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AB's avatar

I don't think I can succinctly capture in a few lines how meaningful and essential this entire essay is right now. The narrative pushed upon us with AI has been "ease, convenience" - while this may be beneficial in very specific scenarios (I'm literally thinking medical), to have this replace the artistry of creating is abhorrent. You're so absolutely right, the magic is in human effort.

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Lidija P Nagulov's avatar

The key to it, I feel, is the difference between those who actually love creating, and those who love having a creation. Even if you can’t monetize it (but much more so when you CAN monetize it), there is the sort of person who is in love with the process of creation, with the person you become through the multiple attempts and failures and experiments and scrapping those experiments just to have another idea and then find that also doesn’t really work but through some slow and infinitely torturously labored iteration something starts to take shape, something that might have little to do with what you originally imagined but it aligns with your chakras somehow and you become glad it exists and you have brought it into being not so much for the thing itself as for its entire process of becoming, and what it did to you.

And then you have the person who just wants that perfect glossy final product and wants no part of the mess - whether to profit from, or to show off with, or whatever. To use as a badge of success of some sort, to possess. Those two drivers are profoundly different - one thinks ‘I love this’ and the other ‘people will love this’.

This second sort sees nothing wrong with plagiarism in any guise, the first doesn’t get the point of plagiarising.

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