Instructing a computer via direct instructions versus via a prompt. I believe the line between this will become vague in the future.

It's creating a pizza but just using a tool called grubhub.

Or is it more like creating machine code but using a tool called a compiler? If you've ever made anything with AI you know it by default generates things that aren't ideal. You still have to go in and debug, make the UI better, think of more elegant ways to present things. The fact that you're focused on those issues instead of tediously finding the block of code and maybe tediously looking up ways to fix / make it better is probably an overall good thing in the long run. We've lost the ability to code in assembly I'm not sure that's made software or life worse even if coders as a group are in all likelihood less intelligent these days.

In your analogy maybe it's more like creating a pizza except you didn't have to make the cheese, grind up the flour, go find the water in a stream somewhere, grow the tomatoes yourself, butcher the animal for the meat, etc.

You can throw away the compiler and the developer who created the software will still understand how it works. You can't say the same about someone who used an LLM who would need an LLM to continue working on the project and understand how it works. If the tool understands the code better than you and can't continue without it, you have essentially given up ownership.

The only caveat with my statement is that there are different degrees in which you can involve an LLM in your project but I mean if you are using it to write the majority of your code.

Does paying someone on Fiverr to draw something for you make you an artist?

Is a movie director an artist?

A more apt comparison would be the producer role (not the executive type, I mean the Project Manager type of roles). And to be honest, I've seen some amazing music A&R being the reason an album is a masterpiece without ever pushing a button or playing an instrument. But none of them would call themselves musicians.

It is … our creation?

This is gonna start a debate for sure. V

It is the same way a football fan thinks he helped his team win by watching on the sidelines while the players do the work and give you the illusion of participation.

Shouting racist slurs at the opposition, making monkey noises and throwing bananas is surely why my team won the match! Couldn’t have done it without us.

The thrill of victory, without the agony of defeat.

Thats what $200 for a ticket to any N*L sunday football event buys you.

T-shirts are extra, and if we win, we sell more of them.

The hard working, professional, polite members of society benefit from the release I think.

isn't "home match" usually more favorable? Like you usually play better when you play in your home country.

There is some evidence of that, where the closer the crowd is to the field the more likely the referees are to call in the home team's favour. There was a study on this, probably close to a decade ago now.

Honestly I don’t expect these kind of low quality comment in HN. Where’s your thinking?

If someone used AI and created something illegal(deepfake or whatever), can they claim it’s not their creation?

>Honestly I don’t expect these kind of low quality comment in HN. Where’s your thinking?

A comment that opens a discussion is not low quality just because you disagree with it Mr 7 karma. There is always a degree of irony with such statements.

You choosing the toppings for your pizza and whether you want cheese in your crust does not mean you made the pizza. You did not make it, you merely ordered it.

Wrong metaphor, because making a pizza involves other people.

A better metaphor would be:

A photocopier won’t copy documents by itself. If someone uses a machine to make a copy, they still made that exact copy. Whether that copy constitutes copyright infringement is a separate question.

Authorship still belongs to the user for AI outputs; their originality is debatable, though. These are two distinct concepts that people easily confuse.

Again, apply this reasoning to illegal AI-generated content: if humans are responsible for AI outputs, then they also have authorship of those outputs.

You’re denying another human’s authorship simply because they use a different tool from you.

Another angle you might argue is that you aren’t really “making” something unless you craft it directly. But then what about film directors, architects, or CEOs? Did they really make anything?

Again, you’re denying the role of human intention by gatekeeping the idea of “making” behind direct craft. That’s fine, but it’s a limited worldview.

Whether my argument holds up in court doesn't really matter. I am not discussing the legal or moral implications of AI generated content.

It depends if you can tell.

At which level of instruction abstraction would you deem it to be someone's creation? You could argue anything high level is not someone's creation (e.g, the use of other people's libraries, compiler, machine language etc.)

I consider it at the point I didn't build it with my hands. If I'm placing the girders, I built the building. If I'm instructing someone to place the girders, I didn't. In that case, the best I can get is "we" built the building.

You are not just going up an abstraction. Whether you are using Python, C, Assembly, you are still engineering because you are writing the specific instructions that make the software work. In this case, you are more like a manager than an engineer that is managing something to engineer for you.

Calling scipy.spatial.Delaunay feels about the same level of abstraction as telling an LLM "write me a routine to calculate Delauny triangulation", except the LLM can do it in any language, and I can trivially tweak the algorithm if I need to. If anything, using LLMs to generate code feels like going down a level, because I can now be bothered implementing things from scratch where previously I would simply have used a library.

You can't convince me that shepherding an LLM to re-implement a library function involves less "engineering" than just... calling the function.