Joseph Clark explains why Oh Studio refuses AI and how a protest film went viral

The useful part

Katy Cowan 28 September 2026 If anyone can make anything with just a click of a mouse these days, why bother paying an expert? That's the frustrating question hanging over many creative careers right now. You might already know him as Joe Bichard, the name he worked under for years.

How it works

• "AI by definition is the homogenised average of everything that has come before, so I haven't really seen anything that particularly appeals to my workflow.
• "We're already seeing products promoted with work where the human craft and care behind them feels increasingly absent.
• "But we felt there wasn't really a piece of work that had communicated concerns quickly and accessibly to a broad audience.
• "Big buildings in central London, lots of staff and offices sitting half empty between projects, There can be a lot of overhead that doesn't necessarily make the work better." I've said this myself for some...
• That's the benefit of working with someone like Oh Studio instead: no building or staff salaries, and "almost no overheads", as Joseph puts it.

What to take from it

You'll have seen him on MARS!, which won a Royal Television Society Award in 2010, and on A Self Compassion Exercise, his Alain de Botton-scripted short that's now clocked up 2.5 million views on YouTube. These days, he runs Oh Studio in London, and this summer he directed We Are Better Than This, a campaign film made with illustrator Chris Haughton, a group of children's authors and artists, and Miriam Margolyes on voiceover. So when Joseph popped up in my DMs after I shared a story on Instagram about Canva, Adobe, and where the industry was heading, I was more than happy to reply.

Example or evidence

• We can build the right team around each project, work with brilliant artists wherever they are, and put more of the budget into the actual work and the people making it." It's why his studio manifesto...
• It is a huge threat to all of us though." What really winds him up isn't the tools...
• For me, that's a pretty depressing direction for the creative industries to go in.
• "The creative industry has been concerned about what AI and Big Tech are doing for some time," he says.

Details worth keeping

He's built a remote studio to prove his point. It's something Joseph Clark keeps losing sleep over, too. It protests against Big Tech scraping creators' work and went viral.

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