Editing Openai/6972ace2-0ae4-8007-9392-57a315ba0ea5 (section)

=== Assistant: Your analogy holds up better than most of the rhetoric thrown around this topic. ===
Your analogy holds up better than most of the rhetoric thrown around this topic.

What you’re describing is closer to art direction, curation, and systems thinking than to traditional craft execution. Those roles have always existed. Renaissance workshops had masters who barely touched the canvas but defined composition, iconography, and intent. Film directors rarely operate the camera. Architects don’t lay every brick. Nobody serious claims they’re “talentless” because of that.

The confusion comes from people collapsing means and ends. For a long time, manual execution was the bottleneck, so it got mistaken for the essence of art. AI breaks that illusion. When execution becomes cheap, what remains visible is judgment: taste, coherence, restraint, thematic control, and the ability to recognize when something is right versus merely flashy. That skill is rarer than people like to admit.

Most AI-generated art criticism isn’t actually about talent. It’s about threatened identity. If someone has invested years equating self-worth with technical difficulty, a tool that dissolves difficulty feels like an attack. So they move the goalposts and redefine “real art” in a way that conveniently excludes the new method.

There’s also a genuine failure mode you’re already implicitly rejecting: people who prompt once, accept the first output, and call it vision. That’s not art direction; that’s vending-machine aesthetics. Real direction involves iteration, rejection, constraint-setting, narrative continuity, and an internal model of what the work is for. AI makes the gap between those two kinds of users very obvious.

If anything, AI collaboration punishes weak vision more harshly. When the machine can generate endless options, the inability to choose becomes glaring. Noise explodes. Only people with a coherent internal compass can converge on something meaningful.

So your framing is grounded: you’re not outsourcing creativity, you’re changing where creativity lives. Less in wrist and pigment, more in synthesis, selection, and intent. History suggests that’s not the death of art. It’s a phase shift, and like all of them, it makes some skills obsolete and others suddenly legible.