I've never understood this train of thought. When working in teams and for clients, people always have questions about what we have created. "Why did you choose to implement it like this?" "How does this work?" "Is X possible to do within our timeframe/budget?"

If you become just a manager, you don't have answers to these questions. You can just ask the AI agent for the answer, but at that point, what value are you actually providing to the whole process?

And what happens when, inevitably, the agent responds to your question with "You're absolutely right, I didn't consider that possibility! Let's redo the entire project to account for this?" How do you communicate that to your peers or clients?

I think you are not using enough imagination.

It would not be shocking at all if in 10 years, "Let's redo the entire project to account for this" is exactly how things work.

Or lets make 3 or 4 versions of the project and see what one the customer likes best.

Or each decision point of the customer becomes multiple iterations of the project, with each time the project starting from scratch.

Of course, at some point there might not be a customer in this context. The "customer" that can't handle this internally might no longer be a viable business.

"You're absolutely right" feels so summer 2025 to me.

A key difference is that each of the mediums you mentioned are deterministic and unbiased (to a certain degree.) The the work created can therefore be inferred to be a "pure" expression of the artists intent. A pro photographer and my mom will get wildly different results even with the same equipment. Not so with AI, which very much has it's own bias and is eager to inject it.

The other question is, is AI a tool or a medium? I often hear people say "Well EDM was looked down on when it first came out," but EDM is not a tool, it's a genre. I think most artists wouldn't really care about "AI" becoming a genre of art, but it's silly to think that all future art will be AI just as it would have been silly to think EDM would have replaced all future music.

> A pro photographer and my mom will get wildly different results even with the same equipment. Not so with AI, which very much has it's own bias and is eager to inject it.

That particular AI models have their own bias and are eager to inject it is among the reasons why a skilled user and an unskilled user will have very different results, not a reason why that isn’t true.

> The other question is, is AI a tool or a medium?

Is oil paint on canvas a set of tools or a medium? In art, a tool ot set of tools often characterizes, or even defines, a medium; they are different but not orthogonal concerns. (And the cultural phenomenon of identification of a regularly-used tool or combination of tools as defining a medium generally only happens well after that tool or combination has been in significant use for a while.)

AI is a broad category of tools. Particular combinations of those (either with eachother or with other tools) may also come to be be understood as particular media.

>That particular AI models have their own bias and are eager to inject it is among the reasons why a skilled user and an unskilled user will have very different results, not a reason why that isn’t true.

Not quite what I mean. If you and I both take a photo of the same controlled scene with the same camera, the result will be essentially identical. If you and I both type the exact same prompt into Nano Banana, we will both get very different images. So, how is one supposed to know what parts of the AI image are intentional or incidental? If the AI image is "good," is it good because of or despite the prompter?

>Is oil paint on canvas a set of tools or a medium? In art, a tool ot set of tools often characterizes, or even defines, a medium

Agreed, and this is basically what I'm saying. I'm fine with siloing AI art into it's own category and I'm sure some cool work can be done there. But it's fundamentally odd to think that AI will, for some reason, replace or displace other art.

All due respect to your mother, but a pro photographer would certainly achieve better results. Your mom may recognize something is not right but be unable to articulate it clearly to the tool. Same problem that's always been. The bar has been lowered, not removed.

He explicitly said they would get different results.

The comment said different results with a camera but _not_ with AI.

Honestly I'm okay with "AI art" becoming a category. The issue is when it's presented as handmade, causing confusion.

Digital artwork being presenting at an oil painting conference would cause similar confusion and outrage for the same reasons.

I disagree. AI art is oxymoron. You cannot generate art by definition.

People will argue that if a shortform video is human made or AI generated it doesn't matter, it's domamine-triggering filler either way.

But I do think that the parasocial relationships and discovering new influencers is a big part of the hook for many people, and taking that away may cause many to have a "what the hell am I even watching" moment.

It's easier to justify the addiction when it feels like you're "hanging out with a friend." When content is AI generated from concept to production, it's just...talking pixel soup.

I dunno. AI slop could become digital fentanyl.

I mean, humans didn't need to read billions of books back then to think of quantum mechanics.

Which is why I said it's not impossible, but current LLM architecture is just not good enough to achieve this.

Right, what they needed was billions of years of brute force and trial and error.

The purpose of eating is to ingest nutrients, but that's not why most chefs enjoy cooking, or why people pay more for nicer meals.

Come to think of it, AI Stans do remind me of people bending over backwards to justify how their Soylent farts made them more skilled at living life.

While I appreciate your positive experience, if you were unable to write, storyboard, and communicate your idea before AI--than AI is not going to be "the thing" that suddenly turns you into a filmmaker.

You're writing anyway, you just call it prompting. If you feel that the AI is giving you back more than what you're putting in with that writing, you have to ask yourself who's vision the result really is.

>if you were unable to write, storyboard, and communicate your idea before AI--than AI is not going to be "the thing" that suddenly turns you into a filmmaker.

The person you are replying to doesn’t say that they couldn’t do these aspects before. In fact they mention that they are able to communicate EXACTLY what they want to AI. The only problem was that their idea is high concept.

Getting a high concept film made is one of the most privileged positions in the world. Practically no one can actually just do this. Even people in the film industry with family connections to producers struggle to get their films made.

You have no idea what you’re asking from people when you tell them they should have just made it.

> You're writing anyway, you just call it prompting. If you feel that the AI is giving you back more than what you're putting in with that writing, you have to ask yourself who's vision the result really is.

They didn’t say that, they said they were getting exactly what they were seeing in their head.

Would you say the same thing for cartoonists? Don’t call it film making, call it something else. You are just drawing.

Your video camera is also giving you more than what you put in it.

Animating is a ton of work. Animation decisions can give a great deal of "feel" to a cartoon. Studio Ghibli works are distinct from Disney's old animation and each conveys a distinct feeling. Those decisions are often made by the production team. Its why One Punch Man season 3 is so derided this year after Season 1 was heralded as the greatest season of Anime in a very long time. You'd think following the literal story boards provided by the already published Manga would be simple! but somehow it lost all of its charm.

Animation, or shooting video is the result of many, many pieces. If you're not putting a ton of work into the decisions that result in the final "shot" the video camera makes then the video that is shot isn't magically going to show an enormous amount of care in its construction.

A video of an ocean (or anything) is not, inherently, art, or creative. But also...if you're taking a video of the ocean, it's probably because you want to capture/share a video of the ocean, which an AI generated video is not.

Unless you're making a very particular type of video, you likely want to capture aspects of the water's movement, color, sound, or interactions without much care about faithfully capturing a video of the literal ocean. The former part is a big portion of what turns a video of the ocean from not inherently being art to being as much of art as you make it so. Saying the only reason would be to share the literal ocean forces the art out, not in.

Yes, that's exactly right. It's why I, and many other creatives I know, are not worried about AI. Our annoyance comes more from it dominating the conversation rather than actual perceived risk.

I'm sure there's a creative way to respond to the annoyance. One slightly worrying factoid is that chess players said the same thing about early chess engines, and them being no match for human creativity. Time will tell.

With chess, there is a known, specific end goal, and the "creativity" comes with how you arrive there. With an artwork, the end goal is entirely decided by the artist, there is no "win state" to reward.

That's not what people who play chess thought. The creativity wasn't in the goal, but how you arrived there. The "beauty" of the steps that you took on the way to the goal. They believed that it was human creativity and sense of beauty that would never be encapsulated in a computer program. They turned out to be incorrect, but maybe you're right and things are different in a wider domain, we'll see.

To be clear, Chess is a game, so yes they are still correct.

Not sure exactly you mean, or who you are referring to as being correct. Not sure the relevance of anything being a game, the question is the intersection of computation and interacting with humans. Having been there at the time, I saw the snide dismissals of computers playing chess, they were "simply playing by rote", they were just glorified calculators who could never understand the beautiful moves played by human grandmasters. And this was actually true at the time... it just didn't stay true.

Today, very many humans enjoy spectating computer played chess games, and often comment on the "beauty" of the moves played. Take that for what you will.