Luxury beliefs: AI is a brilliant tool but can’t replace human creativity, says Aston Martin chief

Aston Martin’s chief creative officer Marek Reichman argues that artificial intelligence should remain a tool rather than replace human designers in automotive creation. While acknowledging AI as “a brilliant tool” and “the most important element we’ve ever created,” Reichman contends that human creativity and intuition are irreplaceable for designing vehicles that capture future consumer desires and emotional connections.

Why this matters: As AI capabilities expand across creative industries, luxury automakers face pressure to integrate automation while maintaining the human touch that differentiates premium brands from mass-market competitors.

The limits of AI creativity: Reichman explains that AI’s backward-looking algorithms fundamentally constrain its creative potential.

• “AI is based on a series of algorithms from today and yesterday, not tomorrow,” he told Newsweek, arguing that true design requires predicting the future rather than reassembling past elements.
• Despite AI’s capabilities, “there is no AI [generated material] sitting at number one [on the charts]. There are no AI books sitting on the bestseller [list], and there’s no AI art being [sold for the same price as the great artists].”
• The designer believes this stems from AI’s tendency to “extract personality and give you a norm” rather than creating the unexpected elements humans crave.

How human designers work differently: Aston Martin’s design process relies on human intuition to anticipate future consumer attitudes and desires.

• “Design is about looking at attitudes that exist… and then creating forms that generate the same feeling as the attitude of the person wanting to buy,” Reichman explained.
• His team draws inspiration from diverse sources including other industries, ecosystems, animals, and technology, combined with studies of customer attitudes and futurist predictions.
• “My predictive state is far greater because I imagine where I want to be based on the same assembly of things,” he said, emphasizing the superiority of human imagination over algorithmic processing.

The luxury market’s unique demands: Reichman argues that affluent customers specifically seek differentiation and tribal identity through their purchases.

• “The world is ever changing, and it’s ever changing in a way that [makes us] want to be different than the next person [in] how we consume and how we buy, but we also want [that purchase] to be personal,” he noted.
• Luxury buyers want to be “part of a tribe that is different to another tribe,” using physical objects like cars as status symbols and identity markers.

The analog renaissance: Despite increasing digitization, consumers are gravitating toward physical, tactile experiences in their vehicles and other products.

• “Every time we automate something, the human has a desire to touch and feel it,” Reichman observed, citing Aston Martin’s manual gearbox cars as an example of unnecessary but beloved analog features.
• He points to broader trends like increased vinyl record sales, analog watch popularity, and physical book purchases as evidence of consumers’ desire for tangible experiences.
• “Through automation, you lose a sense of why we are, who we are, why we exist and touch, feel, sensations, all of those things. I think [physical] experience is the future.”

Where AI fits in: Reichman sees AI’s role as handling mundane tasks to free human designers for creative work.

• “What are the mundane things that I don’t want that team of highly creative people doing that AI [can do] or [using] AI can challenge what they’ve done,” he explained as appropriate AI applications.
• He compares AI to other automation tools like washing machines—useful for eliminating tedious work but not replacing human creativity and judgment.