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YouTube star Cliff Tan apologizes to angry fans after promoting AI for interior design

Cliff Tan speaks onstage during the 29th Annual Webby Awards at Cipriani Wall Street on May 12, 2025 in New York City.

Cliff Tan at the 29th Annual Webby Awards in 2025.

Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images for The Webby Awards

Another YouTube creator is facing online backlash over the use of artificial intelligence.

Cliff Tan, who runs a popular interior design YouTube channel called "Dear Modern" that has 2.4 million subscribers and a corresponding TikTok account with 3.6 million followers, posted a video on Monday in which he apologized for promoting an AI company.

"Yesterday I made a video on AI, and it disappointed many of you," Tan said in the video. "I'm really sorry about that."

Tan's apology comes a week after Hank Green, one of the internet's most reliable content creators, apologized to fans for relying on AI "too heavily" when researching his videos. He later shared a new AI policy for his channel.

In Tan's case, he posted a paid advertisement for a Chinese AI company called "Dreamina," which allows users to generate animated videos with written prompts. In the ad, Tan uploads hand-drawn sketches to the software before transforming them into an animated floor plan.

Though Tan uses his own sketches as source material and says in the video that he doesn't "like AI" because "it makes you forget to use your brain," the video was quickly flooded with negative comments.

"No, Mr. Cliff. Please. Don't sell yourself to AI," one comment with 1,700 likes reads. Others criticized the "Dreamina" company itself, which is owned by ByteDance.

In a follow-up comment on the ad, Tan said he thought the software "would be genuinely useful to fellow designers."

"I just don't want you guys, with the right sentiments, to be martyrs in a world that is increasingly leaving us behind," he wrote.

As tech companies push AI to become a ubiquitous part of daily life, critics worry it could impact critical thinking skills. In 2025, a survey published by Workday found that nearly half of respondents worried the tech would cause a decline in critical thinking.

AI also threatens to upend the workforce as companies of varying stripes race to integrate AI into their workflows.

Last year, the British Institute of Interior Design said AI "has a growing presence in interior design."

Stephen Dick, the founder of an interior design firm in the UK, told the institute that "the possibilities are impressive" with text-to-image visualization tools.

"I know of many designers using text-to-image visualization tools, too," Dick was quoted as saying.

Neither Dreamina, based in Beijing, nor Tan, who is based in Singapore, immediately responded to a request for comment from Business Insider made outside their normal business hours.

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Truman Dickerson is the Weekend News Fellow at Business Insider, based in New York City. He covers trending tech and business news. He previously reported for The Boston Globe's Express Desk. He graduated from Boston University, where he served as editor in chief of The Daily Free Press, BU's student-run newspaper.Contact him at [email protected]