Comment by echelon
8 hours ago
Nolan made "The Odyssey". It was his vision.
Hitchcock made "Psycho".
Miyazaki made "Princess Mononoke".
While you can say Roger Deakins shot "Blade Runner 2049" or Hans Zimmer scored "Interstellar", even these masters of their craft paired with directors to make their films. The film is still typically the work of the auteur director, and the director (usually) exercises control over all of these pieces.
You can tell when that doesn't happen. You can tell when the producers exercise outsized control. Or when the studio controls the editing table. And it's not like that's ever kept a secret - people talk about this openly and loudly when it happens.
Musk built his empire, and even if he bought his way in, he still used his unique methodology to turn it into what it is today. "Founder Mode", if you will. Same thing with Steve Jobs.
All of this hand-wringing about who painted the shed in "The Evil Dead" doesn't matter. It's Sam Raimi's. Everyone else on set dances to the beat of his drum.
Software can (and will) be like that too.
Game design, company formation, product development, you name it.
I agree with you. There would be no X without Y person. Undeniably. The scope of the project matters seems clear though. I think it should be clear and obvious what one means when they say "I made this" recipe from scratch. Even then, there's "did you invent this recipe!?" or do you mean you "prepared it in your kitchen?." That scale and scope is very different from what it means to make a film. And it's where I agree, there's substance to a Hitchcock film being made by Hitchcock. It doesn't mean he literally wrote, acted, set/wardrobe-created, and filmed the movie! But we're losing the plot here to give a similar substance to "I made this app" and allow it to mean one-shotting Fable to clone the latest "you don't prompt AI, you build your empire with a team of Agents" orchestrator.
Future people will look back on this transitional time with curiosity. This is all going to be a non-issue in time.
The fairy path of human language is going to adopt "creation" as assuming someone could have prompted it. It's the path of least resistance, and it's something that will only increase in normality in our daily lives and experience.
Nobody in the future is going to have these paragraphs-long diatribes about what does and does not constitute creation. People are just going to say, "I made this."
And that's that. We'll judge based on the significance and novelty of the output or work.
Nobody bickers about the definition of "photograph".
Nobody will bicker about "created", either.
If someone in the future wants to spend a year making a stop-motion, claymation-animated feature, people will still think that's cool. It'll be something they "created". But it won't stop the world when most people are using new tools, nor will it stop us from calling their outputs "creations" and something they "made".
I'm making something with Claude Code right now. And to be very deliberate about it - I am making it.