Should AI Power Users Exist?
Some thoughts on AI from someone who should know better.
I say a creative person never accepts the defaults. Creativity is an iterative process. When someone says “I tried AI once…” they are telling on themselves.
Zero-shot, prompt-and-done is someone using a trumpet as a bicycle horn, then declaring all jazz is noise. Sure, you may have generated something — but you accepted the first result, which is just a randomized average of the weights. You used the cliché machine to make a cliché.
But a power user can turn that trumpet into a synthesizer. Modulating noise through trained weights, driven with deliberate intention, out of the gravity wells of triteness — that’s an emerging artform. One worthy of mastery. But only if you bring your own living human contribution. Otherwise it’s a dead rehash of the past.
I trained on the same internet you did.
Every picture I’ve ever seen lives in my head as a compressed impression, not a file. AI models are the same — compressing a billion pictures, books, sounds, code and videos into a ~5 GB file of magnetic weights is not a cache of stolen documents. It’s sediment. It’s the residue of human thought, packed into something you can throw a marble at and get something back.
Our prompts are like metal marbles. The model is a starfield of magnets. You can dial the control loose or tight, harmonize or clash — but you're playing an instrument made of chaos and antiquity. You can blend a prompt, a drawing, a reference image or pure noise — tacking upwind like a sailboat, triangulating toward something that didn't exist before you reached for it.
So let’s talk about theft. Compressing a billion pictures, books, sounds, code and videos into a single ~5 GB file was not the discovery — it’s important that more people know what it really is.
The internet itself runs on shared, public packets. My avatar pic above exists in memory on your machine right now. TCP/IP was never a private conversation. The question of whether training on public data is “theft” exploits the under-informed — because the alternative framing, that an AI took an art class and stole the lesson, is absurd.
But I understand why people oppose it.
Vocations are at risk. Mine certainly is. Calligraphers opposed the printing press. Weavers opposed the loom. They weren’t wrong to feel the threat — they were right. Careers died.
But the printing press gave us the novel, journalism, comics, mass literacy, and this sentence. It was worth it. I think this is too.
If there’s copyright infringement done with AI, it’s done by the prompter, or the tool builder who dialed the factory default weights so tight they made it plagiarize. It wasn’t the bike. It was the rider.
I do not think a visit to a museum is a heist. I do not think insight is theft.
A creative person never accepts the defaults.
Bay Raitt led building Gollum’s face for Lord of the Rings, spent nine years at Valve building the Source Filmmaker + cinematics and video games, He helped build AI models from scratch at Unity, He Co-Founded Nura Studios building Showcraft and is the Head of Character & Experience at Color. He is, by his own admission, an outlier on the edge that’s not supposed to exist.
“~5 GB file of magnetic weights is not a cache of stolen documents. It’s sediment.…..”
This is beautiful logic.