Creative Mornings Vancouver · 01 . 05 . 2026
Punk Rock AI
Both hands full.
AI is trained on stolen work without consent — and many of us are also more creative than we’ve ever been. Both things can be true. The punk move is to stay in the room.
The thesis
Name the harm. Then use the tools wrong on purpose so the story isn’t written only by people who don’t see the problem.
This site is the working portal for the talk. It is built the way the talk argues you should make things in 2026: punk-rock simple, hand-rolled, with your taste turned all the way up. No framework. No bundler. No CMS. The imagery is the spine. The widgets are the point.
Field notes
How we built it.
A feature-length recap of the talk, the slides, the dress rehearsal, the portal, and the room. With receipts.
Do the talk.
Phase 1 widgets
-
01
The talk & quote wall
All 22 slides, every key line linkable and copyable, the imagery as it was made.
Open → -
02
Three documents
Personal AI policy, style guide, worldview. Externalize your taste so the machine stops giving you the average of the internet.
Build → -
03
Both hands full
Diptych canvas. Critique in one hand, capability in the other. Export the stance as a poster you can tape on a wall.
Make one → -
04
Lineage
Dada → Burroughs → xerox punks → Jamaican selectors → hip hop → AI. Every generation: corporations build, weirdos figure out what it’s for.
Walk it →
Go deeper.
Phase 2 & 3
-
05
Name what you see
Five real bias case studies with primary citations. Stop saying “bias.” Name what you’re seeing.
Walk through → -
06
Taste audit
What did you throw away this week? List ten. Mark each kept or refused. Find the pattern in your refusals.
Audit → -
07
Pattern finder
Paste your corpus. The model names the structural patterns you’ve been making for fifteen years without consciously articulating them.
Find them → -
08
Library
Sixty-plus markdown files. One search box. The whole talk is in there.
Search → -
09
Posse
The room you’re walking into. Eleven highlighted RSVPs from the May 1 audience.
Meet them → -
10
Decisions
The talk’s own decision log, in public. Open questions, resolved questions, and the running session trail.
Read → -
11
Cut-up generator
Burroughs / Dada cut-up. Paste anything. Cut by word, phrase, or line. Export the rearrangement as a poster. Arrangement is the medium.
Cut it → -
12
The Selector
Build a set list from quotes, lineage beats, and slide titles. Hit play. Every order is a different room reading.
Spin a set → -
13
Bias Bingo
Twenty-five categories that bias laundering hides under. Mark a cell when you’ve seen it ship. Complete a row to download the framework.
Play a card → -
14
Word-ban tester
Paste any AI output. Your style guide’s refuse list lights up the cliché. Stop letting the bot put delve in your mouth.
Scan → -
15
Junior Pipeline
Two ladders side by side. The old career path. The new one with the bottom three rungs eaten by AI. Where the next masters come from is the open question of this decade.
See the gap → -
16
Pattern cluster graph
Six eras as nodes. Six moves — cut-up, sampling, détournement, selection, reuse, refusal — as edges. Hover for citations. Click a move to see how the same gesture manifests across eras.
Trace the through-line → -
17
Chainsaws of history
Every “neutral” tool was a corporate spectacle until somebody used it wrong on purpose. Printing press to AI in six beats, anchored on Anthony Joseph’s line.
Pick up the tool → -
18
Mastery Gym tracker
Daily check-in. One cycle a day — try, feedback, iterate — with a streak counter, a sixteen-week heatmap, and a Markdown export of your last thirty cycles.
Log a cycle → -
19
Open Source Receipt
Toy estimator: how much of you is in the training data? A short questionnaire prints a paper-receipt-style heuristic. Heavily caveated — a feeling, not a fact.
Print the receipt → -
20
Détournement maker
Drop in an ad. Mark it up zine-style with text, redactions, halftone fills, accent splashes. Export the rebuttal as a PNG. The tools of spectacle, turned against the spectacle.
Mark it up → -
21
Am I in there?
Paste a URL or pick a content type. The page tells you which major training corpora — Common Crawl, LAION, The Pile, RedPajama, FineWeb — plausibly swept your work, and links the opt-out tools that affect what gets swept next.
Check the windows →
Release Day — 29 . 05 . 2026
Ship something imperfect by the deadline.
The whole point of this is the thing you make. Bring it to the global Release Day. creativemornings.com/releaseday.