Cliff Tan attends the 29th Annual Webby Awards at Cipriani Wall Street on May 12, 2025 in New York City.
Rob Kim/Getty Images The Webby Awards
YouTube star Cliff Tan apologized for promoting AI, but he doesn't regret it.Tan, who came under intense backlash from fans after he posted a paid promotion for an AI company on Monday, told Business Insider that, like it or not, interior designers need to learn to use AI if they want to secure future work."You can't just avoid it forever," Tan said. "The industry is using it. You need to embrace it if you don't want to be out of a job."Tan is based in London and runs a popular interior design YouTube channel called "Dear Modern" that has 2.4 million subscribers. He also runs a corresponding TikTok account with 3.6 million followers.Though Tan apologized for the paid ad — which promoted Dreamina, a Chinese AI company owned by TikTok creator ByteDance — he didn't take it down from his channel. He told Business Insider that as an influencer, he wouldn't feel right ignoring AI's potential uses in architecture and interior design."I thought it was a bit irresponsible for me to just sweep AI under the carpet," he said.In the ad, Tan uploads hand-drawn sketches to Dreamina and then uses the platform to transform them into an animated floor plan.Tan said he took great pains to show his audience he wasn't blindly using the program to generate ideas, but rather to quicken what would otherwise be a lengthy process of rendering an animation.The backlash came anyway.
