[wlesieutre]

> don’t tell me I did not “make” it because it simply would not exist if I hadn’t created it.

So like when I went to a restaurant last week and "made" a cheeseburger with no lettuce and extra onions, because it wouldn't exist if I hadn't created it.

To me, making something can mean you did the physical work of its creation even if there's no particular creative expression, like "I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich."

It can also apply to tasks where you've offloaded a bunch of work that once would've been done by hand, like "I made this bench using a circular saw."

Where things get hairy even with physical objects is processes like CNC or 3D printers. If you download "Articulated dragon.stl" from a website and press the print button, did you make that? Personally, no. But if you designed your own flexy dragon and printed it, then yes. If you set up a relief carving on a CNC machine or do a perfectly fit inlay, are you making that? Operating these still takes quite a bit of knowledge and skill, but different knowledge and skill from hand woodworking. What if the tools improve and become very easy to operate?

I don't think there's a hard line you can draw. But if there is, it's somewhere between "did everything by hand with no assistance from recently invented tools because those are cheating" and "ordered a sandwich and waited for the finished result to show up."

[InitialBP]

The restaurant comparison doesn't really hold up. The parent didn't go choose from a menu of new apps that they wanted AI to create. They discovered a problem or a feature that doesn't exist on other platforms and they employed tools to create that. Does a product manager not get to claim they "made" something because they plan it out and employ others to actually build the finished product?

Both of the examples the parent gave include some kind of planning and ideating to get to a final product, regardless of the fact that they employed tools to do a bulk of the coding work.

[echelon]

You did not make the cheeseburger.

Yet,

Christopher Nolan made "The Odyssey"

Shigeru Miyamoto and Eiji Aonuma made "Ocarina of Time"

Mark Zuckerberg made "Meta"

I feel just as proud of everything I'm making with LLM, image, and video models as I do the code I wrote by hand for years and the photons I shot on film to make movies.

This is just a new higher level thing. I'm still the "director".

It's my design and my taste.

Author is right about this though,

> "Didn't take long. Only about 50x longer than it would have taken Claude to do it."

I'm never writing code by hand again. I stopped in February.

[apsurd]

Typically the builder crowd absolutely agrees that leadership did not in fact make the things that bear their name. Like Musk didn't make Tesla, neither the company nor the cars nor any of its engineering advancements.

So I think it's playing both sides. Nolan didn't make The Odyssey. He directed and produced it. Large projects require many many people; with this in mind I realize this whole discussion is just one's ability to make something of their own accord: a cake, a pottery bowl, a wood shed. The whole LLM thing blurs the lines but really it turns the conversation into AI rallying.

It's as simple as recognizing the difference between "making" The Odyssey and "making" breakfast from scratch for your family. (and no you didn't have to have laid the eggs to claim "making" so it's really not so rigid)

[echelon]

Nolan made "The Odyssey". It was his vision.

Hitchcock made "Psycho".

Miyazaki made "Princess Mononoke".

While you can say Roger Deakins shot "Blade Runner 2049" or Hans Zimmer scored "Interstellar", even these masters of their craft paired with directors to make their films. The film is still typically the work of the auteur director, and the director (usually) exercises control over all of these pieces.

You can tell when that doesn't happen. You can tell when the producers exercise outsized control. Or when the studio controls the editing table. And it's not like that's ever kept a secret - people talk about this openly and loudly when it happens.

Musk built his empire, and even if he bought his way in, he still used his unique methodology to turn it into what it is today. "Founder Mode", if you will. Same thing with Steve Jobs.

All of this hand-wringing about who painted the shed in "The Evil Dead" doesn't matter. It's Sam Raimi's. Everyone else on set dances to the beat of his drum.

Software can (and will) be like that too.

Game design, company formation, product development, you name it.

[apsurd]

I agree with you. There would be no X without Y person. Undeniably. The scope of the project matters seems clear though. I think it should be clear and obvious what one means when they say "I made this" recipe from scratch. Even then, there's "did you invent this recipe!?" or do you mean you "prepared it in your kitchen?." That scale and scope is very different from what it means to make a film. And it's where I agree, there's substance to a Hitchcock film being made by Hitchcock. It doesn't mean he literally wrote, acted, set/wardrobe-created, and filmed the movie! But we're losing the plot here to give a similar substance to "I made this app" and allow it to mean one-shotting Fable to clone the latest "you don't prompt AI, you build your empire with a team of Agents" orchestrator.

[echelon]

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.

[lesostep]

>> 'Shigeru Miyamoto and Eiji Aonuma made "Ocarina of Time"'

I googled that to check, and on first few pages no one said that they did? It was always "the team made".

Mark Zuckerberg for sure made "Meta" – whatever it is – at least into the joke it is today, but that's beside the point. Meta isn't a product, it's a company

[jimbokun]

No, product managers do not get to claim they made something.

They led a team that made something.

[themgt]

As a programmer I wrote my app TheseusA by hand. As a product manager I vibe-coded my other app TheseusB. Then I had my LLM port TheseusA to Python, while I ported TheseusB to Python by hand and deleted the original codebases.

Do I get to claim I made the Python TheseusA, or TheseusB, or neither or both?

[c1sc0]

What about movie directors? Aren't they celebrated as creative geniuses? They're also just leading a team.

[supersour]

A property developer is the other real-world example which comes to my mind.

[soulofmischief]

Architects and civil engineers don't physically build the infrastructure they design.

[InitialBP]

Let me correct this then: "Do product managers get to claim that they helped to make something?"

I think product managers surely have a right to claim they "helped" to make something at least. If the team made something then those who work on the team all assisted in "making" the thing.

[shampoo_capital]

Ok, forget about the restaurant then. If I hire a private chef to make any food I want, do I get to claim that I made the food?

[planb]

How do people imagine the process of creating software with AI? Tell it “I need an app where I can send images to friends” and accept the first result?

In your analogy, what I’m talking about is more like talking to a chef with the idea of a novel recipe and describing the ingredients and how you would like it to taste (of course also accepting suggestions).

I would take more pride in that meal than in a standard burger I completely cooked myself - maybe because I know I am able to prepare a great tasting burger and already did so many times. OTOH if this would be the first burger I made in my life I would be immensely proud of it.

[xboxnolifes]

> How do people imagine the process of creating software with AI? Tell it “I need an app where I can send images to friends” and accept the first result?

Unironically, this is some of the software being shared. Maybe a couple more back and fourths, but not much more. I know I "made" a simple discord bot that periodically checked a webpage for updates and sends me a message when there are changes. It was basically just "I want a discord bot that checks this webpage and messages me when X, Y, or Z". I only looked at the code slightly to know that the entire thing passes around loosely structured strings everywhere and checks for substrings over and over again for logic flow.

[JaumeGreen]

You know Gaudí? He was a great architect, and made great constructions visited by millions, like Casa Batlló, Casa Milà, or la Sagrada Familia.

To be fair he didn't place a single stone, and la Sagrada Familia was finished long after his death.

So yes, I believe you can make products using LLMs.

If there is a line, it's definitely between "I designed the architecture, and decided on what each class should do, before letting AI do a single line" and "I told AI to clone twitter as is".

Although the latter could be akin to kids colouring books. "I made AI clone twitter, but painted it red and called it rettiw." As long as there was some decision or a modicum of effort it's "ok". We can let them have their victories and try again.

[lesostep]

>> He was a great architect, and made great constructions

He designed them. If you can find any book that claims Gaudi made them, I will personally send you 5$ for an isbn

But that wouldn't happen, because any editor would catch that mistake easily. It's not how language works, and it never was

[JaumeGreen]

TL;DR If you want to be a nitpicker and choose overly precise verbs almost no one is a maker.

I will not be looking for books, and probably "made" is a bit too informal to be used in any kind of "formal" conversation, and as I'm not an English native I might be using false friends, but there's another synonym used by Unesco referring to his works [0]

> Works of Antoni Gaudí > > Seven properties built by the architect Antoni Gaudí [...]

So yes, if you want to be overly precise he will not have "made" or "built" any of his buildings. OTOH you have to stop that simile somewhere, as otherwise people who compile their programs might not be the ones that "made" the executable, they just wrote the code.

[0] https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/320

[Tossrock]

This is why I like to draw a distinction between design, fabrication, and assembly. "Make" is too generic a word to convey what role you actually had in the creation of something, if you're actually trying to be precise. You can fabricate something with CNC tooling that someone else designed, and that can be its own quite substantial challenge, but it's a different challenge than that of the design. And you can assemble your own bookcase from the flatpack Ikea shipped you, but that's different than fabricating the flatpack in the first place.

[HumblyTossed]

Interesting. I'm not sure if I'm on one side of this or the other.

I enjoy cooking. I grab a recipe and start gathering ingredients and prep them and then cook them. The food usually turns out really good (I have a lot of practice, you see, I'm getting up in age and I've done this for a log time). So, the question is, am I any less of a cook because I follow someone else's recipe instead of writing my own? To make this even more interesting, I was cooking for some friends some years ago, and one said the food was great. The other mentioned well, it must have been a good recipe. I have to admit that stung a bit. They didn't mean it that way though.

I'm rambling, but the question is, at what point is something _your_ work?

[brailsafe]

Seems to me that is what it means to be a cook. If you make food or you make recipes, you can be proud of what you did. If you want to create recipes from scratch, that's an increased level of risk, but if you're a good cook, maybe you can apply your taste and come up with a new concoction that your friends love, whether someone else has done it already or not.

Seems also pretty similar to carpentry. My grandfather assembled his cabin from a kit but modified it to taste, making it his own; he built it but did not create it as a whole. He did however create the deck that's affixed to the cabin, and his shed, by measuring out the basic dimensions, cutting and planing all the wood, maintaining it for decades, attaching doors etc..

When I made a document rendering system at my last company, I was proud to have made the system, but I did not make the all of the technology within it, and that seems like a fair distinction. The tools are part of the process of making, but if you are no longer using tools directly, you haven't really made much.

If you've made a bot that plays a game for you, you don't get to say you're playing the game, and if you haven't prepared any ingredients for a meal, you haven't made a meal

[liminal-dev]

I disagree with this line of reasoning. To the same extent, I could say that you did not make an app because you didn’t write the compiled assembly code, build the processor, make the silicone yourself, etc.

Tools are tools. Same as Photoshop, Ableton, they get you to where you want to go.

Where is the line drawn?

[voidUpdate]

Silicone: rubbery, used for kitchen utensils and breast implants

Silicon: Metallic, used for making circuit components

[liminal-dev]

Oops.

[Balooga]

When you create a work using a tool, you own the copyright.

When you create a work using an LLM, there is no copyright.

So then isn't an LLM less than a tool?

[planb]

This is not correct and a common misunderstanding of the court ruling. The verbatim output of an LLM is not copyrightable. If you create a work using an LLM, this IS of course copyrightable.

[Balooga]

When "using an LLM", means the human has to substantially alter the output of the LLM for the work to be eligible for copyright. Agreed.

But this makes the LLM tool different to other tools. If I author a novel using a word processor I don't then in addition have to substantially alter that output in order for the work to qualify for copyright.

[edit] It's like, how substantive would changes to J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter need to to be in order for a derivative work to qualify for copyright? Now apply that to the output of an LLM.

[cobbzilla]

No, the court case you’re thinking of was when someone tried to say the AI itself had the copyright ownership. That’s not allowed (at least in the US), the copyright owner must always be a human. This doesn’t mean that a human cannot copyright AI-directed works.

[subscribed]

So you did not build a wardrobe unless you cut, dried and sliced your tree yourself, and used muscle powered tools.

Power tools or buying kiln-dried planks is forbidden, you might as well go to IKEA, buy you set and claim you "built" it.

You cannot also claim you built a custom sensor for your smart home if you based it on ESP32 and any of the ecosystem tooling. You might as well buy it from Phillips or Siemens if it exists, or just sit in the corner and sulk. Using advanced tools is forbidden.

I swear luddites are going more and more extreme in their analogies.

[inigyou]

No, that is not what GP said. That is, in fact, the opposite of what GP said.

[subscribed]

That's pretty much what they said: unless you "make" something, preferably by hand and without using advanced tools, maybe you didn't make it at all.

They were using restaurant and customised burger example to refute the claim that using LLM to assist with building solutions (applications) is building and making.

I only dialed their extreme to the further extreme, just on the adjacent plane.

[bigiain]

'If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe' -- Carl Sagan

[inigyou]

no that's literally not what they said. Read again.

[stronglikedan]

You made a decision to order a cheeseburger and the cook wouldn't have made it without you ordering it, so you both played a part in making the cheeseburger.