Interior design creator Cliff Tan has apologised to his 2.4 million YouTube subscribers for a paid advertisement for Dreamina, ByteDance’s AI creative tool. It is the second creator apology in a week, after Hank Green walked back his use of ChatGPT for research.
An interior design creator with 2.4 million YouTube subscribers has apologised for running an AI advertisement. Cliff Tan, who posts as Dear Modern, published a video on Monday walking the sponsorship back. “Yesterday I made a video on AI, and it disappointed many of you,” he said. “I’m really sorry about that.”
The ad was for Dreamina, an AI tool that turns written prompts into animated video. Tan uploaded his own hand-drawn sketches and had the software animate them into a floor plan.
He had tried to inoculate himself inside the ad itself, saying he does not “like AI” because “it makes you forget to use your brain.” It made no difference. The comments filled with objections, one of them collecting 1,700 likes: “No, Mr. Cliff. Please. Don’t sell yourself to AI.”
In a follow-up comment Tan said he had thought the software “would be genuinely useful to fellow designers.” He added that he did not want viewers “with the right sentiments, to be martyrs in a world that is increasingly leaving us behind.”
