Beyond the Machine Creative agency in the AI landscape https://frankchimero.com/blog/2025/beyond-the-machine/
The hype is expected—new tech runs on speculation. You can feel the residue of the last 30 years of booms. There is a sense that people missed their chance to get rich on the internet, on ecommerce, on the app store, on social media, on crypto, on meme stocks, on NVIDIA. The hype bubbles get inflated because individuals don’t want to miss their chance at another windfall, and companies don’t want to get displaced by any nascent technological shifts. The history of tech has calcified into stories of dramatic wins and unforeseen downfalls, and what results is a tech culture of near compulsory participation in prediction rather than creating value or serving needs.
Faced with the story of AI labor displacement, our first instinct as technology workers wasn’t to protect one another, but to search for ways to use the tools to replace our collaborators.
Take what the AI gives without question and you’re not producing, you’re consuming. Eventually, that passivity gets used against you. We’ve seen it before: streaming services flattened art into algorithmic averages and background noise, newsfeeds rewired attention toward outrage because engagement meant growth. Each time, the machine attracted us with individual customization while quietly taking control of the terms. The same will happen with AI if used for passive consumption, even if that consumption is dressed up as execution.
So while vibe coding may be useful for short-term work, it’s not a suitable approach for anything intended to last longer than a tub of yogurt. Time saved is not strength gained
Eno called it “a river of sound,” always the same and never the same. In that sense, ambient music was his first experiment with what he’d later name generative art: systems that grow and change within carefully set constraints.
Perhaps the universe is the generative art of the Creator.
If working in the Rubin style puts you under the machine, Eno works beside it. He sets up a system with his inputs and samples, then listens, selects, and continues to shape. Eno often says while making music he feels like a gardener: planting loops and textures, then watching them sprout into something unexpected with the potential to become incredibly beautiful with a little bit of care and pruning. The machine may produce material, but the job of shaping it into something meaningful still rests with him. It is creativity as cultivation.
These weren’t instructions so much as provocations—small reframings that opened space for something unexpected to emerge.
every new technology promises better clarity, yet its essence is determined by the noise it produces
The lesson for AI might be similar. Its danger comes because it operates inside systems with no sense of “enough.” AI needs boundaries, and so do we. The question isn’t just “what can this machine do?” but “what should it serve?” and, most importantly, “when should we stop?”
I used to like technology. The only reason it frustrates me is because I secretly believe it can satisfy me. Perhaps it once did, but the machine is not enough. Is that technology’s failure or my own growth? There are better things to suffer for.