Why AI excites Lamborghini’s design boss: ‘Who is not mastering it will be left behind’

It's dominating the stock market, it's the topic of the moment: So pervasive are the conversations around artificial intelligence and how it’s used, you’ve almost certainly heard of it – software that can take prompts and vomit out words in the style of a decorated journalist, sounds that could slot right into a real pop star’s discography and indeed car designs that could have been penned by one of the great design house artisans.

You’d imagine old-guard sketchsmiths, like many other creatives, would set alight the vast processor farms that power the AI systems they perceive as a threat to their livelihoods and human creativity at large with a snap of their fingers. Mitja Borkert, director of Lamborghini Centro Stile since 2016 is, you might be surprised to read, not one of them. He explained why during a keynote, and in further detail during a lengthy conversation with evo during the 20th anniversary celebrations of Lamborghini’s in-house styling operation.

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Borkert believes that AI is only the latest in a long lineage of revolutionary tools to scare those who aren’t open-minded and innovative enough to capitalise and excite those who are. For Borkert, it shows enormous promise in the augmentation of creativity and that those who don’t embrace it and try to understand it will be ‘left behind’. 

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Could AI ever theoretically replace designers? Borkert explored with us for devil’s advocacy’s sake, how it wouldn’t be impossible: 

‘Playing Devil’s advocate and maybe Walter de Silva would totally disagree, but theoretically we have 100 years of cars, we’ve had 10,000 or more cars from the Ford Model T to the Lamborghini Fenomeno let’s say. You teach the system, you say ‘this is good looking, this is disruptive, this is a facelift, this is a new generation’. Don’t you think a system could learn this? I think yes.’

But of course, the creative impetus of a true artist is an essential part of the equation as it stands, even if AI is a tool with enormous potential, something through which an original idea can be developed, manipulated and understood further, or a tool with which to experiment with initial thoughts, to generate starting points for inspiration:

‘AI is a fantastic tool that we need to understand. I understood the potential immediately. The results when you play around are for sure something you can’t use but you can work with them as a base. Now just one year after I first used it, you can take a photo of a clay model and put it into AI and it will generate for you in a few seconds, almost any colour you want. It’s generating you a quality image that you can take time to change the details. You can put a sketch in and it can turn it into a video of a car moving. This will never substitute any creative person – without the spark AI doesn’t help – but it’s the next step of having fun with design.

‘You need to actively take it and use it for good. It will not substitute us. You still need to say ‘this is what I would like to see’. Someone with good taste has to be in the position to master it and say yes to a design. It cannot create a strategy. It cannot create vision.'

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Indeed the creative people aren’t going anywhere in Borkert’s view. Just as well, as Centro Stile is now comprised of 25 designers from all manner of backgrounds. He is insistent that understanding and experience with all of the old ways is essential to their standing in their field, however the process of car design is to evolve. 

He even brought back more physical elements of the design process – from tape-drawing to clay modeling – when he took the reins at Centro Stile, the latest example being the Lamborghini Manifesto design study, fully expressed in clay and revealed at the event:

‘I am insisting that new designers work with old methods of design, even though AI is the latest tool. I try to be a good example to them. If you’re older, you always tend to say my method is the right one. But I am convinced that in design, every generation had their method. In the ‘50s they were making fantastic renderings and clay modeling. There were the tape drawings that I love. In the ‘90s there was this transition from manual sketching to Photoshop. I remember that we were fighting in the Porsche design centre over the two machines with Photoshop. And then there was 3D modelling, I don’t do this but the last generation that started, they can all model. 

‘When I came to Lamborghini, all the team, they were fully digital, very few models. At the end of the day I always want to be proud of a full size model – that’s your result. You touch it, you criticise it. The taping, the sketching, will never die. I see design in this romantic way and as long as I’m in charge I don’t want to lose this way of designing things.’

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But AI is, he says, the next tool that every designer must attempt to work with in one way or the other, or risk being left behind. Its potential is already bearing fruit that really excites Borkert, albeit fruit he wasn’t allowed to show, that we won’t see on the road for a good few years yet:

‘You need to master it. It has to be mastered. I would not be scared of it, if you don’t deal with it, then you will lose the game. All of us live in our comfort zone. At the end of the day as a responsible designer, I need to be the uncomfortable person. Sometimes you need to change your set-up. Like an athlete. 

'A good athlete constantly asks themselves, am I still good enough? Can I still keep up? It keeps me fresh, it’s fun for me. I’m the oldest one in the design centre, but I am the one pushing for this technology. I saw it and I was fascinated and totally motivated when I saw it for the first time. 

‘I would like to show what my team have already prepared. It is so cool. Very recently we had a presentation where I saw some things and said ‘this we have to do’. I had goosebumps. It's incredible how this tool has developed. Design is storytelling and AI can help tell the story. I am already curious about where we will be with it next year. This is the next step in the process of design. Who is not mastering it will be left behind.’