The 30%, the Lemur, and the Flood: Notes from a Powered Armor Jam Session
1. The Sounding Board and the Suit: AI as Creative Tool
A friend of mine—a truck driver by trade and a game designer by night—recently shared how they use AI in their creative process. They’re not trained in literature or design, and they don’t pretend to be. But they write adventures, riff on tropes, and play with themes using AI as a sounding board. Not the executor—just the helper demon.
They framed AI as a way to close skill gaps, like putting on a suit of powered armor. That metaphor stuck with me. You’re still the one moving—AI just lets you lift heavier ideas. And that matters, especially in the fragmented world of indie RPGs where formal pathways are a luxury and most of us are making stuff on instinct and caffeine.
2. Economic Validation and the False Idol of Success
I’ve seen firsthand what it means to be a working creative: friends in bands scraping by, balancing passion with rent. It taught me early on that there’s no straight path to success—and maybe that’s a good thing. I wrangle cloud infrastructure by day, but I don’t pretend that makes me more legitimate than the cargo haulers. If anything, I respect their hustle more.
Creative work, for me, isn’t economic activity. Not really. It’s the night job in the noblest sense—the work we do when no one’s watching. It’s how we make sense of things. And sure, AI can assist in that, but it can’t generate the spark. The best it can offer is average. The rest is up to us.
3. Helper Demons, Jam Sessions, and Nod Culture
There’s a particular kind of magic in a jam session that doesn’t go anywhere. No gig. No album. Just a moment. Too often we jump from spark to monetization: "That was great, let’s make it a thing."
But sometimes, all that’s needed is a nod. A “hey, I see you.” That’s enough. That’s human. And in this increasingly platformed, optimized world, that might be the rarest currency of all.
4. On Floods and Thresholds: The Ghibli Debate
A recent wave of AI discourse brought up Studio Ghibli—how tools like GPT-4.5 can replicate "the Ghibli look" in seconds. Animators who spend weeks studying light and motion are now “matched” by predictive mimicry.
But let’s be real: it’s not a 100% replication. Maybe 70%. And if that’s good enough for the masses (elitist privilege check), what happens to the other 30%? That 30% is where the soul lives—the slowness, the imperfection, the why behind the image. It’s not scalable. And in a capitalist system, that makes it endangered.
5. Stewardship of the Irreducible
Flooding the market doesn’t mean total annihilation—it means displacement. The center cannot hold, but the weird stuff floats. The slow crafts. The care work. The fragments people carried onto the boat.
Maybe our job isn’t to save the market. Maybe it’s to save the meaning. To tend the ark. To gather what the models can’t understand. Not out of fear, but reverence.
6. The Lemur with the Basket
Which brings me, somehow, to the lemur in Flow. That chaotic little archivist with a basket full of junk. Not a whale riding the flood. Not a prophet. Just a hoarder of vibes. A survivor.
That lemur might be the real spirit animal of this creative age. They’re not trying to make a dent in the market. They’re just saving what they can, because they feel it might matter. And that’s enough.
So no, I don’t make a dent. But I’ve got my basket. And I’m paying attention.