This became more relevant to me when I began meeting producers as a software engineer in game development.
"Make" gets confusing for AI-assisted projects because it carries a connotation of craft. It seems fully justified for a code project that is 90% you, 10% AI (you'd say you made something that was 90% you, 10% human help) and misleading for a project that is 90% AI, 10% you (unless the meaning of the word shifts).
Here is a relevant comment I wrote in a thread about AI art (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46705952#46708186):
>> If you do it daily, in-house, for your own products... you might just have the title "Art Director."
> "Art director" seems accurate for what a skillful user of art generators with a specific vision does.
> I have also thought that since people find "director" lofty (thanks to auteur theory?) and therefore pretentious to assume, one could borrow "producer" from Vocaloid: https://vocaloid.fandom.com/wiki/Producer (alternative front end: https://antifandom.com/vocaloid/wiki/Producer).
I'm feeling this right now. I have a working prototype of a project that has mirrors mounted on pan/tilt mechanisms driven by servos and controlled by an Arduino. I modeled the mirror mechanisms myself in OpenSCAD and 3D printed them, I laid out the wiring from my head, I assembled everything by hand. But I got Codex to write the Arduino code that uses a GPS module to get the location and time, calculates the sun position, and (with some manual calibration) aims the mirrors to beam sunlight 'pixels' in an x/z grid on the wall.
It works. But for some reason it's profoundly unsatisfying. I'm very unlikely to go from this 4 mirror prototype to the original dream of a James Web Space Telescope model in my courtyard with 18 steerable mirrors drawing low res 1 bit pixel art on my dining room wall.
This is what communication is. Words are representations for whatever it is that we're talking about. There is no other way.
Agree with you on what we're talking about, disagree on the stance. It's a discussion of value yes. vibe-coded software has less "I made this" value but still holds "does this have utility" value. They're different. Making things with AI is its own kind of making, but it is not the same kind of making as baking a cake from scratch, building a doghouse, or planting your own garden.