UPSCALE felt less like a conference and more like a rehearsal for a near‑future studio where AI agents sit beside us at the table. The talk tracks braided together loneliness and therapy, filmmaking stacks without gatekeepers, the shift from UX to AX (Agent Experience), and the quiet claim that context (embeddings) is the new canvas. Tools were framed not as replacements but as synthesizers; photography didn’t kill painting, it mutated it. Maybe AI is just the next mutation, a way to add an invisible layer of feeling over what we already make.
If yesterday’s work was about pushing finished content to users, the energy in the room was about pull: agents that arrive when summoned, inhabit our situations, and then recede. Design disciplines started to sound less like arranging pixels and more like choreographing relationships between people, models, data, and the rituals that hold them together. The film crowd showed how the stack accelerates; the designers reminded us that acceleration without ethics, authorship, and care is just shallow speed.
I kept returning to the personal. The most compelling demos weren’t the most technically extreme; they were the ones where a memory or a place, something stubbornly human, was threaded through an image or a beat. It confirmed a hunch: the frontier isn’t more spectacle, it’s more specificity. Less prompt fireworks, more world‑building rooted in lived experience.
Leaving UPSCALE, I’m convinced: the metric won’t be resolution or speed but trust. We’re not just designing outputs, we’re designing terms of engagement between people, ai agents, and the worlds we make together for the human experience.