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Comment by schmidtleonard | Hacker News Reader

> You still make these. You sit down and form the art.

When you use a camera you don't make anything. You press a button and the camera makes it. You haven't even described it.

When you use photoshop you don't make anything. You press buttons and the software just draws the pixels for you. It doesn't make you a painter.

When you use 3D rendering software you don't make anything. You tell the computer about the scene and the computer makes it. You've barely commissioned it.

It's easy to be super reductive. Easy but wrong.

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Sorry, I don't think it's the same because making physical specifications via modifying pixels, or 3D art, or forming a shot is something you do.

It's the difference between making a house with wood and making a house by telling someone to make a house. One is making a house, one isn't.

The problem with AI is that it's natural language. So there's no skill there, you're describing something, you're commissioning it. When I do photoshop, I'm not describing anything, I'm modifying pixels. When I do 3D modeling, I'm not describing anything, I'm doing modeling.

You can say that those more formal specifications is the same as a description. But it's not. Because then why aren't the business folks programmers? Why aren't the people who come up with the requirements software engineers? Why are YOU the engineer and not them?

Because you made it formally, they just described it. So you're the engineer, they're the business analysts.

Also, as a side note, it's not at all reductive to say people who use AI just describe what they want. That is literally, actually, what they do. There's no more secret sauce than that - that is where the process begins and ends. If that makes it seem really uninspired then that's a clue, not an indicator that my reasoning is broken.

You can get into prompt engineering and whatever, I don't care. You can be a prompt engineer then, but not an artist. To me it seems plainly obvious nobody has any trouble applying this to everyone else, but suddenly when it's AI it's like everyone's prior human experience evaporates and they're saying novel things.

Try it sometime. Don't just type one prompt and declare the job done. Try to make something that invokes a reaction in yourself.

AI makes it easy to generate ten thousand random images. Making something of interest still requires a lot of digging in the tools and in your self.

Right, it can require describing and refining over and over. I still don't think that means you did the thing. Otherwise, the business analysts who have to constantly describe requirements would be software engineers, but they're not.

Not that that isn't a skill in it of itself. I just don't think it's a creationary skill. What you're creating is the description, not the product.

Best reply I can give ya I already typed up for someone else here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41743680

You are creating the product but have to go through an unclear layer and through trial and error you try to reach your original vision. No different from painting a picture for an amateur.

The better you get the closer you can get to your original vision.

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