Beyond the Machine by Frank Chimero

I’m trying to figure out how to use generative AI as a designer without feeling like shit. I am fascinated with what it can do, impressed and repulsed by what it makes, and distrustful of its owners. I am deeply ambivalent about it all. The believers demand devotion, the critics demand abstinence, and to see AI as just another technology is to be a heretic twice over.

Today, I’d like to try to open things up a bit. I want to frame the technology more like an instrument, and get away from GenAI as an intelligence, an ideology, a tool, a crutch, or a weapon. I find the instrument framing more appealing as a person who has spent decades honing a set of skills. I want a way of working that relies on my capabilities and discernment rather than something so amorphous and transient as taste. (If taste exists in technology, it needs to be smuggled in.)

Frank Chimero just dropped the first essay I read top-to-bottom in what feels like years.

Really good shit about how to feel, as an artist, a creator, about “AI”.

I wouldn’t want an irregular AI in my bank app, but in a creative workflow, hallucinating feels like the point of it all.