Brands are rarely punished for using AI. They are punished for saying they did not. The Dior holiday film is the live example this week, and it is worth reading as a lesson in process claims.
We build an AI marketer, so we have a stake in this. Our view is simple. A statement about how work was made is a brand claim. It needs the same checking as any other claim before it goes out.
The claim became the story
Dior released a holiday short called Night in Color, directed by the animator Sylvain Chomet. Soon after, viewers pointed to oddities such as warped lettering and an extra finger, and guessed generative AI.
Dior’s creative director, Jonathan Anderson, told WWD that the film is all hand-drawn using techniques that go back to the 1940s, according to Fast Company. Dior also published a behind-the-scenes video presenting a handcrafted process.
Then Ben Wild, a film studio chief executive, made a claim of his own. He said two unnamed people who worked on the film told him that much of the motion was AI-generated. Fast Company reports this as unverified, and says Dior had not responded when it published on 6 November.
We do not know what happened, and that is the point
Chomet and the film’s producer, Aton Soumache, deny that generative AI made the artwork. The AV Club, reporting their comments to Variety, says Soumache described about twenty creatives working for seven months. He said automated interpolation was used for a very small part of the process.
Interpolation is software that generates the movement between keyframes. Chomet attributed the odd hands to animation shorthand, which the AV Club says also appears in hand-drawn work.
We cannot judge who is right, and this post does not try to. What matters is the shape of the problem. Once a claim is absolute, a single machine-made frame reads as a contradiction. A claim that describes the split is much harder to break.
Almost every piece of work has a machine in it
Mark Ritson makes this point in Adweek. Phone cameras blend images, Photoshop can generate a sky, and pop vocals are routinely tuned. He argues the clean line between human and machine work blurred around 2024 and is now a gradient.
On that view, the useful questions are where your work sits on the gradient and whether you are willing to say so. Ritson thinks that if Dior had said artists drew the key frames and machines helped fill the gaps, the row would probably have been minor. That is his opinion, not a fact.
Luxury is the most exposed category, because it sells provenance as part of the product. Any brand that leans on “handmade”, “human” or “no AI” is in the same position.
Treat process claims as brand claims
Most teams check product claims, prices and legal lines before publishing. Few check statements about how the work was made. Here is a routine that needs no special software.
- Write your position down before anyone asks. Which tools may be used, for what, and what you will say if asked.
- Keep a short record for each asset: who made it, which tools touched it, who checked it, and when.
- Be wary of absolutes about process, such as “entirely”, “all” and “100%”. Use them only if the record supports them.
- Describe the split, not the purity. For example: drawn by our artists, with software filling the gaps between frames.
- Put the process line through the same approval step as the copy, so the approver sees it next to the image.
The test is short. If you cannot show it, do not say it.
A good process line is plain and specific. “Illustrated by our team, with AI used to build the first layouts” is honest and hard to attack. “Made entirely by hand” is a promise that every tool, plugin and shortcut in the chain has to keep.
This matters more as teams grow. A brand with several markets, agencies and freelancers has many people making small choices about tools. One careless caption in one market can contradict a claim made in another.
So the written position has to travel with the brand, not live in one person’s head. Everyone who makes or approves work should be able to find it in under a minute.
Where Mavic fits
Mavic always works from your brand. Brand DNA holds your writing styles and a ban list. The Ban List is where you can put absolute process phrases you do not want used. It is a strong nudge, not a hard filter, so a person still has to read the final copy.
Mavic keeps every version of a generated asset with its feedback history, and nothing publishes until a person approves it. That is a record of what Mavic made. It is not a record of everything else you used, so your provenance statement is still yours to write. Mavic, now powered by Tandem, splits a brief across specialist agents that all work from the same Brand DNA.
The takeaway
Disclosure is a choice you can make early, in your own words. A denial is a promise that someone else can test. Pick the one you can keep.
