I must admit I’ve tried to read this essay by Frank Chimero—a script from a talk he recently gave—for about a week. I tried to skim it. I tried to fit it into a spare five minutes here and there. But this piece demands active reading. Not because it’s dense. But because it is great.

Chimero reflects on AI and his—and our—relationship to it. How is it being marketed? How do we think about it? How should we use it?

First off, Chimero starts with his conclusion. He believes we should reframe AI to be less like a tool or technology, and more like a musical instrument.

Thinking of AI as an instrument recenters the focus on practice. Instruments require a performance that relies on technique—the horn makes the sound, but how and what you blow into it matters; the drum machine keeps time and plays the samples, but what you sample and how you swing on top of it becomes your signature.

In other words, instruments can surprise you with what they offer, but they are not automatic. In the end, they require a touch. You use a tool, but you play an instrument. It’s a more expansive way of doing, and the doing of it all is important, because that’s where you develop the instincts for excellence. There is no purpose to better machines if they do not also produce better humans.

Then, he wanders off to give examples of four artists and their relationships with technology, stoking his audience—me, us, you—to consider “some more flexibility in how to collaborate with the machine in your own work, creative or otherwise.”

Read the whole piece. Curl up this mid-autumn Sunday afternoon with some hot tea and take the 20–25 minutes to read it and take it in.