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.”
Part of the anger was aimed at the advertiser. Dreamina is CapCut’s AI brand and belongs to ByteDance, and it runs on the Seedance models the company recently fitted with watermarking and IP guardrails before a global rollout.
This is the second apology of its kind in a week. Hank Green, who has more than 3.2 million subscribers, apologised on August 4 for leaning on ChatGPT to find papers and sources for his scripts, and afterwards published a personal AI policy ruling out letting a model write, edit or outline anything.
Neither creator generated content wholesale. Both were punished for the association, which is the part worth noting for anyone selling AI tools through influencers. It is a rougher market than the sponsorship rates suggest, on a platform already punishing human creators caught in its slop crackdown.
The profession Tan works in has been drifting the other way. The British Institute of Interior Design said last year that AI “has a growing presence in interior design,” with firm founder Stephen Dick telling it that “the possibilities are impressive” with text-to-image visualisation tools.
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