For painting, realism was really what made works great for a long time. Then photography came along and realistic depictions of things were no longer novel, so painting became about representing things in a more surreal way, and novel representations of perspective and emotion became great. Meanwhile with photography initially just capturing a clear image was impressive but now you need to capture something truly rare to have a great photo.
With AI I'm struggling to imagine what will be hard enough to achieve that it remains novel.
I hope no one will fall for it: even when you emphatically reply "I spent the last year building the pipelines I use" it'll still be treated as equivalent a couple of sentences relative to the old ways.
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At the end of the day, the painful lesson some people are (re)-learning is that creative expression doesn't have to be tied to any specific process. A lot of people fall in love with creative expression + process... but some fall in love with just the process, and some fall in love with creative regardless of the process.
AI does not favor those of us who loved the process (that's me with coding), but it's definitely capable of allowing new people to experience what it's like to have creative input in your mind and see it expressed outside of your mind.
There are people who love coding and really dislike vibecoding, but atleast coding and prompting are the same mode of activity (typing in to a computer) so you don’t have to change your whole life to move from one to another.