I disagree, in my opinion it's the exact same process, just on a much smaller scale. It's a problem, and we humans are good at solving problems. That is, until LLMs arrived, now we are supposed to become good at prompting, or something.
Much as I love kākāpō there is no way I was going to invest more than a few minutes in figuring out how to do that.
I love this new world where I can "delegate my thinking" to a computer and get a GIF of a dumpy New Zealand flightless parrot where I would otherwise be unable to do so because I didn't have the time to figure it out.
(I published it as a looping MP4 because that was smaller than the GIF, another thing I didn't have to figure out how to do myself.)
I used ffmpeg and yt-dlp to make an animated GIF of a kākāpō in her nest from a livestream on YouTube the other day. https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/25/kakapo-cam/
Much as I love kākāpō there is no way I was going to invest more than a few minutes in figuring out how to do that.
I love this new world where I can "delegate my thinking" to a computer and get a GIF of a dumpy New Zealand flightless parrot where I would otherwise be unable to do so because I didn't have the time to figure it out.
(I published it as a looping MP4 because that was smaller than the GIF, another thing I didn't have to figure out how to do myself.)