AI is punk

Before he died in early 2025, filmmaker David Lynch came out as an advocate for AI, declaring that “AI is punk.”

Punks weren’t classically trained musicians. That didn’t stop them. They grabbed those guitars, smashed those drums, yelled into the mic, and gave civilised society the middle finger along the way. Punk was about breaking rules, challenging the status quo, and experimenting in public.

Of course, AI is controlled by billionaires and corporations. It’s coming for your job. The hype is about speed and productivity.

Less punk rock, more boardroom trash metal.

But underneath the veneer of hypercapitalism, AI embodies that same disruptive spirit.

So let’s talk about using AI as a punk. Not “do stuff faster”. Do stuff that pushes boundaries.

Grab the guitar

Microsoft dropped its version of Claude Cowork this past week, Copilot Cowork.

On paper, this should be the moment Copilot actually starts being useful. Hazard a guess what the top use case MSFT’s marketing team led with?

“You can get Copilot Cowork to write your emails.”

Not very punk.

While much of modern chart music is homogenised cookie-cutter slop for the masses, punk was born out of experimentation. This is the spirit you need to channel to excel with AI.

Sure, you can get Cowork to write your emails. You too can enjoy the fruits of cognitive offloading, the cheapening of connection, and failing to learn anything.

Or you could ask yourself: what can I now do that I couldn’t do before?

I used Cowork to build a plugin that works with my ADHD and dynamically schedules my whole calendar. I dumped everything I know about comms into one plugin, and everything MBB knows about strategy into another.

We now live in an era where if you’ve got an idea, you can have a prototype, a plan, and a way forward within an hour.

Punks don’t wait for permission. Grab the guitar and start playing.

Challenge the status quo

I had the good fortune of being born smart. Pain in the ass smart.

My teachers didn’t know what to do with me, and I’d soon be labelled as a troublemaker. Not the shouty kind though. I was the guy hacking the school computers, downloading blank report forms, and flogging copies on floppy discs for a fiver.

I used my gift to cognitively offload, find shortcuts, and take things easy. I was damn good at it too.

Here’s the last shortcut I learned: shortcuts are a trap. Playing a game with the cheats on feels great until you realise that without challenge, the victory has no meaning.

Without the journey, getting to the destination has no value.

So I flipped it. Instead of asking “how do I use AI to escape work?”, I started asking “how do I use AI to do the work that actually matters?”

The Premier League of AI use cases is not efficiency but effectiveness. Not making an existing process faster but rethinking the approach entirely.

This isn’t to say don’t use shortcuts, but to use them with a bigger goal in mind: more time for stuff worth doing.

This is how a punk uses AI. Offload all the performative nonsense. Use the time you gain to take an AI crowbar to the systems you want to smash.

Break the rules

IT teams everywhere now face the threat of “Shadow AI” — colleagues ignoring restrictive AI policies and hitting up chatbots on the sly.

This is framed as an issue of governance, security and accountability. The actual issue is trying to apply legacy frameworks to a game that has fundamentally changed.

Allow me to be clear: AI is not a tool. It is not software. It is a platform technology. This means we must invent new processes, new ways of working, and new frameworks.

That’s why I’m on the side of the rule breakers.

With such unprecedented disruption taking place, staying still is a guaranteed way to get crushed.

AI is moving incredibly fast, and the curve is exponential. AI is changing how we communicate, how we engage with information, and the speed and scale of what an individual can accomplish. The very nature of how we build organisations around depth of expertise is now redundant as you can get specialism on tap.

If the guy in charge of your AI policy is still trying to make it fit to legacy frameworks, they are failing to see what AI represents.

Those breaking the rules? These are the people who get what’s happening and are taking the correct steps to prepare.

Lynch spent his career making films that the industry said couldn’t be made, shouldn’t be made, and wouldn’t sell. He made them anyway, and they changed cinema. When he looked at AI, he didn’t see a productivity tool. He saw a guitar.

When all the rules are against your favour, the only viable option is to break them.

The question isn’t whether AI is punk. The question is whether you are.

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