Seth Gammon

“Made with AI” triggers this instinct to devalue the output as fake. Like valuing an original painting versus a copy. The moment you're told it's AI, the value of what you're looking at changes, even if the work itself hasn't. And it's a visceral reaction. Suddenly something impressive becomes slop, something creative becomes lazy, something meaningful becomes artificial. There are plenty of legitimate discussions to be had about AI. Environmental concerns, economics, intellectual property, government, and everything in between. But I'm interested in this particular reaction, the immediate devaluation of something simply because AI was involved in making it. Because AI isn't copying in that same sense. Think of pencil, crayon, charcoal, or photography. Each has its own characteristics, its own way of producing something. AI is similar, both literally and figuratively. There's a style to how AI does things, shaped by how it's trained, configured, and instructed. When I make a story with AI, I'm not simply making the story I would've written myself. AI will make countless decisions I wouldn't, miss things I would've included, and introduce things I might never have considered. There's crossover, but the result is my idea interpreted through AI. And this applies to far more than writing or images. It applies to code, video, research, entire workflows, and everything in between. Take coding, for example. There are things people will never do entirely by themselves again because AI has made them accessible at a level of quality and convenience that changes the equation. You can design an entire application, make the decisions, shape the experience, work through the problems, and be deeply involved in every part of it while AI writes the code. But you'll never know exactly what that application would've become if you'd had to build every part of it yourself. The decisions you'd have made along the way, the problems you'd have encountered, the solutions you'd have discovered. That path doesn't exist. And the same is true in reverse. AI will make decisions you wouldn't have made, solve problems differently, and produce outcomes you might never have reached on your own. That's what I mean when I say AI is a style. Not just the appearance of something, but the way something comes into existence. Unlike a pencil left on a page, AI can continue working from an initial instruction, making decisions, using tools, and carrying out entire processes. You can configure how it operates, how much freedom it has, what it prioritizes, and how closely it follows your intentions. What you're doing is discovering and aligning a configuration that produces a particular outcome. Sometimes that means directing nearly every decision. Sometimes it means letting the system explore possibilities you wouldn't have considered. And I think philosophically, that's where some of this discomfort comes from. When someone says “Made with AI,” people imagine the human path that wasn't taken. The work you didn't personally perform, the skills you didn't have to exercise, the decisions you didn't have to make. And somehow that absence becomes evidence that the result is fake. But it isn't fake. It's also not the same thing as having done it entirely yourself, even if you directed every decision. It's something real, made through a different process, from a different vantage point. It's not inherently more, and it's not inherently less. It's made with AI.

A Showcase of this idea I'm messing around with, where a game session in Rocket League is saved, the theater file decoded and rebuilt to storyboard and stage clips edited for video. There's so much content generated by games that could have personal value, share with your friends, post as content. With a system like this you could storyboard a rivalry that took place throughout a match such as this one between myself and a user named Arthur.

You have to figure out how to remain optimistic. It's a difference of knowing that things can change, and wasting your time holding onto the safety that it won't. Be optimistic.