Interview: Freepik boss tells us the limits of AI, why storytelling matters, and how not to tangle yourself up in a copyright nightmare (www.techradar.com)

At Freepik’s Upscale event in Malaga, CEO Joaquín Cuenca framed AI as a new creative tool that reshapes — but doesn’t replace — human creativity. He coined “creative engineer” to describe professionals who combine storytelling, emotional intent, and AI tooling to produce work that resonates. Freepik highlighted Spaces, a collaboration-oriented platform that layers AI-assisted workflows with comment threads and rationale capture to preserve narrative intent and improve team feedback. Cuenca argued democratization of creative tools is broadly positive — like cameras did for photography — but polish and storytelling still differentiate expert work. On the enterprise side, Freepik emphasized legal and data safety: customer inputs on Freepik Enterprise are never used to train models and are protected from partner reuse, and the company offers liability insurance except where users intentionally infringe trademarks or copyrights. Technically, Cuenca noted steady progress in “edit” models (citing recent advances) and shrinking failure modes such as malformed fingers or garbled text, but warned video generation remains far behind images — especially for long, multi-sequence clips. For the AI/ML community this underscores priorities: improving fine-grained visual fidelity, robust instruction-following in edit models, and scalable temporal consistency for video, plus the growing importance of enterprise-grade data governance and IP-safe deployment.