Where Ai Meets Creative Practice At The Royal College Of Art

Creative Boom: Resources Sponsored Where AI meets creative practice at the Royal College of Art Two RCA creatives explain how the college gave them the space, the tools and the critical grounding to do something genuinely new with AI. Written By: Tom May 24 February 2026 AI is everywhere in the creative industries right now: in the hype, in the anxiety, in the tools themselves. But between the breathless enthusiasm and the fevered backlash, a more interesting conversation is happening. One about what AI can actually do in the hands of artists and designers who refuse to take its promises at face value.

At the Royal College of Art, that conversation is producing work that is winning international awards, exhibiting at major institutions and challenging how we think about technology's role in creative life. Two RCA creatives—one a recent graduate, one a current student—are approaching AI from very different angles. What they share is a refusal to simply accept the script. A film built on forgetting Gregor Petrikovič is a Slovak-British artist and filmmaker who completed an MA in Photography at the RCA, where he was a Burberry Design Scholar.

His film, Sincerely, Victor Pike, was recently selected for New Contemporaries and won the Colección SOLO AI Award 2024. It was built on an audio archive he has been collecting since 2016: hundreds of hours of conversations with friends and acquaintances, recorded originally to help him manage chronic memory loss. For years, the recordings just sat on old phones. "I didn't look at the files for years," he says. "It was only when I gathered all my old phones and moved everything into one folder that I realised: this is completely overwhelming." AI entered the project not as a creative vision but as a practical solution.

Gregor used it to transcribe the audio and found himself staring at what looked like film scripts; documents full of intimate, funny, sometimes profound exchanges between people who had never met each other, but coexisted in his memory. From there, he turned to AI-generated visuals to bring the material to life, drawn to the glitchy, dreamlike quality of early generative imagery, which mirrored how memory actually works. An undiagnosed, long-term sleep condition had fragmented his recall for 25 years; his brain, he explains, tends to create "placeholders" for things he can't remember; a generative process of its own.

The result is a film that uses AI without celebrating it. Gregor fed his voiceovers into the software, but interestingly, most of the time, the AI simply didn't get it. "It couldn't understand metaphors, poetry, or the nuances of spoken words," he recalls. "That was a huge realisation for me: the project is about the stuff that AI cannot capture." He describes Sincerely, Victor Pike as a "sentimental counter-practice to big data". Where surveillance technologies flatten us into profiles and sell us things, his recordings do the opposite; they preserve tiny, funny, irreducible human moments.

"When you strip everything away, and it's just a voice, you get all these tiny individualities and emotions that come to the surface," he says. "These technologies aren't going away, but I want to be there figuring out how we can use them to actually feel something. Connection isn't the reason these tools were built, but I think as artists, that's exactly what we should be using them for." Rewriting the narrative Ramla Anshur has been coming at AI from a different direction entirely. A current part-time student on the MDes Design Futures programme, she also works at Accenture as an experience designer.

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The article discusses a significant trend in integrating AI into creative practices, which is increasingly relevant for brand strategy professionals, while also presenting a thoughtful perspective on the human aspect of creativity.