Beyond the Machine: Creative agency in the AI landscape (frankchimero.com)

At Kinference (Oct 14, 2025) the speaker reframed generative AI not as an autonomous intelligence or an ideological force but as an instrument—one that demands technique, practice, and human judgement rather than passive “vibe coding.” They described deep ambivalence: impressed by AI’s outputs, repulsed by some of its cultural effects, and distrustful of its owners. Instead of the cult of inevitability or the abstentionist critique, the talk urges designers and artists to reclaim creative agency—standing beside or above models to shape outcomes rather than ceding taste and craft to prompts. The speaker also critiques “vibe coding” (exemplified by Rick Rubin–style mythmaking and Anthropic’s Way of Code), arguing it promotes dependency and flattens skill into cheap, disposable production. Technically and strategically, the talk notes a cooling of hype: GPT-5 felt incremental, progress has shifted from revolution to optimization, and smaller local models are increasingly viable because they’re cheaper, more private and more energy-efficient. That suggests an “AI autumn” where teams can plan deliberately instead of chasing speculative windfalls. Practically, this means investing in human techniques—prompting as performance, curation of samples, and collaboration models—so that better models yield better practitioners and healthier coordination rather than isolated replacement of colleagues.