We don’t do AI.

As a matter of principal, we do not work with AI, work for AI or use AI in our design solutions. Our experience has been that AI has to produce any tangible profits for anyone in the long or short run. Having carefully observed the local AI scene (Vancouver, British Columbia), our observation is that the only people benefiting from the current AI hype are the consultants and educators who crop immediately after every technology buzz word the industry throws up routinely.

Our list is long, but let me note down just a few that come to mind immediately:

• AI leads to deskilling
• AI raises the cost of production and product life cycle
• AI is not is based on stolen data scrapped from around the world
• AI companies add another subscription to the operation budget
• AI creates social hierarchy (AI for masses, Humans for bosses)
• AI use is unethical and harmful

Let us elaborate on a few points we mentioned above.

Key proponents of AI, especially in technology world, are experienced hands with hands on domain experience, who know how what results they are looking for and generally diligent enough to guardrail the AI output and test and compare various results. For students, new entrants and general public, AI based skilling paths are being promoted aggressively but such paths will leave learners with curtailed sense of judgment, real world intuition and ability to think beyond AI curated sense of reality.

If this happens, we believe we will see a workforce that is hyper-dependent of AI for performing even the most basic on the job functions. AI companies will then have the ability of exploit and further perpetuate this dependence of the workforce. We do not believe this is good for humanity.

Using AI in workplace immediately adds another line item to the opex of the company balance sheet, without any guarantee of costs savings. Like any subscription based software service, the cost of subscriptions keeps growing. With technology control of a handful of tech companies, the likelihood of this happening is virtually guaranteed.

With growing use of AI and deskilling, we believe the cost of hiring skilled/experienced supervisors will also increase as such experts will demand higher premium for their services. So over the next few years, whatever cost savings an organization might see due to AI will end up being neutralized, not to mention the operational costs of managing and maintaining supervisors, cost of litigation, and other such related issues.

We believe, AI is based on stolen data, from the internet without any pay back to original content creators. By content creators we don’t just mean authors and writers (living or historic), each and everyone of us who has written any thing online (and in some cases, offline) – comments, messages, shared emojis, rated content, clicked on buttons, participated in poll, made reports and presentations available online, etc., have potentially contributed to the AI models of the tech companies. Not just words, any type of media (text, video, audio, games, puzzles, etc.), anywhere on in digital format has, and will, potentially be used to train the AI models. The scale of theft is hard to express in words and we, at Maya Studios, reject this exploitation and misappropriation of mankind’s labour.

If this was not enough, the AI world charges subscription fees to use their models, which further records these interaction to train itself. So in essence, people are paying to train a system that in return uses them as data-points.

The use of AI is being promoted as a given and we are being told that AI will takeover the world (in terms of impact) in ways that can not be resisted and controlled. This world view assumes that 8.3 billion people (as of Jun 2026) will passively accept the this top down model. AI may become dominant in advanced economies of the word, but we do not believe this tech dependency has or will reach 6 to 7 billion people in the rest of the world which may choose to find other paths and way to prosperity. It is by no way certain that the western world view will prevail and continue to shape technological progress of the world as it has been so far.

There are many reasons that have convinced Maya Studios to steear clear of AI gold rush so far, which we will cover in future. For now, we don’t see AI as good for business and public good, therefore our rejection.