Building AI for Creators | Luma & Phota Labs
6/30/202648 min
Yoko Li speaks with Luma's Head of Applied Research Matt Tancik and Phota Labs cofounder and CTO Zach Xia about how AI is changing creativity, photography, and the tools people use to make art.
The conversation explores the evolving relationship between artists and AI, from image generation and personalization to creative workflows, controllability, and agentic design tools.
They discuss personalization, photography, creative software, model design, evaluation, and why the future of creative tools may depend less on generating content and more on helping people express ideas they couldn't easily realize before. Along the way, they explore AI agents, interfaces, and how creators are already using these tools in unexpected ways.
Resources:
Follow Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewtancik/
Follow Zach on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zhihao-zach-xia/
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsMatt Tancik· Guest0:00
[upbeat music] I think the creativity is building a story. The tools alone aren't a story. Someone has to direct them.
Zach Xie· Guest0:05
It's not about mastering those tools, it's about directing an agent who can use those tools to achieve your creativity. Generative AI have become so good, you can be sort of authentic to that moment while getting a little bit creative of stuff. So I, I just think a lot of photographers are having more fun post-capturing than before.
Matt Tancik· Guest0:23
How do you make something unique with the tools you have access to now? There has to be something more than just text. If you go to, say, a studio and you say, "Make me a ten-second video about a dog jumping in the grass," they're never gonna take that deal. They're gonna want more specific, and I think AI tools are no different.
Yoko Li· Host0:41
Something I heard from someone today earlier was they assume AI to be slop. It's up to the humans to create something out of it. What are your thoughts?
Zach Xie· Guest0:51
I, I feel like that's such a hard question.
Speaker 40:53
Creative tools have always changed the way people make art. Photography changed painting. Digital software changed photography, and now AI is changing how images, videos, and entire creative workflows come together. The technology is improving at an incredible pace. But the most important ingredient in creative work may not be the model, it may still be the person behind it. In this episode, Yoko Li speaks with Matt Tancik of Luma and Zach Xie of Fotor Labs about AI-generated imagery, creative workflows, personalization, and why they believe the future belongs not to the tools themselves,