Eric Coleman / AI Rising / Human Creativity in the Age of AI

Tripulator.

Does Human Creativity Still Matter in the Era of AI?

This all started with a simple thought: "You know what would be cool?" I wanted to capture the feeling of great musical improvisation: musicians finding something new together, groovy visuals vibing to the music, and something a little different every time. So I built a band and lightshow with agents.

As I played with my crazy machine, I learned new things about what was possible. I made a lot of music that wasn't quite right. And even though lots of my results were cool, I realized that I couldn't get what I was chasing without bringing myself.

This is a talk about play, taste, and the importance of your human creativity in the age of AI.

See the talk

Human Creativity in the Age of AI · AI Rising · October 20, 2026

Watch on YouTube →

Scenes and Lessons

01 / Just play

Find a reason to experiment.

Welcome to Tripulator

Find something big and fun to give you a reason to learn what the tools can actually do. Pick something that makes you curious enough to keep playing.

02 / Keep what works

Keep your generations, and learn from them.

Building the Band

Catalog and save useful generations so you can build on them. Bad generations are useful too - they give you something to learn from.

03 / Share the context

Give your players common ground.

Shared Ground

The musicians follow changing chords because their programs share a musical context. Models write their programs to reference contextual variables, and Tripulator keeps them current. Your team’s card wall, product plan or database schema all serve this same purpose: helping independent contributors pull in the same direction.

04 / Try alternatives

See what sticks.

Visual Bake-off

The same prompt produces different results through Hydra, p5, and GLSL. AI makes experimentation cheap. But choosing what to keep from the results still takes your judgment.

05 / Give direction

Let the agent make a bigger decision.

Play the Instrument

Sometimes one element of a scene needs specific changes. Sometimes the whole band needs a feeling: “Make it feel like driving fast.” "Vibe" prompts can be an interesting way of unsticking your results from the average. See what different levels of context can add to the abilities of your agents.

06 / Keep playing

Let yourself be surprised.

Alien Disco → Latent Bloom

The model matters. The same prompt fired to two different models can yield dramatically different results. Maybe my own guardrails were getting in the way? This experiment changed my idea of what the instrument could do. Keep playing, and push the limits of what you've built. If you think you already know what's possible, you're probably wrong.

07 / Bring yourself

Make something only you can make.

The finale

When I wanted something specific, I had to bring it myself. A riff and a bassline I wrote on my guitar, translated into Strudel. A generative solo recut from my own playing in real time, different every time. The music I was hearing in my head all along, finally real. AI can build the application. It took something human to make it matter.

Try Tripulator

Meet the band.
Make something weird.

Tripulator is a browser-based Rube Goldberg machine for generating music and visuals. Load a scene, change a part, give a musician some direction, and see where it takes you. Turn your own agents loose and change the whole thing. Try different models and capture your best results. Make something cool and tell me about it!

Get Tripulator on GitHub →

How I Made It

An hour wasn't long enough to share everything interesting about this project. Some things I plan to write about:

  • Building the instrument. Models write programs; the browser performs them.
  • AI Bake-off. Techniques for examining many possibilities quickly.
  • Latent Bloom. What I learned when I let the models off the leash.
  • A generative guitar solo. Turning my own playing into a different performance each time.