LUtopai Studios' Creative Director explains how GenAI, cinema, and advertising are changing imagery, ethics, and audiovisual production.

For decades, creative direction has had an almost physical relationship with the constraints of production: budget, crew, location, post-production time, client mediations, and compromises with reality. The arrival of thegenerative artificial intelligence It hasn't eliminated this profession, but it has shifted its focus. The question is no longer simply how to realize an idea, but which images, stories, and imaginations are truly worth bringing into the world when generating them has become so much easier.

It is within this transformation that moves Laia Grassi, creative director, artist and communication professional with over twenty years of experience between dealer, artistic direction, branding, cinema, and new technologies. His work spans perhaps the most delicate transition in the contemporary creative industry: the one in which AI ceases to be perceived as a simple operational accelerator and becomes an active presence in the processes of ideation, visual development, prototyping, and narrative production.

The professional profile of Laia Grassi tells this story well. After a long experience in traditional advertising, Grassi has concentrated an increasing part of his activity on GenAI applied to communication, training creative teams, consulting for international brands and audiovisual experimentation. Today, as Creative Director of Utopai Studios, works on building cinematic stories generated and directed with the support of artificial intelligence.

His perspective is interesting because it avoids two frequent shortcuts in the AI ​​debate: the vague fear of substitution and the superficial enthusiasm for efficiency. For Grassi, the crucial point is not whether the machine is creative or not, but rather understanding what humans do when the machine produces with skill, speed, and abundance. In a market where images, videos, and texts can be generated by anyone, the difference no longer lies in mere technical refinement, but in the presence of a recognizable vision.

One of the strongest passages of the interview concerns the new role of the creative director. If in the past the job also consisted of guiding the execution and defending the idea through complex production constraints, today the rarest skill becomes the judgment: choosing, discarding, forcing the model, breaking the default, recognizing when an output is merely correct and when it actually contains an authorial trace. Technology multiplies the possibilities, but makes the responsibility of selection more evident.

The issue also concerns advertising. GenAI allows the production of variable, personalized, and potentially infinite imagery at a speed the industry has never seen before. Precisely for this reason, according to Grassi, the responsibilities of agencies, brands, and creative directors are growing: transparency in synthetic content, attention to bias, respect for rights, caution in the emotional use of data, and the ability to avoid turning personalization into manipulation.

In the documentary “Hollywood the hizo”Grassi also addresses how cinema and popular culture have for decades constructed our fear of intelligent machines. Real AI thus enters a territory already occupied by powerful narratives: rebellious robots, out-of-control systems, seductive or destructive artificial entities. Therefore, a more mature conversation about artificial intelligence cannot be limited to technology. It must also interrogate the stories through which we have learned to imagine it.

The reference to theAndorra adds a further element. For Grassi, working from a small country, far from Europe's major creative hubs, isn't a limitation, but a prerequisite for the method: less noise, greater intentionality in collaborations, leaner structures, remote work, and a useful distance from the recurring conversations of the industry. If AI has reduced the burden of geography, the quality of creative direction becomes even more crucial.

What emerges is the portrait of a professional who views generative artificial intelligence not as a production shortcut, but as a cultural testbed. The issue isn't producing more, faster, and with fewer resources. It's understanding what aesthetics will emerge, what professions will change, what responsibilities will become inevitable, and what space will be left for the human voice when technical expertise is available almost everywhere.

You work at the intersection of advertising, art, film, and generative AI. In practical terms, how has the role of the creative director changed now that AI is no longer just a supporting tool, but part of the ideation, visual development, and production process?

“Everything has changed, and at the same time, the only thing that really mattered has remained the same. I spent more than twenty years in traditional advertising, where the creative director was, first and foremost, the bottleneck of execution. You had an idea on Monday and spent the rest of the week negotiating with reality: budget, schedule, post-production, weather. Today, as Creative Director of Utopai Studios, I'm building Hollywood films from a desk in Andorra. Ten years ago, a statement like that would have sounded like science fiction. What has changed is the distance between thinking and seeing. Before, you imagined a scene and had to convince twenty people, sign three contracts, and wait two months to see it. Now you imagine a scene and can almost touch it that same afternoon. This changes the muscle you train. I no longer train the muscle of patience. I train the muscle of judgment. But the deeper change is more subtle. The creative director used to be the person in the room who knew the most about the craft. Today, the model knows more about the craft than I do. He's seen every film. He's read every script. So my role It levels up. I no longer compete with the instrument. I direct it. What hasn't changed, and what no model ever will, is the question every creative director must answer twenty times a day: of all the things that could exist, which deserve to exist? That decision is still ours. And it's more precious than ever, precisely because everything else has become so easy..

Generative AI is often described in public debate as a threat to human creativity. In your opinion, where is the right line between automating creative processes and truly expanding the human imagination?

“The line is drawn with intention. There's no other place to draw it. Automation means asking the machine to do what you already know how to do, only at a lower cost. Expansion means asking the machine to do what you couldn't do on your own, in a lifetime, on any budget. Same tool, two completely different conversations. In my work at Utopai, building cinematic stories with AI, I see this every day. You can use these models to imitate what Hollywood has been doing for fifty years, only faster. That's automation, and frankly, it bores me. Or you can use them to access visual territories that classic cinema could never have afforded: impossible worlds, dreamlike logic, characters who breathe and violate the laws of physics in the same frame. That's expansion. That's why I joined this studio. The threat to human creativity has never been AI. The threat is the comfort of default. The model gives you something acceptable on the first try, and most people stop there. The acceptable It's the new mediocrity. It looks good, it works, and it says nothing. If your imagination has shrunk with the arrival of AI, the problem isn't the tool. The problem is that you were using your craft to mask the fact that, deep down, you stopped imagining a long time ago. AI is exposing this, brutally and magnificently, throughout our industry..

In a market where anyone can generate images, videos, and text, what still distinguishes truly creative work from technically polished output?

We've entered an age of infinite expertise. The lighting is right. The composition works. The typography is clean. The narrative voice is warm. Everything passes the technical test. And almost nothing sticks with you. What distinguishes true creative work, today as it did a hundred years ago, is the unmistakable trace of a specific human mind. Someone who saw the world in a particular way and refused to translate it into something more universal. The tool is irrelevant. Pencil, Photoshop, Gemini, Veo, Runway. The soul is not in the tool. The soul is in the choice. When I direct a project, the first hundred generations almost always appear beautiful and mean nothing. The work begins at generation one hundred and one, when I start fighting the model, asking it for things it doesn't want to give me, breaking its defaults, searching for the version that makes the team uncomfortable. The version that a calmer and more reasonable creative director would never approve. That version is usually the one that arrives at its destination. The finishing touch was the ceiling. Now the finishing touch is the floor. The new ceiling. It's belief. The work that survives is the one someone believed in enough to defend, even when it would have been easier to choose the safe option..

Many companies are approaching GenAI with the goal of reducing time and costs. From your perspective, when does the use of artificial intelligence become a true driver of strategic innovation for a brand?

“The day a brand stops asking how much money AI will save it and starts asking what AI will allow it to attempt that was impossible yesterday. Saving time is an accounting question. Strategic innovation is a vision question. They tend to be answered by very different people, in very different rooms. I've coached management teams on several continents, and the pattern is almost always the same. Companies that use AI simply to do the same thing faster end up exactly where they started, only with slimmer margins and the same irrelevance. Companies that use AI to do things they weren't allowed to do before are the ones I see changing categories. AI becomes strategic when it expands what a brand is willing to attempt. When a regional studio can produce work on a global scale without leaving its hometown. When a smaller team can hyper-customize without losing its craft. When a century-old brand can prototype its next chapter in an afternoon instead of a fiscal year. My sincere advice, in every consulting engagement, is This: If AI is simply reducing your costs, you're using it as a calculator. If AI allows you to take risks you previously refused, you're using it as leverage. Efficiency is the ticket. Imagination is the real prize..

Advertising has always worked on constructing imagery. With GenAI, however, those imageries can be produced, varied, and personalized at unprecedented speed. What new responsibilities do agencies, brands, and creative directors have today?

We've been producing dreams for a century. Now we can do it every second. It's not a tool upgrade, it's a moral upgrade, and I don't think our industry has truly internalized this yet. The first responsibility is transparency. People deserve to know when an emotion has been engineered with AI. Not because synthetic emotion is less valid, but because trust is the only currency that doesn't devalue. The second is control. Just because we can generate a thousand variations of personalized advertising based on your fears, your loneliness, your weaknesses, doesn't mean we should. There's a clear difference between talking to someone and exploiting them. AI makes that line easier to cross and harder to see. The third is representation. Models inherit our biases on an industrial scale. Every time we generate without question, we reinforce a worldview largely written by people who don't resemble the rest of the planet. As a creative director, I have to be obsessive about this. It's not political correctness, it's professional rigor. And the fourth, Perhaps the most uncomfortable: we have a responsibility to the imagination of the next generation. If children grow up surrounded by endlessly generated content, we must offer them works that still surprise. That still seem handmade, even when they aren't. That still earn a place in their memory. Imaginaries shape behavior. We're not making advertisements or films. We're shaping what people consider normal, possible, beautiful. This deserves more humility than the industry has practiced so far..

In the documentary "Hollywood lo hizo," fear of artificial intelligence emerges as a cultural issue, often shaped by fiction and cinema. How can we build a more mature narrative about AI without falling into either dystopia or uncritical enthusiasm?

Hollywood has spent nearly a century training us to fear the machine. Every time AI appears on screen, it rebels, kills us, or seduces us into oblivion. So when real AI arrived, our nervous systems already had the script ready. We weren't reacting to technology. We were reacting to a story we'd watched since we were children. Mature storytelling begins by acknowledging this. Fear is real, but its source is imaginary. It's a strange thing to untangle, and that's exactly the work that needs to be done. Now, working as Creative Director at Utopai Studios, building cinema from within this revolution, I see the irony every day. The same medium that taught us to fear AI is now being rebuilt by AI. And that offers us a unique opportunity: we can write new stories. Stories in which AI isn't a villain or a god, but a collaborator. Complicated, at times. But human enough in its consequences to deserve more honest storytelling. I don't even care about the hype. Unconditional. Uncritical supporters are as exhausting as catastrophists. Both avoid nuance, which is the hardest place to live and the only place where useful thought arises. An adult conversation about AI is less like a keynote and more like a long dinner. Fewer certainties, more questions. Fewer predictions, more presence. This is what I tried to do with the documentary, what I'm trying to do with the book, and what I try to do every day in the films we're making. We need fewer prophets and more witnesses..

Generative AI is also transforming the communications supply chain: concept development, storyboards, moodboards, post-production, sound design, and prototyping. What skills will become essential for creative professionals in the coming years?

I would group them into four levels, in order of difficulty. The first, the easy one: familiarity with the tools. Not mastery of a single platform, because they all change every three months. A real familiarity with the logic of generative systems. Knowing how to talk to a model is becoming as fundamental as knowing how to talk to a designer or a cinematographer. The second, much rarer: editorial judgment. The ability to choose. When you can generate infinite options, the bottleneck shifts from production to selection. The professionals who will grow will be those capable of looking at a hundred outputs and immediately understanding which one is alive. This is taste. And taste is built slowly, by reading a lot, watching a lot, and making many mistakes. The third: narrative thinking. AI gives you fragments. Beautiful, refined, often disconnected fragments. The work of stitching them together into a story that truly means something is, ironically, more human than ever. People capable of thinking in narrative arcs, not just assets, will be irreplaceable. This is exactly what we work on at Utopai: how to maintain narrative coherence when the units Production processes have become almost atomic. And the fourth, which no one puts on a slide because it seems soft, but is the one that decides careers: emotional intelligence. The ability to know what a piece should make people feel, not just how it should look. AI generates feelings like a calculator generates numbers, quickly and accurately. But it doesn't know which feeling matters in this room, with this audience, in this cultural moment. That decision is still ours. Tools change. Craft evolves. Judgment, storytelling, and feeling are what remain..

The relationship between artificial intelligence and advertising also raises ethical questions related to models, datasets, rights, and the recognizability of synthetic content. What criteria do you use to decide whether a technology is truly suitable for use in a professional project?

I have a short checklist I apply before introducing any tool into a paid project. It's not glamorous, but it's saved me more than once. Where does the training data come from? If the company behind the model can't clearly answer, the conversation ends. I won't build a campaign, or worse yet, a movie, on top of something that could become a lawsuit or silently endorse an exploitative supply chain. Who owns the output? In clear, written language, not buried in a terms of service page that changes every quarter. If the brand can't use the work without legal risk, the work isn't truly finished, no matter how beautiful it may seem. Can the work be identified as synthetic when necessary? Some contexts require disclosure. News, public figures, sensitive topics, anything involving real human likenesses. If a tool makes that disclosure technically difficult, it's a red flag. Does the tool reinforce biases I wouldn't accept from a human collaborator? I test it directly. I ask the model to generate executives, scientists, caregivers, criminals. If the results reproduce the same old clichés, the tool It requires oversight or it doesn't enter the project at scale. And finally, the most personal filter: would I be comfortable explaining this choice to a journalist on a bad day? If the answer is no, the technology isn't ready for that project, no matter how impressive the demo. Ethics in this field isn't a department. It's a daily practice. And it slows you down, which is exactly the point. Anything moving that fast deserves some restraint..

You've worked from Andorra, a small country with an international outlook and a very different scale from Europe's major creative hubs. How can operating from such a specific territorial context be an advantage for experimenting with new agency models, branding strategies, and AI applied to communications?

There's a persistent myth in our industry: that to do important work, you have to be in Madrid, London, or New York. I've lived in some of those cities. I chose Andorra on purpose. Small places force you to be intentional. There's no ecosystem of agencies to lean on, no built-in network of suppliers, no Friday happy hours where you accidentally meet the right person. Every collaboration must be planned. It seems like a limitation. In reality, it's a discipline. Andorra also gives me something that big hubs can't: distance. Distance from the noise, from trends, from the same five conversations recycled at every conference. When you live in the mountains, you read more, think more, and notice when the industry is repeating itself. And then there's the practical level, which is the most exciting. AI has dissolved geography. From my desk in Andorra la Vella, I co-direct films with Utopai for Hollywood. I collaborate with Google on the Gemini team. I build teams executives in Bogotá. I consult for brands across Europe. I'm about to launch a book in Madrid. None of this would have been imaginable from this zip code ten years ago. Today, the zip code on my invoice is irrelevant. The quality of my thinking is everything. Working from a small territory also teaches you to build leaner, more remote, more digitally native models. Exactly the kind of models the rest of the industry will need within five years. Andorra isn't behind. In a strange way, it's ahead. And, honestly, walking my dog ​​in the mountains between meetings does more for my creative practice than any open space ever did..

Looking ahead to the next five years, do you think generative AI will primarily lead to a standardization of visual language, or to the emergence of new aesthetics, new professions, and new creative business models?

Both. At the same time. And it's precisely this contradiction that makes the moment so interesting. In the short term, yes, we're experiencing a wave of standardization. Same models, same prompts, same aesthetics. Everything is starting to resemble the same dreamy, slightly plastic, vaguely cinematic image. I see it every day. We're living in the Helvetica moment of generative AI, where a default takes over the world and we confuse ubiquity with quality. But standardization always generates its own counterculture. Always. The more uniform the mainstream becomes, the more valuable rebellion grows. In five years, the most expensive thing in advertising and film will be work that clearly wasn't created by anyone else. Craftsmanship will become a luxury. Imperfection will become a signature. A distinct authorial voice will have the price of a fine wine. New aesthetics will be born from artists who refuse to let the model dictate. Those who push it, hack it, train it, break it. My team and I are building just that: cinematic languages. That simply couldn't exist without AI, but that absolutely couldn't exist without a very specific human mind directing them. Both are true. And new professions are already arriving. AI cinematographer. Prompt director. Synthetic casting director. Model trainer. Ethical reviewer. Narrative engineer. It's not science fiction. The people I work with do these jobs every day. The most exciting part is the new business models. Small studios producing at the scale of major networks. Independent artists licensing their style as a template. Brands becoming production companies. Creators becoming infrastructure. The agency, and even the film studio, of the future will bear little resemblance to the version we know today, and I'm genuinely excited to build one of those new versions from the inside out. Standardization is the noise. New aesthetics are the signal. The next five years will be the loudest, strangest, and most beautiful chapter our industry has ever seen. And I wouldn't want to do anything else..

The filmed portfolio of creative Laia Grassi, a great expert in GenAI

Laia Grassi: When Artificial Intelligence Imagines Sea, Sky, and Brands

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