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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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You wouldn't get credit if the task was lighting the room. In that case, you didn't do a thing; the light did the work. If you happened to use an electric light in the process of another task then sure you would get credit, but the light was incidental to the actual task in that case.

This is exactly the right way to think about this sort of thing. You do not deserve credit for the part of the work that the AI did, only the part that you did. If you put in a lot of thought and creativity in coming up with an original idea to ask for that makes your output better or more interesting in others, then that's worth some credit. If you iterated on an idea multiple times, came up with complex multi-layered prompts, had followup prompts, etc, that's worth some credit. If you created a whole work of art like a game or a comic book built out of many different AI generated images arranged together, that's worth a lot of credit. In the same way that a writer-director should get primary credit for directing a movie even if he didn't hold the camera and play the role of every actor, but should not get credit for a particular instance of stellar performance by one of the actors, or a generic screenshot of one of them having an attractive face.

Define "incidental". There are plenty of tasks that I can't do at all if I have no light. That sounds like "fundamental" to me.