quality was poor and it felt more like a trend, similar to NFTs, than something that could seriously compete with creatives. But over time the tools improved and people’s perception of it changed. That’s when I started noticing a deeper issue. Creative work, at least to the general public, began being judged more on speed and surface level polish than on intention, depth or authorship.
For a lot of people who don’t have the time or interest to analyse craft, AI was enough. The outputs got better and more convincing, but I still felt like something was missing. It often looks polished and well put together at first glance, but when you look closely it can feel superficial. Even when it’s technically impressive, it doesn’t always feel grounded in a clear reason for why it exists the way it does.
Human creative work has imperfections too. The difference for me is that human error feels intentional, or at least honest. There’s something meaningful about knowing a flaw came from a human decision rather than a system predicting patterns. Even if AI reached a point where it had no visible flaws, I think I would still feel detached watching a film made entirely by it. It would look good, but I’d question whether there was any real lived experience or philosophy behind it.
To me, AI is a tool. It’s useful for speeding up certain long processes. It can help with ideation, testing variations, prototyping visuals or effects that would otherwise take hours to experiment with. Used properly, it can make the creative process more efficient and open up more room to explore ideas.
But generating a finished piece purely through prompting doesn’t equate to authorship in my eyes. Producing an output isn’t the same as building the skill, judgment and understanding needed to create meaningful work. AI works through statistical pattern recognition. It doesn’t have lived experience, personal conviction or symbolic intent.
Marcos Silva
Motion Designer/Creative Technologist
@masd.lab
@the.mayda.creative.co
There's a version of AI that genuinely helps you. And there's a version that quietly flattens everything you spent years developing. Most people are using both without realising which is which.
I've been using AI in my workflow for a while now. Not because it's trendy. Not because I was afraid of being left behind. But because I noticed friction in my day-to-day, and friction is just opportunity with a bad attitude.
What I've never done is let it think for me.
That distinction matters more than most people are willing to admit right now.
When I build tools for motion designers, scripts, extensions, systems inside After Effects, the goal is always the same: remove the repetitive so the creative can breathe. AI fits into that framework. It helps me write code faster. It helps me prototype ideas I'd otherwise spend a week testing. It generates the scaffolding so I can focus on what actually requires my eye, my taste, my decisions.
But the moment I ask it to make a creative call, I've given something away I can't get back.
I've watched AI-generated motion work and felt something off about it. Not technically, technically it's often impressive. It's the sameness. The outputs are trained on everything that came before, which means they tend toward the average of all of it. Safe. Competent. Recognisable. There's no friction in it, and friction, the productive kind, is where personality lives.
The risk isn't that AI makes bad work. It's that it makes perfectly acceptable work, endlessly, for everyone.
If you're a motion designer right now, that should sharpen your thinking about what you actually bring to a project. Not your ability to execute, that's increasingly commoditised. But your ability to see differently. To build a visual language that doesn't look like a prompt. To have a point of view strong enough that a client hires you specifically because they want it.
I think about this a lot through the lens of tool-building. When I create something for masd.lab, I'm making a decision about what a motion designer should own. The software, yes, I've always believed in that, no subscriptions, no renting your own workflow. But also the thinking behind it. The logic. The craft of knowing what to automate and what to protect.
The same principle applies to AI. Use it to own more of your time. Use it to compress the technical so you can expand the creative. But be selective about which parts of your process you hand over. Some of that friction is load-bearing.
AI in motion design is not a threat if you're honest about what it actually does well. It answers. It executes. It scales. What it doesn't do is wonder. It doesn't get bored of its own solution and start over. It doesn't feel the specific discomfort of a frame that's almost right.
That discomfort is yours. Guard it.
The designers who will matter in five years are the ones building intentional relationships with these tools, not dependent, not dismissive. Using AI like a highly capable junior who does exactly what you ask and nothing more. The brief still comes from you. The vision still comes from you. The taste that makes the work feel like something, not just look like something, entirely you.
We are in a moment that rewards clarity about what you are. If you can answer "what do you bring that a model can't?" with something specific and real, you're fine. If the honest answer makes you uneasy, that's useful information too.
I'm not worried about AI replacing motion designers. I'm more interested in what motion designers become when they stop using AI as a shortcut and start using it as infrastructure.
The ones who figure that out now won't be asking the question in five years..
Sayeed Islam
Motion Designer
@sayeedi
Two years ago, my stance on AI in motion design was that “tools change, what matters is knowing what’s good and what’s not.”
Today, my perspective has shifted into something a bit more cynical. Many of the companies driving this tech operate with a lack of ethics regarding artists’ rights and data sourcing. That’s ignoring the environmental cost and wider social impact. When we replace the struggle of creation with a text prompt, where anything is possible with the right sequence of words, we lose the friction that sparks innovation.
I think back to times when I didn’t know how to do a particular thing in After Effects, didn’t know how to code something, or didn’t know how to build it in 3D, and I had to work with the knowledge I had. That often sparked something far more interesting than what I would have originally planned. I worry that AI will mean future generations never experience that friction, and what that might mean.
I will say there are glimpses of utility in tools like Kling, where AI is used to develop a final treatment while the designer retains control over motion and form. But even with these advancements, a part of me, for whatever reason, has a physical revulsion to generative art and motion.
For me, this emerging technology has triggered a desire to move in the opposite direction. I find myself wanting to embrace the analog: real craft and traditional methods that feel more human and less disposable.
Jordan McBarnet
3D/AI/Motion
@jordan_motion
AI, to me, is simply the next evolution of creative tools. I use it to experiment, prototype faster, and push ideas further than I could on my own. It expands my output and shortens the distance between concept and execution. As an independent artist building a long-term career, adaptability is survival. AI allows me to stay competitive, efficient, and profitable in an industry that constantly evolves. Just like 3D once disrupted traditional animation, this is another shift that rewards the artists who lean in rather than resist.
When it comes to the ethical debate, I understand why it exists, but I’m not personally consumed by it. AI has been integrated into creative software and workflows since it accelerated in 2021 and 2022, and it’s only becoming more embedded in the tools we already use. Major platforms and creative companies are building it directly into their ecosystems. That tells me this isn’t a passing trend, it’s infrastructure. The internet has always been a space of remixing, referencing, and reinterpretation. AI didn’t create that reality, it just amplified it.
As for environmental concerns, a lot of the extreme claims don’t reflect how the technology actually works. AI runs on electricity and data centers, just like the rest of the internet. It’s not “using billions of trees,” and framing it that way oversimplifies a much broader conversation about energy consumption in general. The digital world as a whole has a footprint, and AI is part of that system. For me, the focus is on using the tool responsibly while continuing to grow as an artist. I plan to evolve with technology, not get left behind by it.
Will Taylor
Creative Director
@visualsbywlroo
@ravie.co
Early on, AI really felt like a novelty, with most people using it to quickly iterate on ideas but now that its ability to visualise has come so far, the shift has clearly not replaced good creative thinking, it’s compressed the execution layer. This, in turn, hasn’t made creativity less valuable but made judgement far more visible. You can tell when someone’s had a great idea or if they’ve been fed it by an AI model.
Nothing I do has necessarily been replaced by AI, but I do use it to quickly test the validity of ideas and expand on them, allowing me to explore variations faster than what we previously could’ve. AI’s a collaborator in the exploration phase, not the decision-maker at the end.
For me, it’s about intent. If AI is helping generate variations, speed up production, or assist in ideation, that’s an extension of our tooling. If it replaces original thinking that’s where it becomes problematic. Ethics in AI is about transparency and responsibility. The creative industry has always evolved through new tools in history. The difference now is scale, so the accountability has to scale too.
There’s definitely economic pressure, not so much creative pressure. AI means clients now are starting to expect faster turnaround times, so internal teams are expected to be efficient, which in turn means that people often turn to AI to speed up their workflow. It’s all kind of circular. I’ve felt more pressure to stay mentally sharp through this shift than anything. I don’t feel pressure to use AI because it’s the latest gadget in the industry; I'm more focused on understanding when AI is adding or subtracting value from our processes.
Sam Essanoussi
Creative Director
@sam.essanoussi
@ravie.co
Giving a blanket opinion on “AI” is a little tough because there are so many different types that require different conversations. Looking back, AI existed and was used way before the recent explosion of ChatGPT and generative AI. At its core, it’s essentially machine learning, you feed it data, and it learns, improves, and makes predictions based on that information. The technology itself is impressive, but the real question is: what does it do to the user? How does it actually affect everyone?
Honestly, it depends. Like most tools in life, if you use it right, it helps, If you use it wrong, it harms you. We've definitely seen both sides. On the positive end, AI is a fantastic time saver. Using tools like Gemini to research faster is incredible. I understand why some say it makes us lazy, classic research used to mean hours of digging through sources and comparing notes, and I agree there's value in that. However, AI can make the initial digging easier while still leaving room for us to put in the effort to understand topics deeply. If you have two weeks to research a topic, using AI gets you to the baseline faster, giving you the time to either dive much deeper into the nuances or even research a second topic.
The “not so great” side is how easily it can be abused. In academic settings, for example, it’s tempting to use AI to get quick answers without putting in the time to actually understand the material. It becomes the “copy paste” method. If we aren't careful, these research tools can build lazy habits. When your default becomes typing a prompt and skimming a paragraph, you lose the time and effort required to actually understand and retain information, rather than just reading it once and forgetting.
Generative AI, whether video or imagery is a whole different story. A major issue here is how these models were trained using other people’s work, which can make the output feel soulless and lacking in meaning. The reason great ads, movies, or shows resonate with us is the human mind and creativity behind them. Crafting a story takes years of real life experiences, emotions, connections, and events. That human touch is what makes a piece of art feel familiar and alive, you feel a genuine connection to it because it’s human to human.
That said, I’ve seen creatives using AI not to replace their ideas, but as an executional tool to bring their concepts to life. By letting AI handle the heavy lifting of the execution, they can spend more time refining the core concept. When used that way, the results can look really interesting, different, and fresh. Not that this should be the way forward, but it’s an interesting “style” and it needs to maintain that way, because if you start to see AI made posters, movies, ads, etc.. that’ll feel hollow and meaningless Humans want to interact with other humans and not machines, even the non experienced eye who can’t tell the difference between AI and real will feel that negative energy over time.
Personally, I use AI to make life easier and tackle tasks that would otherwise take me days, if not weeks, to develop. Gemini helps me organize my research and tackle complex mathematical equations that involve finance or context from multiple sources. I also use Cursor to help build apps and tools, and it has been completely life changing. Knowing how much time it takes to code manually and troubleshoot bugs, it would be almost impossible for a creative director in a motion and design studio to make these projects happen on my current schedule without AI.
This brings me to a rule of thumb I like to follow: use AI for things you already grasp conceptually, but that would cost you a massive amount of time to execute manually. AI is there to make things more efficient for you, not to do the thinking for you.
Still, I have to admit there is a lingering pressure to use AI. Being on the train of trying to improve, follow trends, and stay competitive definitely adds a subtle weight to adopt it. When everyone else is using AI to become more efficient, it certainly feels like you need to as well.
Nathan Smith & Charlie Hocking
Design Studio
@studio__kiln
studio-kiln.com
Our stance has sharpened more than it has shifted. As a studio, we’ve always leaned into new methods and technologies, looking for ways to fold them meaningfully into how we work, so our starting position on AI was curiosity. But we were never in the camp of wholesale enthusiasm or knee-jerk resistance.
What’s changed is our relationship to the tools. Early AI felt slightly detached from the creative process. You prompted it, it produced an outcome. It was easy to treat it as a surface-level magic button, aimed at generating something quickly. As tools have developed, AI is being embedded more deeply into creative processes and workflows. It’s less about producing a finished artefact in isolation and more about being a part within a wider process. That shift makes it feel less like a shortcut to an end and more like something that can introduce friction, not bypass it.
What’s sharpened for us is the distinction between two uses. One is efficiency and that’s where most of the conversation around AI tends to sit. The other is creative opportunity: using it to open up possibilities, find unexpected angles and collide things that couldn’t normally meet. That’s what genuinely excites us. The key is being clear about which mode we’re in and where it belongs in our process. When those get muddled, the work suffers.
Reaching for AI to shortcut as a means to an end, you tend to arrive somewhere statistically ordinary. When you use it to go somewhere you couldn’t have reached on your own, to break a process open, to not quite know where you’re going, that’s when you arrive somewhere worthwhile and unexpected.
The work we’re most proud of has always come from not quite knowing where we’re going to end up. AI doesn’t change that uncertainty. If anything, it makes the starting questions more important. Taste, intent, judgement are still human responsibilities. That’s what we care about.
Yes, we are currently using AI in our workflow but selectively and with a clear sense of where it earns its place. If we’re going to use AI for efficiency, the question we have to ask is whether this allows us to focus more creative energy where it counts, or whether this reduces or overwrites it.
For creativity, it can open up our means of exploration and expression. It’s good at volume, variation and linking things that wouldn’t naturally meet. For us the relationship has to be less about delegation and more about friction. We’ll push against it, use it against itself, let it generate noise that we then filter through our own judgment. That’s a different mode from using it as a shortcut to a finished thing, which we’ve found consistently produces something bland or senseless.
What we try to avoid is using the tool to do the thinking. The messy, uncomfortable part of a creative process isn’t an inconvenience to be automated around, it’s key. Take that out and you’re left with something faster but somehow lighter, untethered from any real point of view.
We use it where it makes the thinking richer. We don’t use it to make the thinking faster.
The clearest line for us is around authorship. We won’t use AI to emulate another artist’s style or produce work that’s built on someone else’s creative IP. That feels fundamental wrong creatively as much as ethically.
But the ethical question we think about more is a subtler one, it’s about what kind of studio we want to be and what we’re modelling for the people learning the craft.
There’s a version of AI adoption that quietly bypasses all the messy, frustrating, formative work that builds genuine creative judgment. If you remove that friction, especially for newer designers, you don’t just speed things up, you hollow something out. The ability to have taste, to know why something is right, isn’t always innate. It’s shaped by doing the hard yards. We’re not precious about tools, but we are protective of that process.
There’s definitely pressure whether that be from clients, from the industry conversation or from the fear of being left behind that seems baked into creative culture right now. But we’ve always found that the most interesting question isn’t ‘are you using it’ but ‘why’ and ‘how’. Because we’re heading into a world where almost anyone can generate almost anything the technical barrier to making something that looks impressive is essentially gone. This means the questions that don’t go away, and that maybe become more urgent, are the ones AI can’t answer: Why should this exist? What does it mean? What are we trying to say? Does it actually connect with someone, and why would it? Those are questions of culture and taste, not capability.
We’d rather be known for having a clear answer to those than for being early adopters of every new tool. Kiln exists because we believe in design that connects deeply — work that has rich cultural meaning, genuine feeling, something worth stopping for. In a world that keeps optimising for speed and ease, the things that resonate and surprise us come from somewhere harder to reach.
