alt Hacker News> where does AI fit in? […] what am I, then?
One of many. Personally I’ve never seen this as a particularly confusing or mysterious question, as long as you don’t anthropomorphize the computer. The computer isn’t writing your apps out of thin air, people made all the training data, and people wrote the tools that can turn prompts into code & images. You are just choosing to use the work of other people, and tools made by other people. In a very real way, your situation supports the article’s notion that we are nothing without the others.
Art, and especially digital art, has always had the ability to use/borrow/steal/remix the work & tools of others. AI is just the newest tool other people made that can do faster borrowing of other people’s work than before. After MacPaint, we had Photoshop and that was used to do a lot of borrowing & remixing too (as well as plenty of original & creative digital work).
I’m guessing that use of AI will mirror the other tools in the sense that the people who will be celebrated for their creativity, for the most part, will be the people who limit their use of borrowing from others and bring new ideas to the work, and/or the people who can tell the best story about what they did.
Your reply has some comforting points, but there are also a few difficult ones. Because the premise of all this is basically that there's originality based on ideas, right? But realistically, the apps I deliver aren't original. They're more like, 'There's this app, could you migrate this feature for us?' or 'Could you implement X site's functionality for us too?'
In that sense, the tool creators in the original post are tool makers. They're like mold makers for tools. But I'm more like mass production, so there's a bit of a difficult point there. The problem is that I sometimes wonder whether my mass-production identity is actually better than AI.