Have your views on AI changed? Here's what our creative community had to say

The conversation around AI in the creative industries was never going to stay still. A year ago, the dominant mood was anxiety; a fear that tools trained on other people's work were coming for jobs, identities and the very idea of what it means to make something. Twelve months on, and the picture is considerably more complicated.

It's not that the anxiety has disappeared; it hasn't. But it's been joined by something else: a grudging recognition that this technology is now woven into the fabric of everyday creative life, not to mention life in general, whether people want it there or not.

That shift was palpable at OFFF Barcelona this year. As our report outlined, the conversations that mattered weren't so much about whether AI was coming as about how to respond to it now that it has.

Creative Boom has always aimed to reflect the full breadth of the community rather than advocate for any single position. In this light, ignoring the arrival of AI would be a bit like ignoring the home computer in the 1990s or pretending Photoshop wasn't reshaping the industry in the 2000s. Possible, but not particularly honest.

So we asked members of our private community, The Studio, directly: has your view shifted in the past year? Their answers suggest a community that's thinking harder about this than the loudest voices on either side might suggest.

"I'm not willing to become dispossessed for the sake of abundance"

For some, the past year has simply reinforced what they already believed, and there's no shame in that. Studio member Todd Walker, for instance, remains immovable. "Nothing about why it's a nonstarter has changed," he says. "Still built on stolen art. Still an ecological disaster. Still putting money in the pockets of people bent on destroying society. Still deskilling and wiping out people's livelihoods."

Brand voice copywriter Jonathan Wilcock puts his opposition in similarly uncompromising terms. "I'm now even more opposed to using it for my thinking, writing or editing," he says. He recalls how a line from a recent conference talk beautifully summed up his thoughts: "I am not willing to become dispossessed for the sake of abundance."

Illustrator and author Juliana Salcedo hasn't changed her mind either, although she has changed how she frames her opposition. "I no longer see it as an individual fight," she explains. "I now see it more as an adaptation all actors affected by this massive copyright theft, especially policymakers, need to tackle. Because these companies will funnel all profits from everyone else. They have in the past; have a look at what they did to the once powerful legacy media."

Trying it, finding it wanting

Not everyone, though, has completely stayed away from AI. Some have put the tools through their paces on real commercial work and come back with a clear-eyed assessment of where they currently fall short.

Sandrine Bascouert, a photo retoucher and creative artworker, recently used generative AI tools, including Gemini 3 and Flux Kontext within Photoshop, on a high-stakes portrait retouching job for a major brand. For her, the experience was instructive.

"I ended up eating all my credit— 4,000 credits for a set of 10 images—just because there were so many trials and errors, most of which I ended up doing manually in the end," she recalls. "The bits that were good enough had to be heavily retouched. I lost so much time waiting for the engine to render the prompt. Long story short: this stuff isn't production-ready, at least not for critical work."

She does distinguish, though, between generative AI and the embedded AI tools that have been part of Photoshop for years. "AI was there many moons ago in Photoshop," she notes, "with things like Content-aware Fill or Scale, Neural Filters, subject selection and so on. Those things are fantastic. But GenAI as we know it now? Not for final images."

Graphic designer Josh Welsh also isn't a fan of Adobe's current direction. "If Adobe weren't so predatory with it and pushing AI on us in every possible way, it'd be much more accepted," he argues. "The creatives want to learn and grow, but Adobe is going about it all wrong."

Ultimately, he believes AI will have a natural ceiling. "It can never replace our creative spark. It will never create unique work. It will copy-paste everything it is told to make until people get sick of it. In an age where AI is becoming more involved, I hope people start to want a human-made design, something unique and thought out, something crafted with care and patience."

Digital and branding designer Amy Lay offers a similar take. "I feel like designers are getting bombarded by information saying it's the best ever and it's better than you will ever be," she says. "But then when you use it for designing something specific, it becomes like a trainee that isn't really listening to what you're saying, and goes off and does its own thing."

Where it actually helps

For others, though, the experience has been more positive: perhaps because they're using AI for clearly bounded tasks rather than asking it to do the thinking for them.

Brand designer Gavin Brophy, for example, has found a practical equilibrium. "I use AI daily, mostly because I know my own limitations," he explains. "The mundane, task-heavy work, which I'm not great at, AI handles that end of things well, which means I can stay focused on the parts that actually matter. The visual generation side is interesting, but it's only ever a concept. You still have to direct it. The output is only as good as the thinking you put in."

Designer and art director Sarah Kobal counts herself as an enthusiast, though not an uncritical one. "Tech companies are constantly competing to be the best, which makes it expensive and confusing to keep up," she complains. "You often end up paying for multiple app subscriptions just to test tools, learn them properly, and understand where they fit, only for a newer, better tool to replace them soon after. It makes upskilling feel harder than it should be."

Sarah is also clear-eyed about the wider consequences. "As much as I enjoy AI, it's also scary seeing the downside of it," she says, "from fake videos just to increase content views, to having the ability to make nudes of children just from a normal photograph and circulating these around at schools. Basically, everything is growing and changing way too quickly."

A problem with definitions

Creative director Paul Leon is unequivocal about generative AI in a creative context, his studio having tested it and decided firmly against it, but that doesn't mean he's against AI overall. "Are we against machine learning to supplement a tool set, say within image editing, to cut something out accurately and speed up the drudgery?" he asks. "No. Is it good that machine learning can contribute to the speed and accuracy of cancer diagnosis? Abso-bloody-lutely."

He's deeply sceptical of the current investment narrative, though. "I feel there's a gap in what machine learning is realistically useful for and what the tech bros have been saying to increase investment," he argues. "Some people are getting very rich."

That worry is shared by Edmund Keefe, a lecturer in product design engineering at MMU. "The only concern I have about AI is that it's owned by a small number of people," he says. "It's another cash stream to a very small group of tech bros. The AI systems themselves are very good admin tools, some of which I use daily."

One of the problems here lies in definitions. As designer and artist Matthew Gallagher puts: "When I speak with folks about AI, many of them seem to actually be talking about automation. There can be a lot of overlap between the two, but they're different." He points to the CARES framework developed for ethical AI use in healthcare, and argues that had something similar been adopted from the start for gen AI, "we wouldn't have the intellectual property violations, nor the pending ecological disaster on our hands."

What emerges from all of this is not a clean conclusion, but perhaps something more honest. A community thinking carefully about a technology it didn't ask for, on a timeline it didn't choose. The conversation hasn't resolved, but it's certainly deepening. If you'd like to join us and share your own views, you'd be very welcome: find out more about The Studio by clicking the link below.