Projects by Camilo Güell (Director of the Master in Artificial Intelligence for Creative Industries, Spanish Edition) and Maria Vinagre (Instructor in Artificial Intelligence for Creative Industries, Spanish Edition)
The Barcelona School of Arts and Design (LABASAD) is teaching seasoned creative professionals how to master AI… not as a replacement, but as a critical collaborator.
When you hear the words “design student”, you typically think of someone fresh-faced and lacking in experience. Yet Lizzie Van Wassenhoven is anything but. After more than two decades as a visual storyteller, she’s co-founder at BeContent, a high-end storytelling agency in Belgium, and owner of graphic design studio Resolut. And yet she’s typical of many enrolling in online masters programmes at LABASAD, Barcelona School of Arts and Design, to refresh their careers at a time of blistering technological change.
As part of her studies, Lizzie has been exploring how generative AI could be used in fashion cinema and choreography. Working entirely in Sora, she completed an experimental short film in under three weeks. It was an exercise in precision and control. “I approached making the film in Sora in the same way I would direct a fashion campaign,” she explains, “first developing a concept/mood and then generating the images.”
Importantly, this wasn’t an exercise in replacing traditional methods with AI, but testing whether it could maintain the brand consistency and directorial intent that commercial work demands. This is exactly the kind of critical exploration that LABASAD (which offers over 30 online master’s programmes in design, creativity, communication and photography) is fostering by integrating AI across almost all its courses.
Nowhere is this more focused than in the Online Master’s in Generative Artificial Intelligence for Creatives, designed to transform anxiety about AI into creative agency.
AI across the board
So what gap is LABASAD filling? “The main gap we identified was fear,” explains Isabel Martinez, who directs the programme as Isabelita Virtual. “Much of the public conversation around AI is dominated by anxiety; the idea that AI will replace creative jobs or devalue human creativity. We wanted to respond to that fear with knowledge.
“Integrating AI is not about following a trend, but about acknowledging a structural shift in how ideas are generated, developed and materialised,” she continues. “Knowledge makes us free. This master’s was created to transform uncertainty into agency and critical use.”
Rather than teaching specific tools – which are just as easy to learn through YouTube tutorials – the course focuses on thinking critically about AI as a creative medium. The Online Master covers three areas: understanding what generative AI is and its ethical issues; exploring proprietary and non-proprietary models; and developing a final project that demonstrates meaningful AI integration.
As such, the programme is attracting creatives, designers, artists, producers, filmmakers, writers and strategists who want to shape how creative practice is changing. Many, like Lizzie, come from established careers, seeking to enhance workflows they’ve refined over decades.
The discipline of creative direction
Lizzie’s fashion film shows what this informed AI use looks like in practice. “Intention had to be translated into language, structure and repetition,” she explains. “This challenged my intuitive way of working and forced me to formulate decisions more precisely.”
Before generating anything, she established a clear visual framework. “Influenced by contemporary hip-hop choreography—my inspiration was FKA Twigs, Childlike Things—I translated those specific, detailed movements into concrete instructions. I did this by having ChatGPT analyse the style: weight shifts, pauses, slowed movements, abrupt freezes and restrained energy.
“The more specific the instructions, the clearer the generated movement and intention became. By repeating the same choreographic rules in all dance shots, a controlled system was created. So I had to work as both a choreographer and a director at the same time.”
Her ultimate goal, she stresses, was brand consistency. “By strictly locking casting, silhouettes, materials and colour palettes across all prompts, I was able to create a fairly coherent visual language,” she says. “At the same time, the system still revealed its limitations. Small inconsistencies became visible. In response, I made conscious, strategic choices about framing and cropping during my edit. By partially obscuring faces and using masks, I could manage these imperfections while reinforcing the editorial logic of fashion imagery. Acknowledging these limitations was part of the process.”
This level of critical engagement is exactly what LABASAD cultivates. As Isabel explains: “This Master is not about how to use a tool but about how to use your brain and skills to use a tool. We don’t start with tools; we start with questions, concepts, and creative goals. The technical aspects are introduced as enablers, not as ends in themselves.”
A diversity of approaches
Of course, this project is only one of a multitude of approaches to AI that’s being taken at LABASAD, as international academic manager Danielle Oldson explains. “For example, in Graphic Design and Branding, it’s becoming an essential tool for ideation, mock ups and variant testing. In Creative Direction, AI can act as a kind of research assistant: analyse trends, help draft initial briefs, or brainstorm taglines that the creative director then refines and injects with human emotion.
“In UX/UI, prototyping has become much faster; designers can now use AI to turn hand-drawn sketches into high-fidelity wireframes within seconds. There’s also predictive UX, where UX designers can use AI tools to predict where a user’s eye will travel on a screen. In Interior Design, designers can now take a simple photo of an empty room or a 2D floor plan and use AI to render it into multiple styles in minutes. There are many, many other examples.”
What this means for creatives
In summary, LABASAD’s integration of AI is about more than jumping on a trend. It’s more a recognition that today’s creative education must prepare practitioners for a landscape where collaborating with AI systems is as essential as traditional craft skills. “The program is designed for people who are curious, critical, and aware that creative practice is changing,” says Isabel. “People who want to be part of shaping that change rather than reacting to it from the outside.
“Understanding how these systems work, how to collaborate with them, and where their limits are is deeply empowering,” she continues. “We want students to understand how to keep implementing their own perspective while amplifying it.”
In conclusion, Danielle adds: “We don’t perceive AI as an add-on that we’ve just slapped on to the end of our Masters. We see it as being part of a fundamental shift in how we teach. Over the next few years, our goal is to move from simply teaching students how to use AI to teaching them how to lead with it.”
