I gave a talk Friday morning at CreativeMornings/Vancouver. The title was Punk Rock AI. The frame was Both Hands Full. The room was held by my brother Mark Busse, who has been running this thing in Vancouver for fourteen years straight.
This is the recap. It’s also the on-ramp. If you weren’t there, pick up wherever you want.
I walked out, didn’t say anything, let the room settle. Mom and dad were in the room. Kelly and Debbie Krug. I will get to why that matters.
The argument I came to make is two sentences long, and the rest is story.
Generation is cheap now. Taste is the job.
The tool is never neutral. But neither are we.
Twenty minutes, twenty-one slides, and a rolling argument made by telling you my life. Here it is.
Cult Baby
I was born at home, in my parents’ bed. They were nineteen years old and part of a religious commune that didn’t believe in doctors. I got sick enough that I almost died. They took me to the ER anyway. They chose their kid over the rules. The church kicked them out for it. Showed up at the door and told them they were no longer part of the community they had built their whole adult lives inside.
So we packed up. Moved to California. We were the first-ever California Krugs.
I grew up not knowing that a person could be a creative professional. The world I came up in was evangelical, conservative, small-town California moving into Sacramento. The people who made art, who took photographs, who worked in film, those people were called worldly. That was not a compliment. It meant: not your people, not your path, not a real life.
So I tried things. Ten years of trumpet. Drawing. Writing. I wasn’t bad at any of it. I just had no map. At twenty I met my first photographer who did it for a living and something cracked open. These are real jobs. You can actually do this.
But I still hadn’t found my medium. That took eleven more years. And it didn’t happen the way I expected.
My Camera Saved My Life
It happened in a hospital.
My son Judah was born with serious health complications. Over those first few years I performed CPR on my children more than twenty times. My daughter Sierra went through Oakland Children’s Hospital. Judah went through Stanford NICU. There was a morning I couldn’t strap his limp blue body into the car seat and I went back inside and did rescue breathing again until he came back to me.
I picked up a camera not for any artsy reason. The company I worked for needed photographs and we were too broke to hire a pro. That was the practical reason. The truer one is that the camera got me out of the house. It gave me somewhere to put my attention when my attention was otherwise drowning. I could hold my grief up to the light instead of being swallowed by it. The camera was a survival device before it was a creative tool. It interrupted the despair.
I posted the photos to Flickr. Raw, unfiltered. One of Judah’s NICU photos ended up on the Flickr homepage. People weren’t responding to the technique. They were responding to the truth in the image. That was the first time I understood what any of this is actually for. Not for product launches. For connection. For making something real when the world goes fragile.
That camera didn’t leave my hands for the next twenty years.
145,000 Frames
I released a hundred and forty-five thousand photographs under Creative Commons. Specifically Attribution-ShareAlike. Anyone can use them, share them, build on them, as long as they credit me and keep the same license open for whoever shares them next.
You can’t outgive the goddess. It turned out to be a benevolent curse.
Critics said I was crazy. Piracy, they said. I told them they had it upside down. Piracy isn’t your biggest fear. Obscurity is. Those photos spread like a benevolent virus and each one carried my name. National Geographic called. Rolling Stone. The New York Times. They never wanted the free stuff. They wanted the premium experience. Giving away made me invaluable.
For twenty years that logic was sound. Then AI came and broke it. I’ll come back to that.
Dada ? Punks ? DJs ? Hip Hop ? AI
Here’s a framework, because this story is not new.
The Dadaists picked up the newspaper, which was a corporate mass-production technology, and tore it into collage. The Situationists named what was happening: détournement, taking the tools of corporate spectacle and turning them against the spectacle. William S. Burroughs cut up text and rearranged it on the floor. Arrangement and selection is the medium.
The Xerox punks picked up the copy machine and made zines. Then in Kingston, Jamaica, the hero of the dancehall wasn’t the musician. It was the Selector. That idea took a boat to the Bronx and became Hip Hop.
Every generation: corporations build the infrastructure. The weirdos figure out what it’s actually for.
This is the lineage you’re standing in. The cult of the creative weirdo who picks up the new corporate technology and uses it wrong on purpose. AI is the latest chapter in a tradition older than most tech cities have been alive.
The Selector
In Kingston, making the sound wasn’t the hard part anymore. Knowing which sound the room needed at that exact moment, that was the skill. That was taste. That was social intelligence. It came from being present in the room, listening before the first record dropped.
Generation is completely free now. AI can write a screenplay in ten seconds. What’s genuinely scarce is taste. Your specific weird eye. Your refusal to use the five corporate adjectives everyone else reaches for. Your instinct for when something is technically fine but somehow wrong.
The Selector is the job. It always was. AI didn’t take that from you. AI made the rest of the work cheap and made the Selector visible.
A Gym for Taste
Think about what mastery used to look like. Shoot a roll of film. Develop it. Hope a magazine publishes it. A reader writes a letter. That loop took a year. That’s why mastery took fifteen.
Then Flickr happened. I posted every single day. Feedback every day. I ran the loop again the next morning. It’s like a gym for the development of taste. You don’t get strong by going once.
AI compresses the loop further. You can run taste cycles in an afternoon that used to take a season. Speed without judgment is kind of like a leaf blower. You’re out there moving the mess around. Turning gas into noise.
The AI assists within each phase. It must not determine what comes next. That’s the human’s job. Every time.
The Cutting Room Floor
The loop is only as good as the taste you bring to it. The machine didn’t teach me what good looks like. Twenty years of choosing did.
Here’s a question nobody asks. What did you throw away this week?
What’s on your cutting room floor? Because that’s your taste. Not what you kept. What you refused to keep.
Fifteen years of choices. Thousands of decisions about what to keep and what to refuse. That accumulation has a shape, even when you can’t name it. What you call artistic instinct is encoded choice. Decades on the cutting room floor compressed into a sensibility.
AI made it legible. That’s not replacement. That’s revelation.
The AI Chapter
Then AI arrived. Here’s where it gets complicated in a way I haven’t fully resolved.
I find my relationship with AI completely non-consensual.
For twenty years I operated on a covenant with the internet. I share freely. I get attribution. I get community. The relationship comes back. Open source taught me value lives in relationship, not in locked files. So I shared. Radically. A hundred and forty-five thousand photographs under Creative Commons.
That deal held for twenty years. Then AI came and broke it.
When I checked one of the dataset search tools that lets creators look themselves up in major training corpora, I found roughly eighteen hundred of my images scraped into a major AI training set. Nobody asked me. Nobody paid me. They took the file. They did not keep the relationship.
The thing that made me who I am, the openness, is the thing that was exploited. I haven’t resolved that. I’m living inside it.
Three Fears
Before I rest at any frame about AI, I want to be honest about what I’m holding.
One: consent and theft. Not just my photos. The entire infrastructure of human creative work, scraped without permission, to build commercial products. I am not anti-remix. Dada was remix. Hip Hop was remix. The open internet I helped build was remix. Remix has culture. Extraction has appetite. What AI did was extraction.
Two: the junior pipeline. How does a young creative learn if there’s no market for the entry-level work that teaches you? What happens when the bottom rungs disappear? Entry-level jobs are vanishing. That’s the pipeline that trained the next generation. I don’t have a clean answer. The people who say they do are not being honest with you. We owe young creatives honesty, not reassurance.
Three: the race to the bottom. AI-generated output competing with human creative work at the low end, driving down rates, normalizing mediocrity at scale.
These are real. I don’t want to paper over them.
Name What You See
Now that we’ve named what’s in that left hand, let me get specific about what we’re holding.
We’ve said the word bias so many times it’s lost all meaning. Stop saying bias. Name what you’re seeing.
Dr. Joy Buolamwini, founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, ran the Gender Shades study. Facial recognition fails on darker-skinned women at thirty-four point seven percent error rate, versus zero-point-eight percent for lighter-skinned men. That’s not a performance gap. That’s racism and sexism embedded in code.
A colleague asked an image generator to create a marketing professor. She got a man in a power pose. Harvard blazer, authority, gravitas. She asked for a female professor. She got a timid school teacher. It took multiple rounds of prompting to get a woman with the same authority the system gave a man by default.
That’s not bias. That’s misogyny.
I call it bias laundering. Discrimination that looks like math.
AI knows what’s frequent. It does not know what’s fair. The mirror reflects. It doesn’t correct. Correcting the mirror is your job.
Both Hands Full
Most conversations about AI force you to pick a side.
The Boosters say embrace it fully, stop being afraid, you’re a luddite if you don’t.
The Doomers say resist completely, don’t participate, you’re complicit if you do.
Both feel clean. Both are incomplete. You’re a creative professional. You already know the binary is lazy writing. Two-dimensional characters don’t move anyone. The interesting choice is always the third option, the one that’s harder to hold.
I hold the critique in one hand. I hold the capability in the other. Both hands full. That’s the only honest place to stand.
What’s Also True
Despite the extraction. Despite the misogyny laundered as math. Despite everything we just named, here’s what I need you to sit with at the exact same time.
I am more creative, more productive, and more powerful than I have ever been in my entire life.
Both of those statements are true. At the exact same time.
Action is the antidote to despair. Not solutions. Not answers. Action. Make something small. Make it today.
Stay At The Table
If every thoughtful, ethical, critical creative opts out of using AI because it’s messy, who writes the rules?
The people who don’t see the problems.
We need the most critical voices at the table. Not at the protest. At the table. The protest matters too. But somebody has to be inside writing the documentation.
Vancouver is the home of Adbusters and Greenpeace. We have been turning corporate infrastructure into counterculture since before most tech cities had a scene. That is the tradition you’re standing in. Not opting out. Using it wrong.
Build a Posse
I’m watching a bloodbath. Generative AI is consuming one creative industry after another. Coders. Journalists. Photographers. Strategists. You see it. I see it. Nobody is immune.
So I stopped waiting for someone to build the lifeboat and started building it myself. The BC AI Community. Four hundred members. Nine thousand on the newsletter. We’re learning together. What’s working. What’s failing. What to refuse.
Kevin Friel, twenty-five years in Hollywood visual effects, Dune, Detective Pikachu, describes working with these tools like a conductor with a much bigger orchestra. Get to about eighty-five percent with the machine. Use craft to finish the last fifteen. The conductor doesn’t become irrelevant when the orchestra grows. The conductor becomes more important.
Don’t build community. That word has lost its teeth. Build a posse. Five to twelve people you actually learn with, every week, in real time. The lifeboat is the posse. And it has room for one more.
The Tool Is Never Neutral
Every Vancouver AI Community gathering opens with an Indigenous welcome from the Coast Salish territory. Anthony Joseph, Isiléyu, said something I think about constantly.
He said: my ancestors didn’t have chainsaws. But they would’ve used them if they were there.
That’s the whole permission slip. The creative impulse is continuous. The tools change. The people who pick them up are in the same lineage. Adaptability is not capitulation. Sacred is not antiquated.
The tool is never neutral. But neither are we.
The Three Documents
This is the most practical punk move I know. Write three documents.
One: a Personal AI Policy. What will you use these tools for? What will you refuse? Five sentences will do. Mine refuses generative imagery for any role a human photographer could fill. That’s a hard line that came from twenty years of practice and two minutes of writing.
Two: a Style and Voice Guide. What does your work sound like when it’s really you? What are the ten words you refuse to say? Ban the word delve. Ban the phrase in today’s fast-paced world. Be specific.
Three: a Worldview Document. Your values, your politics, your perspective. Are you a feminist? An anarchist? A punk? Coast Salish? A weird hybrid of all of the above? Write it down.
You don’t have to start from scratch. You already have the raw material. Old blog posts. Interviews. Emails. Photographs. Resumes. Feed your own corpus into AI and ask it to find the patterns. Ask it what you believe. Ask it what you sound like. It will hand you a first draft of who you already are.
I did this with twenty of my own photographs. I asked the AI to describe the structural patterns. What came back stopped me cold. It named something I’d been doing for fifteen years without ever consciously articulating it. Like seeing a map of a city I’ve lived in for decades but never seen from above. That was the document. That was who I already was on the page.
Then feed those documents back to whatever AI you use every day. The machine stops giving you the average of the internet. It starts amplifying what makes you you. If your values aren’t in text, to AI they basically don’t exist. Make them exist.
You can do all three on the companion site we built for this talk. The Three Documents builder is right there. So is the Both Hands Full canvas. The Selector. Bias Bingo. The Cutting Room Floor. The Lineage timeline. All of it. Free. Pick whichever calls you.
Release Day
The global Release Day is May 29. Four weeks from Friday. The deal is simple.
Pick up the tool. Use it wrong. Make something only you could make. A zine. A short film. A photo series. The album you’ve been sitting on for a decade. The book you started in 2017 and never finished.
Ship it on May 29.
You don’t have to make it perfect. Punk never was. You don’t have to figure it all out first. You have already figured out more than you give yourself credit for. The three documents will tell you that.
Submit at punkrockai.com/release-day.
You Coming?
I’ve carried a line since I was fifteen years old. My youth pastor used to say it.
Any dead fish can float downstream. But it takes a live fish to swim against the current.
Use these tools to mess it up.
You coming?
Credits
This talk exists because of many people.
Dr. Joy Buolamwini and the Algorithmic Justice League for doing the work that makes the naming possible. Matt Lambert. Kevin Friel. Brett Gaylor. Cory Doctorow. Anthony Joseph, Isiléyu, for the chainsaw line and for opening every BC+AI gathering with the welcome that grounds the work in the territory.
Mark Busse for fourteen years of CreativeMornings/Vancouver and for pushing harder, every time.
And Kelly and Debbie Krug for choosing their kid over the rules.
The full companion site, with every widget the talk pointed at, the slides, and the audio, is at punkrockai.com. The newsletter and the Discord are at bc-ai.ca. The lifeboat is the posse. Room for one more.
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