We went back to school to take a course on AI applied to design, organized by Galileo Science and Technology Park. A total immersion in the world of artificial intelligence, including tools, tests and various experiments.
We have put our hands — and our heads — on quite a few tools. Here are a few of them:
📝 AI for texts
Chat GPT
Claude..
Copy.ai
Clee.ai
Gemini
🎙 AI for audio
Elevenlabs
🎨 AI for images
Midjourney
Krea
Firefly
Vizcom
🧑 🎤 AI for avatars and translations
Synthesia
HeyGen
🎬 AI for video
Runway
These tools were not an absolute novelty for us, but the course gave us the opportunity to deepen them, test them one by one, understand their strengths and limitations. We have alternated moments of pure creative chaos — never seen so many different dinosaurs in our lives — with more structured tests; we have even tried to rethink the communication of Rawr Studio through AI.
The verdict? AI is sometimes frustrating because of its lack of control, other times surprising because of the possibilities it opens up. One thing, however, is clear to us: AI does not replace creativity, but rather amplifies it, causes it, stimulates it. It forces us to see things that, on our own, perhaps we would never have considered.
For this article, we started with a question that concerns us and from here we tried to find answers to other questions based on our experience. Because AI is not just a technical issue: it is a field of confrontation, doubts and possibilities.
Yes, AI can create. Let's abandon the idea that artificial intelligence can't invent anything new. In 2025, AI models are so advanced that randomness itself generates unpredictable news.
But does this mean that AI is creative? No, AI isn't creative. Artificial intelligence produces content through semi-controlled randomness, based on prompt parameters and training data. Creativity, however, is another story: it is the ability to combine elements in an original and meaningful way. It's not enough to combine words or colors at random to define yourself as creative. Creativity is the ability to generate meaning and meaning, a profoundly human characteristic that stems from intuition, experience and the ability to attribute value to data. We have talked about creative processes — indeed, written — here.
In addition, human creativity is not limited to the generation of ideas, but also involves a process of validation and iteration. While AI can propose infinite variants of a concept, it is human judgment that establishes which are valid, innovative and relevant in a given context. In this sense, AI becomes a support tool, not a substitute.
In recent years, the debate on artificial intelligence has focused on the importance of prompting as a new fundamental skill for managing AI. Ludovico Diaz, CEO of NTT DATA Italia, in a recent interview on Actually, underlines how the real technological leap lies in the evolution of the language of human-machine interaction. These are no longer complex codes, commands or functions, but natural language. This change makes AI more accessible and democratic, shifting the focus to language, humanistic and verbal skills.
This accessibility opens up new scenarios, allowing professionals from different sectors to interact with AI without advanced technical knowledge. However, prompting requires a refined ability to formulate precise, structured and contextualized requests, transforming it into a strategic skill. Knowing how to communicate with AI becomes a crucial skill, combining logical, linguistic and analytical skills.
Yet we are convinced that it is not enough to be 'prompting masters': without direction, not even the perfect prompt can take us far.
We asked ourselves if this, as so many claim, is an unprecedented revolution. For comparison, between the 80s and 90s, architects, designers and graphic designers switched from manual to digital drawing, a change that revolutionized those sectors, completely redefining the skills required of these professionals and expanding the number of people able to use design tools.
Will artificial intelligence make everything democratic? Can anyone become an architect, designer, graphic designer or artist? We really don't think so. Already today, anyone can use some tools used by creative professionals to generate professional-looking 3D models and renders. Professionalism, however, does not lie so much in prompting, as in the ability to understand and analyze the results. Only an experienced architect can discern which of the hundred outputs generated by AI is truly valid, which one meets the project brief, which one is economically sustainable, which one is feasible with respect to regulations and, above all, which one guarantees that the building does not collapse.
In this sense, AI lowers the entry threshold to advanced tools, but it does not replace deep knowledge of a sector. The same is true for design, engineering, medicine and many other disciplines: AI facilitates, accelerates, amplifies, but does not replace human competence.
AI allows us to generate chaos, unpredictability and randomness, to mix, rework and create new elements very quickly. However, at least for now, he is unable to attribute meaning or meaning to them. This remains a task exclusive to human intelligence. In the professional field, only an expert can evaluate the validity and viability of an output generated by AI.
While in sectors such as finance and medicine, the applications of AI have a different and well-defined impact, in the creative field its role is more nuanced. This is an enhancement of our work, an accelerator of creative processes, capable of democratizing access to advanced design tools, but not of replacing human decision-making.
AI offers a space for experimentation, allowing designers to explore alternative solutions, test ideas and visualize concepts in real time. But without strategic direction and clear intent, these explorations risk being meaningless. Creativity is not only production, but also selection, refinement and conscious innovation.
Today, we must learn how to harness AI to optimize our time and our skills. Less time spent on manual research and experimentation means more time for analysis, setting objectives, understanding the problem and refining the solution.
The key point is to understand exactly where in the operational workflow AI can be useful. At the beginning of 2025, it is particularly effective in the following phases:
However, understanding the brief, choosing the right directions among the multiple proposals proposed by AI and the progressive refinement of concepts still remain fundamental human skills. AI is not able to generate definitive solutions on the first attempt, nor can it create final products on its own.
Let's be clear: the purpose of AI is not to steal our work, but to assist us. It does not replace the designer, it empowers him. It deals with the repetitive and boring parts, leaving more room for strategy and real creativity.
And no, AI isn't just software. After all the tests we have done, we are convinced that we should see her as an 'outsider' colleague, the one who displaces her by proposing absurd and meaningless ideas. Like that crazy designer who churns out dozens of ideas — 90% unusable — who at a certain point undoes the genius that carried out the project.
We vote for opportunity. And we are ready to change our perspective, to ask ourselves new questions, to accept a bit of chaos in exchange for new possibilities.
Of course, on a social level, the discourse is more thorny and would deserve a separate analysis. On one point, however, there is no doubt: human and AI are already working - and collaborating - together, just as happened in the past with Photoshop and AutoCAD. AI is only the next step and it's up to us to decide how to use it to redefine our role as creatives.
The value of AI comes from those who use it with competence, vision and critical spirit. That's why we'll continue to explore and experiment with it to better design — and not just dinosaurs!
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