Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine
November 27, 2025
I am so tired of hearing about AI. Unfortunately, this is a talk about AI.
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.)
Maitre Miro gives a very nuanced and thoughtful meditation on the journey of AI and its impact on design and the creative endeavour. He uses the metaphor of AI as an instrument and the work of four renowned musicians and the lessons we might learn from their work about how we can work with AI.
