AI Ethics Statement

Generative AI is best understood as a new way to produce footage. On a traditional production, the shoot ends with an SD or CF card full of camera footage, and post-production begins from there. In an AI production, the model-generated footage takes the place of that camera footage: it becomes the material you start with, not the finished piece. Like footage captured on set, it still has to be directed, curated, edited, composited, graded, brought to life with sound design and refined into something cohesive before it becomes production-ready.

How much of that starting material makes it into the final production varies wildly. Sometimes the generated footage provides almost everything needed to build an entire piece. At the other end of the scale, AI might contribute one hero shot to a music video: a shot that would have been impossible, unsafe or completely out of proportion to the production around it. Between those ends, it might remove a wire, assist with rotoscoping, rescue difficult audio or add a voice to a crowd to help sell the size of a scene.

Films aren't measured by how many shots needed colour correction, how many backgrounds were matte painted, or how often 3D quietly supported a two-dimensional world. For example, much of modern animation operates through 2.5D techniques inside 3D environments.

Sometimes AI augments human work, and other times human craft refines and builds upon AI footage.

Warm Regards doesn't calculate creative integrity as a percentage of AI usage. What matters is whether the method was right for the outcome of the project.

Warm Regards is primarily AI-first, but only when it's best suited for the outcome. Clients have previously arrived prepared for a GenAI campaign, and Warm Regards has made the case for traditional 3D, animation by hand, or various other traditional solutions instead. Upon completion, the finished work exceeded expectations for various reasons: finer granular control, a stronger aesthetic, and most importantly a more appropriate result.

Warm Regards works alongside production teams, talent, producers and creative leads to supply whichever piece of the jigsaw is missing. That might be an entire AI-originated sequence, one impossible shot, a traditional post treatment or a completely different solution from the one first proposed.

A generative model can produce a beautiful frame that's wrong for the cut, impressive movement that doesn't serve the story, or something technically new; yet creatively empty.

It can also solve in an afternoon what would otherwise be unsafe, unaffordable or impossible. Telling the difference requires an understanding of shots, sequences, rhythm, performance, design, sound and what the finished piece is actually trying to do.

That judgment is the practice and methodology behind Warm Regards.

Warm Regards is an ally to the traditional creative industries first and foremost, and an advocate for the artists who specialise and dedicate their life's work to them. The allegiance sits with the greater arts and cinema, not with a technology company, platform, AI model or release cycle.

Actors, directors, producers, cinematographers, production designers, editors, animators, VFX artists, motion designers, colourists, sound recordists and designers, set builders and technicians aren't "legacy media" or people left behind by the times. They practise something truly irreplaceable, even where technology becomes capable of mimicking its visible result.

AI can mimic the appearance of cinematography, but it doesn't contain a traditional artistic and logistical understanding of light, lenses, blocking, coverage, safety and the physical reality of a set.

It can only mimic production design without the designer's understanding of story, material, construction, history and space.

It can only mimic a performance without having lived the performer's experience or made their decisions - and only through the model training partially based on their hard work.

AI may change how parts of creative production are completed. Warm Regards won't pretend that no paid task will ever be affected, or that displacement isn't a legitimate concern. That makes solidarity more important, rather than division of creative minds.

Across the full creative toolkit, AI is one among countless of others. The most important tool remains the person behind them.

Warm Regards remains accountable for the work it chooses to make. That responsibility can't be foisted to an AI model, hidden inside a platform or excused by the fact that AI has “elements of randomness”.

The studio won't create political manipulation, deliberately deceptive work or material designed to grift, belittle or divide. It won't create non-consensual likenesses, put words into a real person's mouth or help anybody continue using a performer outside what they knowingly agreed to.

Entirely fictional people and synthetic presenters can be legitimate parts of visual production. The ethical line sits in what they're being used to claim. A synthetic presenter can explain how a product works, communicate its features or deliver approved brand information. That's different from inventing a customer who claims a product cured an illness, transformed their life or otherwise is deceptive - otherwise known as fake testimonials.

On likeness and identity

Where a real performer knowingly chooses to extend their likeness or voice through AI, the work must reflect informed consent, agreed use and fair compensation. If the arrangement appears exploitative, or separates a person from the value of their own identity, Warm Regards won't participate. The same responsibility applies to how people are depicted. Generative models reproduce and exaggerate shallow stereotypes with extraordinary confidence, and Warm Regards won't reduce real ethnicities or cultures to a recycled collection of visual features and call it representative.

The same principle shapes how Warm Regards teaches AI visuals. Education should develop transferable creative and technical judgment, not dependence on whichever platform has the largest promotional budget that week (or referrals, and promo).

Tools will change. Visual literacy, production knowledge and the ability to understand what a piece of work needs, will remain useful.

AI production has a material environmental cost. It runs on hardware, electricity, cooling and datacentre infrastructure, and Warm Regards treats that as a production constraint.

The response is to generate deliberately. The studio generates local-first where the available technology can effectively perform the task - reducing reliance on datacentre & hyperscaler infrastructure.

Where production-ready image and video still depend on hosted models, the focus is the part the studio can control: how those systems are used. Internal workflows and SOPs keep moving production closer to one-shot generation: understanding what the shot needs before opening the model, learning how each system responds, carrying knowledge forward between attempts and reducing blind iteration. The goal isn't to generate endlessly and hope something useful appears. It's to arrive prepared enough to land close to the intended result.

This is the discipline post-production has always demanded. Renderfarms and cluster computing systems are data centres, and the cost of compute has sat inside CGI for decades.

What changes is how deliberately it's spent, how mindful the use, and the intention to reduce carbon footprint where possible.