Then is AI code creative because the human wrote the prompt or guided the agent? But as you already said you agree that creativity is hard to define, I’m ok with us disagreeing on the exact boundary.
criteria for copyright protection.
honestly copyright was already BS as is. “Fair use” is such a mess
Then is AI code creative because the human wrote the prompt or guided the agent?
That’s something that is and will be argued about to the death. I don’t think that a prompt is enough to say the person writing it had a part on the creation of the thing, but I know someone will disagree. I see it as someone commissioning a portrait from a painter. No matter how detailed the request is, no one would say that the customer painted the picture.
Aside from that, I guess what I’m trying to say is that, in my view, creativity is something inherently human, and so can’t be attributed to a machine or software by definition.
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?
Maybe neither of them are. I wouldn’t expect someone who made a website using one of those tools to claim some form of copyright on that and suing other similar websites.
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.
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.
Don’t worry, comments threads aren’t really the best medium for complex and in depth discussions.
Maybe where we don’t agree is on the role of AI and the difference between AI and other types of tools.
The way I see it, other tools perform are “dumb”, as in they do exactly what you tell them to and nothing else. AI, on the other hand, does more than that, making decisions instead of leaving them to the user.
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
This sounds like no true scotsman. Because I think AI prompting can take just as much creativity as shooting a photo, I must not be a true photographer…
How do you measure creativity so that we can decide if using AI is creative or not? And no, you can’t just claim “creativity = not using AI”, since that would create a circular argument
Then is AI code creative because the human wrote the prompt or guided the agent? But as you already said you agree that creativity is hard to define, I’m ok with us disagreeing on the exact boundary.
honestly copyright was already BS as is. “Fair use” is such a mess
Haha I totally agree that copyright is a mess!
That’s something that is and will be argued about to the death. I don’t think that a prompt is enough to say the person writing it had a part on the creation of the thing, but I know someone will disagree. I see it as someone commissioning a portrait from a painter. No matter how detailed the request is, no one would say that the customer painted the picture.
Aside from that, I guess what I’m trying to say is that, in my view, creativity is something inherently human, and so can’t be attributed to a machine or software by definition.
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?
Maybe neither of them are. I wouldn’t expect someone who made a website using one of those tools to claim some form of copyright on that and suing other similar websites.
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.
Sorry man, it seems we’re at an impasse here.
Either I can’t articulate my point via comments or you’re determined not to get it no matter how I explain it.
I think it’s time to call it quits and use our time more productively. Cheers.
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.
Don’t worry, comments threads aren’t really the best medium for complex and in depth discussions.
Maybe where we don’t agree is on the role of AI and the difference between AI and other types of tools.
The way I see it, other tools perform are “dumb”, as in they do exactly what you tell them to and nothing else. AI, on the other hand, does more than that, making decisions instead of leaving them to the user.
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
Am I a chef because I ordered a pizza and modified some toppings?
are you an artist because you framed a photo while shooting it?
Point being that if you’re going to call photographers creative, then prompting is arguably just as creative
No it absolutely isn’t, and this hot take marks you as someone very obviously completely ignorant of photography.
At its very best, slop creation is art direction. And most of it doesn’t even reach that level of artistry.
It’s slop. Pure and simple. Anybody calling it art is an ignorant jackass.
No but this was the exact criticism levelled by painters against photographers when cameras became more widespread. It’s absolutely a valid argument.
Again, the fact you think it is equivalent is very telling of your extreme ignorance of all forms of art.
Why are you in a group literally called “Fuck AI”? You have an abuse kink? (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Kinks are.)
This sounds like no true scotsman. Because I think AI prompting can take just as much creativity as shooting a photo, I must not be a true photographer…
How do you measure creativity so that we can decide if using AI is creative or not? And no, you can’t just claim “creativity = not using AI”, since that would create a circular argument
Why is a slop-monger even in a group literally called “Fuck AI”?!
Piss off, sea lion.
So you can’t come up with a valid argument so you just resort to name calling? Please, you don’t speak for the community