In the glassy SF Jazz Center in San Francisco, I found myself sitting among designers, founders, developers, and dreamers, most clutching their morning coffee, all buzzing with excitement. We were gathered for the Upscale Conf by Freepik, a global conference series that brings together top creatives, technologists, and innovators to explore how AI is reshaping the creative industries — from digital art and design to storytelling, film, and music innovation.
What unfolded over those two days wasn’t another industry hype machine or tech product pitch. The event acted as a cultural mirror and a reminder that the way we approach AI as creatives isn’t universal. It’s profoundly shaped by who we are, where we live, and how we make things.
On the East Coast, in New York, where I live and work, the conversation around AI often feels cautious, even skeptical. In studios and schools, at critique panels and gallery openings, you hear a lot about guardrails, authorship crises, and the erosion of craft. At Adobe MAX London earlier this year, the creative energy was felt but underpinned by quiet apprehension and product fatigue. The question wasn’t if AI would change everything, it was whether it would leave space for the designer at all.
San Francisco, however, sang a different tune. At the Upscale Conf, the tone wasn’t fearful. It was exploratory, energized, and unbothered by doom. Here, AI wasn’t framed as a threat. It was framed as playful curiosity.
The way we approach AI as creatives isn’t universal. It’s profoundly shaped by who we are, where we live, and how we make things.
“Creativity is evolving with technology,” Kathryn Han of Meta told the crowd. “But creativity itself is still deeply human and deeply communal.” Her words weren’t a defensive plea, rather a re-centering of the debate not around what AI might replace, but what it might reawaken. That sentiment echoed throughout the event: AI as catalyst, not competition.
Joaquín Cuenca, CEO and Co-Founder of Freepik, delivered what might best be described as an anti-keynote. Rather than focusing on tech specs or slick product demos, he returned again and again to intention. “Stock content was the tool, not the mission,” he said. “The mission was always to help anyone create great design faster.” For Cuenca and for Freepik, the goal isn’t automation. It’s the acceleration of imagination, access, and joy.
That’s not to say the conversations ignored the gravity of the moment. Leonardo de la Rocha, a design leader at SimplePractice, laid out a clear, principled framework for building AI-first design teams, led by human creativity. His session was an encouraging masterclass in strategy: blueprints, company principles, product vision documents, and UX strategies. But beneath the structure was something more philosophical. “AI will happen with or without us,” he warned. “It’s our responsibility as creatives to guide the ship.”
The throughline of many of the talks was the idea that designers must lead, not lag. Claudio Guglieri of Work & Co invoked Baudelaire and Glaser, reminding us that every creative tool — photography, the computer, even the microwave — was once seen as a threat to artistry. Change is constant. But so is resistance. And yet, design endures.
Chad Nelson from OpenAI delivered what might have been the most unnerving and exhilarating moment of the conference. He showed a demo of “vibe coding,” where a game designer’s mood influenced the layout and behavior of their creation in real time. “The real question,” he said, almost offhandedly, “is how do we create things that endure, not just things that are easy to make?” It felt like the question beneath all the buzz, panels, and press releases. While AI might let us generate more than ever before, it also risks flooding the world with content that says very little.
Ben Barry drove this home by returning to the root of design: meaning. AI may generate symbols, but only humans give them emotional weight. “Be careful what you prompt for,” he warned. The tools may get faster, smarter, and more intuitive, but intention will always matter more than execution.
And then Andrea Trabucco-Campos reminded us that before we can create the future, we need to understand the past. In his work on Artificial Typography, he embraced AI’s missteps, curating its glitches into compelling visual studies. “To create something new,” he said, “you need to understand its origins.” It was a subtle reframing: AI not as erasure of visual history, but another chapter in it.
What felt refreshing about the Upscale Conf wasn’t its reverence for new tools, but its insistence on creative stewardship. Whether it was the launch of Freepik Enterprise, Jason Zada’s story-driven AI film trailers, or Tomas Moreno’s technical breakdown of Google Veo and Imagen 4, the emphasis wasn’t on replacing human creativity. It was on redistributing it. Reclaiming it. Reinviting people into the process who might have once been shut out due to cost, access, or technical skill.
As I left the conference, someone beside me whispered, “This is the most hopeful I’ve felt in months.” I understood. Hope was everywhere. Not naïve or blind optimism, but real, complex, creative hope. The kind born when artists and technologists sit down together and ask, “What else is possible?”
AI will continue to evolve, whether we like it or not. But what the Upscale Conf by Freepik reminded me of is that the future of creativity won’t be written by machines. It will first be sketched, messily, bravely, joyfully, by us.
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