A classic tale from the music production world comes to mind:
"I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all."
Does prompting an AI music generation service count as making your own songs? I noticed you left that one out of your parable.
As a songwriter, drum hitter, and acoustic strummer, I am not good at drums (can play on beat, though), guitar (can strum all the cowboy chords, though), or singing (no caveat on this one).
So sometimes when I want to hear what my song COULD be if I were good at every one of those, I will use Suno. But I do not let it change my lyrics, or chose it's own arrangement. I will give it a VERY ROUGH demo (out of key singing, basic drums and strums, and it will "polish" my turds into really shiny turds.
Does snapping a photo with a camera count as making your own painting?
We don’t call the end result a painting though, we call it a photo. Theres probably some value to distinguishing between them.
A set of pleasing qualia.
If figma draws you a gradient, are you really a designer?
Probably yes; If Figma is deciding for you where the gradient goes, what colors it is, and what its purpose in the design is, then no.
it kinda is by showing you tools in a certain order and what defaults and so on
A designer, yes. A painter, no.
No, it's using FL Studio's random sequence generator with a general MIDI instrument, exporting it, then saying it's a ballad you just composed. Or paying a ghostwriter to write on a topic, then saying it's a novel you just wrote.
"Good artists copy, great artists steal." - Picasso
> "Good artists copy, great artists steal." - Picasso
The problem being that the users of LLMs aren't even putting forth the effort to do the stealing themselves, which would at least have implied some level of discernment and artistic effort in selecting what to steal.
Like bad managers stealing credit for their subordinates' hard work, bad LLM advocates wish to normalize taking credit for the work the LLM does on their behalf.