Future people will look back on this transitional time with curiosity. This is all going to be a non-issue in time.
The fairy path of human language is going to adopt "creation" as assuming someone could have prompted it. It's the path of least resistance, and it's something that will only increase in normality in our daily lives and experience.
Nobody in the future is going to have these paragraphs-long diatribes about what does and does not constitute creation. People are just going to say, "I made this."
And that's that. We'll judge based on the significance and novelty of the output or work.
Canon mountaintop photography : smartphone selfies :: Quality AI art and software : ChatGPT Miyazaki cartoons
Nobody bickers about the definition of "photograph".
Nobody will bicker about "created", either.
If someone in the future wants to spend a year making a stop-motion, claymation-animated feature, people will still think that's cool. It'll be something they "created". But it won't stop the world when most people are using new tools, nor will it stop us from calling their outputs "creations" and something they "made".
I'm making something with Claude Code right now. And to be very deliberate about it - I am making it.
> Nobody bickers about the definition of "photograph".
Uh, yeah, because there's nothing to bicker about in the definition of a photograph itself. But people absolutely do not view photographers the same way they view illustrators. Nobody would ever, in a million years, consider you an artist because you snapped a selfie. You also don't "make" a photograph, you "take" a photograph (and this kind of distinction exists in every language I speak). You really couldn't have introduced a better example to defeat your own point.
Photographs presented as works of art have something about the choice of what and how to photograph that is artistic. I can't just, like, take a photo of my leg and call it art. At least not without writing a thought-provoking blurb about is a photo of a leg really art? Then it becomes artistic parody, like the toilet sculpture.
People seem to be downvoting you because they don't want it to be this way, but I feel you're absolutely correct and this in inevitable. No matter how we - 2026 - feel about it, this will be the norm for future generations.
We know it's not inevitable because people are sticklers about the process of creation today.
People claim certain artists work is uninteresting because they didn't paint or sculpt it themselves but instead acted as more of a creative director.
People claim The Odyssey has more value because its physical effects and uses film not digital.
People claim digital art/digital photography isn't real art/photography still.
It's not an insignificant number of people but yeah it's definitely not everyone too but there are definitely ones born way after the argument was already settled on a lot of these things and still argue it. Will be mostly interesting to see how children today think about the value and ownership of education, knowledge, art, etc in a world where they're completely devalued and democratized and if they still have people who think it's not art if you didn't paint it and it's not your work if you didn't think it.
I just watched The Odyssey this evening. Loved it! These stories were passed down in song over thousands of years. Humanity scale type stuff. Thousands of years of spoken and written language based connections.
And it’s all survived. Durable.
So I just sit here and think and laugh wow the ego on us. Call me aged out but im not so sure that your vibe coded app or that tik tok upload is gonna hit the same in 5080.
The fairy path of human language is going to adopt "creation" as assuming someone could have prompted it. It's the path of least resistance, and it's something that will only increase in normality in our daily lives and experience.
Nobody in the future is going to have these paragraphs-long diatribes about what does and does not constitute creation. People are just going to say, "I made this."
And that's that. We'll judge based on the significance and novelty of the output or work.
Nobody bickers about the definition of "photograph".Nobody will bicker about "created", either.
If someone in the future wants to spend a year making a stop-motion, claymation-animated feature, people will still think that's cool. It'll be something they "created". But it won't stop the world when most people are using new tools, nor will it stop us from calling their outputs "creations" and something they "made".
I'm making something with Claude Code right now. And to be very deliberate about it - I am making it.