Date: June 3, 2025
Session: Track 1 - Augmented Creatives
Moderator: Marc Göhring

The creative industries face a fundamental transformation as artificial intelligence tools reshape traditional workflows and challenge established notions of authorship. At Panoramai's panel on creative AI applications, four Swiss practitioners shared candid insights into how they're adapting their practices, revealing both the promise and tensions inherent in this technological shift.

Collage Artistry Meets Generative Tools

Chantal Caduff, whose vibrant collage work spans fashion and lifestyle industries, approaches AI as a natural extension of her traditional practice. She explains that collage fundamentally involves « taking random bits and bobs you find and putting them together in something new », making AI-generated elements feel like another material in her creative toolkit.

Caduff's commercial work reveals the practical constraints many creatives face. While her personal projects freely incorporate magazine imagery, commercial clients require copyright-cleared materials. « For commercial work that is often not possible due to copyright. So I need to use stock images, stock libraries, which is fine. It just kind of limits the creative process », she notes. AI has become a solution to this limitation, allowing her to generate specific elements—from designer furniture to models with particular characteristics—that traditional stock photography cannot provide.

Her approach emphasizes AI's capacity for creative surprise: « You can say, like, generate some blue goo that looks like paint but is also used in a fashion magazine in the same way René Magritte would use it. And then suddenly it gives you something unexpected that you would have never, ever, ever been able to just come up on the spot. »

Typography and Visual Identity in the AI Era

Demian Conrad, running design studio Automatico, brings a strategic perspective shaped by his involvement with Alliance Graphic International (AGI), the world's oldest association for graphic designers. His recent project challenged the global design elite to confront AI's implications for their profession—a timely exercise given that the World Economic Forum now ranks graphic design 13th among jobs potentially disrupted by automation.

Conrad organized an exhibition where ten AGI members created posters using AI tools, revealing diverse approaches to the technology. The resulting works demonstrated both AI's creative potential and its current limitations. He highlights one poster that « from far looks like technical, interesting technique poster. And then more you go close and then you see that they're all fetuses and they are all like little monsters », showcasing how designers can embed conceptual depth within AI-generated imagery.

The project also explored training custom models on historical poster collections, though this raised immediate copyright concerns within the design community. « I had one of the best illustrator who used to work for the New Yorker who came to me and said, oh, Damian, what the hell are you doing? You cannot train poster that belongs to someone », Conrad recalls, highlighting the legal and ethical complexities facing the creative sector.

Sustainable AI Practice and Environmental Consciousness

Pascal Wicht, who maintains a hybrid profile spanning security ink design for banknotes and speculative design education, represents perhaps the most conflicted relationship with AI among the panelists. His work demonstrates AI's potential for conceptual exploration while grappling seriously with its environmental and social implications.

Wicht's creative process involves extensive pre-visualization to minimize AI usage. « I recently developed a campaign for a luxury brand. Four different creative tracks and I only did four hours of midjourney so it's one hour per track because I know exactly what I want », he explains, using ChatGPT to iterate on prompts efficiently.

His environmental concerns extend beyond carbon footprint to fundamental questions about technological sovereignty. Wicht is experimenting with running AI models on his own solar infrastructure, seeking independence from corporate AI services despite current quality limitations. He contemplates even more dramatic action: « I told them maybe last week I'm thinking about opting out. I want to close my midjourney account. »

The photographer-turned-speculative designer draws parallels to 19th-century debates about photography's artistic legitimacy, referencing Baudelaire's skeptical view that photographers would always remain « technical guys » unless they ventured into art's « sensible world ». For Wicht, the challenge lies in bringing genuine observation and sensibility to AI-generated work: « A good artist knows how to observe the world and brings his own or her own sensibility into the work. So if you don't take the time to observe the world and you don't work on your sensibility, it doesn't matter how much AI you have. Your images will look synthetic, empty, and they won't perform. »

Brand Design and AI Realism

Didier Quarroz positions himself as an « AI Realist », seeking practical applications that solve genuine client problems rather than pursuing AI for its own sake. His 15 years of brand design experience in Switzerland and China inform a pragmatic approach that weighs AI's capabilities against real-world constraints.

Quarroz's work with University Hospital Basel illustrates the nuanced decisions organizations face. While AI-generated people were initially rejected for being inauthentic in healthcare communication, the team recognized potential applications for sensitive medical conditions where patient privacy concerns might make AI preferable to photography.

His systematic approach focuses on creating brand-specific imagery that traditional stock photography cannot deliver. « Sometimes it's perhaps a Swedish woman, sometimes it's a Kenyan woman, sometimes a Korean woman. So AI helps me a lot to really create images that focus on a specific kind of target group », he explains. This precision in demographic targeting and brand alignment has enabled him to create imagery that often appears « more lifelike than actual stock imagery » through careful control of mood, clothing, and context.

Evolving Creative Expertise and Market Dynamics

The panel's discussion of expertise revealed fundamental questions about creativity's future. Caduff emphasizes that technical execution has never been the core of creative value: « You can have stick figures and launch a national mobiliar campaign that is super successful. And you keep doing stick figures for years and years. Or you can be the perfect painter that draws lifelike things. In the end, it doesn't matter how good of a drawer or how good your design is—your idea, your concepts, how you communicate with your audience. »

Conrad outlines three potential scenarios for the creative industry's evolution: augmented creatives who integrate AI tools for enhanced productivity; full authorship practitioners who maintain entirely human-made work as a premium offering; and automated systems that generate content without human intervention based on real-time data inputs.

The economic pressures underlying these shifts are stark. Conrad notes that poster design fees have plummeted from 15,000 Swiss francs in the 1980s to as low as 1,000 francs today—a trend AI may accelerate further while potentially enabling new forms of responsive, data-driven creative content.

Copyright, Scale, and Cultural Questions

Audience questions about copyright drew parallels to music sampling's evolution, with particular attention to controversies like OpenAI's apparent training on Studio Ghibli's distinctive style. The panelists acknowledged the complexity of policing artistic influence while recognizing AI's unprecedented scale as a differentiating factor.

Caduff noted that style appropriation has long existed in traditional art markets, citing Miami artists whose work closely resembles established masters. However, Pascal countered that « cultures are influenced by each other » naturally, while AI represents « large scale financial operations that automate culture, that capture it, that digitize it and then market it. » This distinction between organic cultural exchange and algorithmic commercialization emerged as a key concern.

Future Scenarios: Utopia and Dystopia

The panel concluded with stark assessments of AI's potential trajectories. Wicht painted the current moment as already dystopian from a global perspective: « We are in the shitty scenario. The next COP is in Brazil and they're already cutting trees to create the highway and the hotels for the delegation. » His vision of positive change involves fundamental reconsideration of technological consumption patterns and global equity, advocating for selective AI adoption—supporting medical and scientific applications while questioning ubiquitous smart device proliferation.

This perspective highlighted the geographic inequality of AI's impacts, with benefits concentrated in wealthy regions while environmental and economic costs are distributed globally. As Wicht emphasized, « It's not evenly distributed » —a reminder that AI's creative applications exist within larger systems of resource extraction and climate change.

The panel ultimately revealed an industry in transition, where established professionals are actively experimenting with AI tools while grappling with fundamental questions about authenticity, sustainability, and the future of human creativity. Their diverse approaches—from enthusiastic adoption to skeptical experimentation—suggest that AI's integration into creative practice will be neither uniform nor predetermined, but rather shaped by individual values, client needs, and broader societal choices about technology's role in culture.