Working With the Machine: Mark LaFountain on AI, Design, and Adaptation

A local creative professional reflects on the technology behind a larger shift now reaching western Virginia

By Danny Cardwell | Allegheny Mountain Radio

For nearly two years, Allegheny Mountain Radio has been following one central question: What happens when the infrastructure powering artificial intelligence moves beyond Northern Virginia and begins reaching rural communities?

That question became more immediate this year when Google announced plans for a major hyperscale data center campus in Botetourt County. The proposed project includes three data center buildings, three electrical substations, and an investment estimated at at least $3 billion. It would be the first data center campus of its kind along Virginia’s Interstate 81 corridor.

For years, Virginia’s data center story was concentrated in Northern Virginia, where Loudoun County became known worldwide as Data Center Alley. But as land becomes harder to find, infrastructure becomes more strained, and communities push back, developers are looking farther south and west.

The technology did not suddenly become more powerful.

It simply became much closer.

That shift is the focus of AMR’s continuing Hyperscale: Power and the Pace of Change reporting. Earlier installments examined the cooperative model, electricity demand, ratepayer questions, utility regulation, and the forces driving the artificial intelligence buildout. AMR has spoken with Bill Buchanan of BARC Electric Cooperative, Jason Carter of Shenandoah Valley Electric Cooperative, and Bath County native Jon Judah, who works with major technology companies.

More recently, economist Lauren Saidel-Baker told Bloomberg Surveillance that data centers are helping drive utility costs higher not only for the facilities themselves, but for residential customers and other businesses as well.

Those are large questions: power demand, transmission, substations, investment, rates, and who ultimately carries the cost.

But there is another side to the story.

Artificial intelligence is already changing the way local people work.

Mark LaFountain is a volunteer programmer at Allegheny Mountain Radio and the host of Poptitude, a program built around pop music, positivity, and songs that make people feel good. Away from the microphone, LaFountain is co-owner of Polytone Design Company in Hot Springs, where he has spent more than three decades working in graphic design and branding.

In a two-part conversation with AMR, LaFountain discussed what generative AI looks like from inside a small creative business: not as a distant corporate concept, but as a tool already changing client expectations, production schedules, and the creative process.

For LaFountain, generative AI is not the first technology to disrupt creative work. He remembers the concern surrounding programs such as Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. At the time, some feared those digital tools would eliminate the work of sign painters and mechanical designers.

Instead, they became part of the standard workflow.

LaFountain sees generative AI as the next stage of that evolution, although he recognizes that the speed and capability of the technology make this moment feel different. Early AI-generated images were often visibly flawed. Today, he says, the tools can produce concepts and visual elements from a written prompt with results that would have seemed impossible only a few years ago.

He described the experience as “the closest thing to magic” he has seen.

That sense of possibility is one reason Polytone Design Company has chosen to explore the tools directly. LaFountain said AI is here to stay and that professionals who learn to use it responsibly may have an advantage over those who ignore it.

For his business, the goal is not to replace graphic design or professional judgment. It is to improve workflow. Generative AI can help develop early visual concepts, move smaller production tasks forward, and help clients reach a finished product more efficiently.

LaFountain also emphasized transparency. Polytone has been open with clients about its exploration of AI tools rather than using them quietly behind the scenes. He recognizes that questions about authorship, ethics, labor, and how creative work is valued are legitimate.

That local experience is connected to the much larger system AMR has been documenting.

The tools LaFountain uses depend on computing infrastructure housed in data centers. Those facilities require land, cooling systems, transmission capacity, substations, and extraordinary amounts of electricity. Google’s proposed Botetourt campus is one visible example of that infrastructure moving into a new part of Virginia.

The question is not simply whether AI will change the way people work. It already is.

The larger question is whether communities will have the information they need to understand the infrastructure, energy demands, and economic consequences that arrive with it.

The full two-part interview with Mark LaFountain is available through AMR’s continuing Hyperscale: Power and the Pace of Change coverage. Previous stories in the series examine the electricity, infrastructure, ratepayer, and policy questions surrounding artificial intelligence and data center growth across Virginia.

This story is part of Allegheny Mountain Radio’s Listening Post Collective Seed Project, supported by the Listening Post Collective, Internews, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Part 1

Part 2