Cliff Tan’s apology to his audience came with a line in the sand: he regretted the sponsored AI post, not the idea that designers must confront AI’s growing role.

The London-based creator, whose Dear Modern channels reach millions of followers, posted a paid promotion on Monday for Dreamina, ByteDance’s AI platform. In the video, he fed hand-drawn sketches into the software to create an animated floor plan — a use he framed as speeding up rendering rather than outsourcing creative judgment.¹

The distinction did little to calm fans. Commenters accused Tan of embracing “AI slop” and selling out, while another plea — “No, Mr. Cliff. Please. Don’t sell yourself to AI” — drew 1,800 likes. Tan said he anticipated criticism, but not the “tsunami” of disappointment from viewers who felt he had changed.¹

He apologized for the ad but left it online. Tan said Dreamina had initially wanted a more enthusiastic pitch, and that he pushed for a version that included his own reservations. His position is not that AI should replace designers, but that it should be used selectively: “You can use it, but only in the right way.”¹

That puts him at odds with followers who see any promotion as a betrayal, while sharing at least one concern with them: the technology can be misused. Tan calls himself “really, really analog” and says AI is unlikely to shape how he makes his videos. Yet he argues that ignoring it is no answer. “You can’t just avoid it forever,” he said. “The industry is using it. You need to embrace it if you don’t want to be out of a job.”¹

For Tan, the backlash has exposed a harder question than one sponsored post: whether authenticity online can survive a technology that creators and audiences increasingly distrust.