Ariel Kotzer on AI and art

While visiting HSE ART AND DESIGN SCHOOL in Saint Petersburg, designer Ariel Kotzer gave a lecture and sat down for an interview, sharing his insights on AI’s role in art and design—its potential, limitations, and creative impact. 

Kotzer’s career spans Jerusalem, São Paulo, NYC, and Tel Aviv. With a background in visual communication and architecture, he has created award-winning work for agencies like Pentagram and TBWA. Now, he brings his distinct vision to AI art, exploring its possibilities beyond traditional prompting. His work has been featured at Jerusalem Design Week, The AI Film Academy Awards, Artefact AI Film Festival, and Oculus Gallery NYC.

Actually, I haven't seen any fully AI-generated design yet, people are just now starting to use it. I actually implemented AI in some of my recent projects, to produce images and illustrations for a brand styleguide. I was extremely happy with the results, as was the client.

In the talk I gave I mentioned Paula Scher, one of the leading partners of Pentagram, and her recent view on using AI. She is very well-known and probably one of the most respected designers in the world today, and yes, she decided to use AI in a branding project. But what’s more important is the way that she used it. First of all she hired an illustrator, who created the style they wanted for the project. Only then came the AI, which was  “fed” the illustrator’s work and their artistic style and it was used to create all the different elements. And I agree with what she said: AI is just a tool. And like any tool you can use it, in a good way or a bad way.

To make it clearer, I'll give you an example. When I was in school about 30 years ago, desktop computers just started coming in, and so using them for design was a completely new thing. It just didn’t exist before, everything was done by hand. Obviously, today, both students and professionals use computers to design, all the Adobe programs and others. No one nowadays thinks of it as a problem, it’s just a tool that allows you to be creative. My attitude towards AI is exactly the same: it’s a new tool.

I don’t think it does. Overall I see the tendency of going back to traditional tools, for example illustration is having a big comeback even though for years it kind of disappeared. When I started my academic education, there was no illustration at all. People were in love with the computer. But today people are going back to doing more and more things by hand. Now there is a certain need for human expression that no machine can replicate or replace. 

That reminds me of something. When I was starting out in advertising, I began my career in New York. After a couple of years, I moved back to Israel and worked in Jerusalem. It turned out to be two very different approaches. In New York, when we had an idea, we did a photoshoot to bring it to life — we hired a photographer, went on set, and produced the image. In Israel, the budgets were usually much smaller, so they didn’t do that. Instead, they used stock photography. That was the first time I ever saw stock photos used in advertising. At the first place I worked — a very small ad agency — they even had a library of old magazines. They’d flip through them, find an image they liked, tear it out, and use it. For me, it was shocking that instead of starting with an idea and creating an image to match it, they would look for ideas in images that already existed.

When we talk about AI mimicking someone’s style, I can think of several situations — especially from the early days of generative AI art — that caused a big uproar in the illustrator community. For example, there’s Tomer Hanuka, a well-known Israeli comic artist with an incredible and highly distinctive style. One day, he discovered a Facebook page called something like Tomer Hanuka Aliens — filled with art made in his style using AI, which someone was not only generating, but also selling. And he’s a living, working illustrator. So I can absolutely understand why someone like that would feel threatened by AI.

I have a personal rule — or maybe more of a principle: I don’t do anything that mimics another artist’s work, especially if they’re still alive. To me, it just doesn’t feel right. But that doesn’t mean others won’t do it. Industries like advertising, for example, often have no problem with that kind of thing.

But even before AI, there were always people pushing the boundaries and doing original, interesting work — and others who were just copying or repeating what had already been done. I don’t think that has anything to do with AI, and I don’t think AI is going to change it for better or worse. There will always be mimickers, and there will always be trailblazers.

One of the reasons I started working with AI was because most of what I saw being created with it was complete crap. It often came from this attitude that you can just let the tool do everything for you — without bringing anything of your own: no experience, no background, nothing new.

But ideas don’t come from nowhere. I have years of experience and a whole world of interests and curiosities. My art is shaped by everything I’ve accumulated over the years — through living, working, and even before that. My father was a comic strip collector; he loved film and books. That’s where my love for art began. I know Kandinsky, I know Malevich, I know Van Gogh, and I love them — they’re all part of me.

So when I bring an idea to AI, that idea carries my inner world. Even the words you type into a prompt either contain something or they don’t. For example, I made a black-and-white film using AI, and the decision to make it specifically black-and-white — the style, the lighting — that all comes from within me. And so does the final result.

In the way I work with AI, I like to see what it comes up with. I don’t give it too much direction — just a little. But the choice I make afterwards, choosing a certain direction from the results, that’s my decision. It’s an aesthetic and conceptual choice — and both come from my inner world.

No, I don’t think it’s cheating, and I don’t have a problem with it. But I do believe that working with AI is a fundamentally different process from creating art through traditional methods.

Like I said before, the process of working with generative AI is more about art directing and curating than creating in the classical sense. I’m working with something else that’s generating the visuals. I’m the one directing, choosing, making small changes, and deciding which way to go.

There are positives to this. It’s fast, flexible, and open to all kinds of possibilities. That’s what fascinates me and keeps me engaged — I get results that surprise me, things I wouldn’t have created on my own or even thought of. It takes me to places I might not otherwise go.

I recently heard an interview with Brian Eno, the legendary musician. He talked about how, when he started making music, he wasn’t formally trained. But the emergence of new electronic tools allowed him to skip the traditional learning curve and just start experimenting. And from that experimentation came something new and unique. He said he had no problem with that — and neither do I. Like he pointed out, for someone with ideas but less ability to execute them in the conventional way, tools like these are fantastic. They give people a way to realize their vision on their own terms.

These days, I’m making two kinds of art at the same time. I’m creating with AI, especially when it comes to animation, for example. It allows me to explore new methods and workflows, and right now, that’s a big part of what I’m experimenting with.

But at the same time, I come from a world of working with my hands. So I also continue to do traditional art. I’m currently working on a project in Jerusalem using clay. The simple reason I started it was that I needed to do something that didn’t involve a screen or a keyboard. And it’s not just about AI, it’s about computers in general. I grew up with pencils, brushes, paint, and paper. Even drawing on an iPad isn’t the same. It’s plastic touching glass, not the feeling of a real brush on paper.

I still need that kind of tactile, physical process in my life. So I work in both mediums. And I only decide which one to use after I’ve come up with the idea, depending on what the concept needs, or sometimes just based on what I feel like doing.

Honestly, I don't know. It's progressing very quickly. One of the things about working with AI tools is that you have to always be on your toes. I've been working with AI for a while, it's going to be 3 years this year, and every couple of months or even weeks, something new comes out.

For example in MidJourney, beyond the fact that you can put in words and get back images, now they have a new function called Moodboard. With it you create a style that you can reuse and AI knows how to maintain consistency throughout the whole project. I use it for my current animated movie with a specific black and white and kind of Eastern European style. A great function, but in order to understand how to use it, you need to learn it, just like anything else. And these new functions come very quickly, so you constantly have to learn. It's like surfing, you have to be on top of the wave all the time. It's challenging and it's fun at the same time. 

If you ask where AI is going, I think it’s becoming more widespread. Like ChatGPT, just about a year ago people were skeptical about it or scared of using it. Now more and more people are using it on a daily basis. Because it’s a good and easy tool that works well. Without us even noticing, it’s already become a part of our lives.

I think it’s very possible in some areas. For example, advertising, where stock photography was already widely used, will probably turn to AI. The big stock image companies are well aware of this and are already integrating AI-generated content into their platforms.

I recently had a job where I needed an image of a dog holding a bone. Traditionally, that would mean hiring a photographer, spending a couple of days selecting them, finding and choosing the dog, hiring a dog trainer… the whole process could take a week and a half and cost a lot of money. With AI, I was able to generate a solid image in literally minutes — and at almost no cost, since I already have a subscription. That’s absolutely going to change the financial side of these kinds of jobs.

But does that mean photographers will be out of work? No, I don’t think so. I believe we’ll see a kind of market redistribution. Brands will still turn to professional photographers for high-end, more specific work, especially when they’re looking for a unique visual style or strong creative input. AI will affect how much work goes to photographers, but it won’t replace them.

What it will replace, I think, is stock photography. Stock photography is dead. And honestly, thank God.

I don’t have a lot of experience in marketing my art. In fact, I only recently sold my first pieces and those were AI-generated works. They were listed on a platform called Sedition, which functions like an online gallery. I met their team when I was screening one of my films in Portugal last year. We connected, and later they invited me to put together a collection for the site.

Sedition helps artists showcase their work and has a built-in community of collectors who subscribe to updates. So when new work is uploaded, collectors are the first to see it. As an artist, you can decide which works to share, how many editions of each piece to offer, and how to price them. I created a collection of four works, with 15 editions each. Buyers can display them in their homes, offices, or public spaces. Apparently, there's a real market for that. The platform also promotes your work on their social media and through their collector network, which helps with visibility and sales.

It’s a very immediate process compared to traditional galleries. In a physical space, there’s only room for a limited number of works, and people have to be physically present to see them. Online, it’s accessible to anyone, anywhere.

That said, I’m still very interested in showing my work offline. I’ve been visiting galleries, including here in St. Petersburg, because I want my art to exist in the real world, too. For that, it can’t just be a digital file on a screen; it has to become a physical piece.

When I work with AI, I’m always thinking beyond the screen. How can I translate this digital image into a physical artwork? Just yesterday, I visited the Marina Gisich Gallery. She showed me a beautiful piece — unfortunately I don’t remember the artist’s name — but it really stuck with me. He created an image with AI, then used a robot to carve it into wood. After that, he projected the original image back onto the wooden surface. It created this fascinating fusion of digital and physical—something truly unique.

That’s the direction I’m interested in: continuing to show my work online and on platforms where collectors can engage with it digitally, but also finding ways to bring it into the physical world in a meaningful and original way.

I'd like to put my artworks in galleries, but overall they prefer physical objects, not something on a screen. At the end of the day, galleries need to sell something to their clients, and the buyers need to be able to take the piece of art and put it in their homes. I’m still figuring out how I could interpret my art, for example, as a sculpture.

There is a project that I'm working on now and I would like to develop it physical form. It’s a series called Goddesses, inspired by Asian metaphysical beings. Visually, the works look like they’re made of glass — transparent, layered, and delicate.

Just last week, I found out that a friend of mine in Israel has access to a 3D printer at her parents’ house. It’s not just any printer, it can print with all kinds of materials: clay, glass, metal, you name it. I have no idea why her dad has such a machine, but it’s incredible. Now I’m thinking about how I could use it to bring this series, which I started with AI, into the physical world.

The figures in the images are already quite three-dimensional. They contain multiple layers: you can see a woman, a skeleton, clothes, details around her — all within the same form. Right now, they exist only as digital images, but I would love to turn them into physical objects. The next step is figuring out how to model them for 3D printing.

In the end, it all comes back to my fascination with the intersection of technology and art. This project is exactly that, starting with generative AI and moving toward something tangible.

I'm a very conceptual person, but also very intuitive in how I bring those concepts together. And I only trust myself to do that.

I actually tried using AI for it. When I was working on the animated film I'm currently developing, I started out using ChatGPT and similar tools to help write the script. I wanted it to be funny and engaging, but I just wasn’t happy with the results. And more generally, whenever I’ve tried to use AI to generate new ideas or even just to have a creative conversation, it’s been disappointing.

So no, I don’t trust AI to come up with real concepts. Good concepts. That takes something, a spark, that the AI we have now just doesn't have. But who knows where it’s going.