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Two years ago this question arrived once a month, usually suspiciously. Now it is in most briefs, and it splits cleanly: half of them want reassurance that no machine is drawing their logo, half want to know why we are not charging marketplace prices if a machine is. The honest answer covers both, and it is not a slogan in either direction.
What no client logo here is
No mark we deliver is a generative output with a name set into it. That is not a stylistic position, it is a legal one. A design has to be attributable to a human author for the copyright assignment we sign to mean anything, and that assignment is what makes a trademark application in your name possible. A mark you cannot prove you authored is a mark you cannot properly own, and ownership is most of what you are buying.
Where the tools genuinely earn their place
| Research and reference | Pulling together what a sector already looks like, fast. It replaces an afternoon of scrolling, not a decision. |
|---|---|
| Background and mockup work | Rendering a business card into a realistic scene so a client can judge scale. Nobody is buying the tabletop in the photograph. |
| Copy drafts for internal use | Structuring a proposal or a scope document. Everything client-facing is still written and edited by a person. |
| Image cleanup and upscaling | Rescuing a supplied photograph that arrived at 400 pixels wide. This is retouching, and it always was. |
| Video and audio grunt work | Transcription, rough cuts, noise removal, subtitle timing. Real hours saved on the motion desk, and it shows in the turnaround. |
What it is still bad at, specifically
- Vector output. Generative tools produce pixels and the traced result carries artefacts a printer will reject. Logos have to be born as vectors.
- Consistency across a system. It can give you a mark. It cannot give you the same mark at favicon size, embroidered, and reversed out of a dark photograph, with the deliberate compromises each of those needs.
- Restraint. It will always add another element. The hardest part of a logo is deciding what to remove, and that is a judgement about a business, not about an image.
- Being wrong on purpose. Distinctiveness usually comes from breaking a convention deliberately. A model trained on the convention reproduces it.
Why the price did not fall
Because the part these tools speed up was never the expensive part. The expensive part is the hour spent working out that a cleaning company selling on trust needs to look established rather than energetic, and the four attempts it takes to get there. Faster reference gathering saves twenty minutes. It does not save the decision.
Where the tools have moved the price, we have moved it: video turnaround is quicker and priced accordingly, and photo cleanup that used to be a line item now usually is not.
The question worth asking any studio
Not "do you use AI" — everybody uses something, and a studio claiming otherwise is either lying or slower than it needs to be. Ask instead: is the mark you are handing me attributable to a human author, and will you sign an assignment that says so? That question has one right answer, and it is the one that matters if you ever need to defend the mark.
Got a project this applies to?
Send two lines about the business and you get a plan, a timeline and one fixed price. If the honest answer is that you do not need us for it, we will say that instead.