You are not morally superior for struggling more to complete the same small personal project/task

Awesome, thanks for the recommendation. I started working on pixel art for a game about a year ago and I wish I had bothered to look up some lessons beforehand. Every few months something new will "click" about how to do something differently and I invariably end up going back through all the old assets and updating them.

I think I understand where we're diverging here, and part of it was due to poor reading comprehension by me. When I saw your comment:

"I said in my reply that determining whether something that was made with both AI and human contributions should be deemed a work of human creativity is not trivial. That being said, I can’t consider a piece of code entirely written by AI to fit the criteria for copyright protection.

And, dude, photography is 100% creative work and recognized as such everywhere. Yes, the machine takes the picture, but there’s a human who decided the subject, how to frame it, light, composition, not to mention the artistic intent, what he means to convey with that picture."

in my mind I read that as "I can't consider a piece of code entirely written by AI to be creative work", which isn't what you actually said. I absolutely agree that AI can be used in non-creative ways, but I want to spend minute to mention how I think AI can actually enable creativity rather than replace it.

I'm a software developer for a pretty big enterprise and the way I use AI is not creative in the slightest. Writing code is the part of my job that I like the most so I never really use AI outside of automating boring stuff that I don't want to do, like taking my commits from the past week and writing an update for management each Friday, stuff like that. I also used it recently to write a test suite for a python backend that I was migrating from Flask to Fast API and it worked pretty well for that, but obviously I wouldn't consider that a creative endeavor.

However I have a friend who is a civil engineer, who is pretty comfortable with computers and has done a little modding for old games. I've tried to get her to learn some basic python for data analysis for her work, but she gets intimidated by the idea of programming. For the past few months, she's been using claude to create a website for people in her section to use at work. She takes bridge inspection and location data, does some basic statistics like grouping average inspection scores per county, and then displays all the data on a map with styled points and lines the end user can click to find out more information about the bridge.

Even though she hasn't written a single line of code, she has spent 4 or 5 months creating an application, learning the entire stack, redesigning each page/view, understanding how maplibre works and making decisions about how to render the objects, how the information should be arranged, how the pop up dialogues should work, interlinking functionality with other apps they use for work, etc. What irked me was the thought that someone could look at her work and completely dismiss it as non-creative simply because her hands didn't type the code for all the decisions she made in designing it. The way I see it, working with AI like this is no different than the decision making you mentioned in reference to photography. She is still in control of the vast majority of the design and functionality of the website, even though she's not personally deciding the border radius for each button.

Hopefully you can see my perspective there, and sorry again if my earlier comment sounded dismissive or combative. I came to lemmy from reddit a few years ago and I think the thing I love the most about this site is the fact that you can actually have constructive and nuanced conversations with people who disagree with you without it devolving into name calling or shouting. Thank you for giving me a chance to get that off my chest <3

Sorry, I hope I didn't sound combative, I'm just genuinely curious about how people bifurcate these ideas. If anyone else wants to give their perspective I'd be glad to hear it.

In my mind, the use of tools has no bearing on the creativity of the user. I don't really see a difference between coming up with an idea for a beautiful website and then creating it by writing react vs creating it by writing prompts. Just like i dont think writing vanilla javascript is better than writing react, or assembly better than javascript.

The creation is the important part, coming up with an idea for something that could improve the world around you, and then bringing that thing into existence.

How about photoshop then? Or music creation tools like Garage Band? Does any assistance by software invalidate the creative pursuit of the user? By extension you could argue that all 3rd gen programming languages are the same, you're not writing the 1s and 0s for your code, the machine is doing it for you.

I like the comparison the other use made to GUI tools like Wix or Squarespace. If a user creates a page on Wix, they design the layout, the color palette, the content, etc. which is all undoubtedly up to the creativity of the user. How is prompting an llm to build the same website any less creative? The user is going through almost the same steps, designing the layout and all that, but because they're using natural language instead of a drag and drop tool, suddenly it's not a creative task?

Same energy as this tweet, very real and valid

Anyone have a good book recommendation for this time period?

Northerlion has a pretty good bit about this

I've actually been working on an ant settlement sim in godot, but it's closer to dwarf fortress than factorio

Your posts are always so fun and informational at the same time, thank you for being a pillar of the fediverse!

It's funny the stuff that can set people off, I can't stand the feel of long pants and short socks. If I'm wearing long pants, my ankles have to be covered by my socks.