When everyone can create, what makes creation ours?

AI can now turn an intention into finished work. But is intention enough to make the work ours?

I recently rebuilt Hecimal, the website on which you are reading this.

For years, my essays lived on Medium. It served its purpose, but over time the place no longer felt like mine. I wanted something quieter. I wanted the page to give the writing more room. I wanted translations to sit naturally beside the original essays. I wanted better audio, a design that felt considered, and small details that worked the way I expected them to.

So I built a new website.

Except that sentence is not entirely true.

I knew what I wanted Hecimal to become. I described it to an AI. It wrote much of the code. I looked at what appeared, noticed what felt wrong, and asked for changes. A typeface was too loud. A section had too much on it. The mobile page did not feel right. Something broke, and I asked the machine to find out why. We repeated this until the website began to resemble the place I had imagined.

Today, it has the translations, audio, design and control that I could not get from Medium. Almost every part of it reflects a decision I made.

But did I build it from the ground up?

No.

Could it have come into existence without me?

Also no.

Somewhere between those two answers lies a question we will meet more often: when a machine does much of the making, what makes the creation ours?

We have never created alone

The idea of the solitary creator has always been partly a myth.

A writer uses a language formed by countless people before him. A musician inherits styles, scales, rhythms and instruments. A filmmaker depends on actors, camera operators, editors and composers. An architect may design a building without laying a single brick.

We do not normally doubt their authorship. The architect remains the architect because their judgment runs through the building at every level … the concept, the structure, the smallest detail. Other hands execute the decisions, but the decisions are theirs, and there are thousands of them.

Tools have always stood between an idea and its final form. The pen made writing easier. The camera captured in a moment what a painter might take weeks to reproduce. Word processors removed the need to retype entire pages. Digital tools let musicians create orchestras inside small rooms.

Each new tool changed the labour involved. None of them ended creativity.

It is tempting to place AI in the same line and leave the argument there. AI is just another tool, we say.

But that answer feels incomplete.

This tool does more than obey

Tools have made suggestions before. A camera surprises the photographer with what appears in the frame. Predictive text has been offering the next word for years. But these suggestions stay at the level of execution. The idea still has to come from somewhere else.

AI is the first tool that can propose at the level of intention. It can offer the words, the colours, the structure, the melody, and the central idea itself. It does not merely carry out a decision. It can participate in making the decision.

That moves the machine closer to the part of creation we once reserved for the creator.

So the question is not simply whether AI was used. It is how much of the final work came through human intention and judgment.

Creation is becoming a spectrum

The person using AI can play several roles.

We can be a customer asking for a finished result. We can be a curator selecting one result from many. We can be an editor changing what the machine produces. Or we can be something like a director, carrying a larger vision and using the machine to realise it.

These roles overlap, and they are all forms of participation. But they are not the same kind of authorship.

If I ask for a picture of a moonlit temple and accept the first image, can I say I made it? Perhaps in a very loose sense. If a painter had produced the same image after receiving my request, I would not claim to have painted it. Asking is not making.

But suppose I spend hours changing the setting, the composition, the light, the symbols and the mood, until the image expresses something specific that I wanted to say. I still did not draw it. Yet I did much more than request it.

What separates these two cases is not effort alone. It is where the judgment enters. In the first, my judgment arrives only at the end, choosing among finished wholes. In the second, my decisions reach into the parts. They shape what the work is made of, not just which version survives. This is the same line that separates the curator from the architect. The curator selects. The architect’s intention runs through everything.

Authorship, then, may no longer be a switch that is either on or off. It is a spectrum, and our place on it depends on how deep our decisions run into the work.

We often say we lack words for the positions along this spectrum. But some of those words already exist. Film met this problem a century ago. No single name could honestly carry a film, so cinema invented the credits roll: director, writer, editor, producer, cinematographer. Each title marks a different depth and kind of judgment. The crafts AI is now entering … writing, painting, coding alone, are the ones built on a single byline. In a sense, AI is pulling the solitary crafts into the condition of filmmaking. The byline may have to become a credit.

When skill is no longer visible

Until recently, the finished work carried some evidence of the effort behind it.

A polished essay suggested that someone had spent time finding the words. A working website suggested that someone knew how to build one. A detailed illustration showed that a person had learned to draw.

AI breaks this connection.

The same finished result might now come from months of work or from a sentence typed during breakfast. Looking at the result alone, we may not know which.

This can feel unfair, especially to people who spent years developing the skill that a machine can now imitate in seconds. But effort and value have never been exactly the same thing. A sentence is not better merely because it took three days to write. Sometimes the right sentence arrives at once.

Still, the struggle involved in learning a craft did more than slow us down. It shaped our taste. By making bad things repeatedly, we slowly learned why they were bad. The hand acquired a skill, but the mind also acquired judgment.

AI gives us the result without necessarily giving us that journey. It can make a beginner look accomplished before the beginner has learned to tell good work from convincing work.

That may be one of its greater dangers. Not that machines will create badly, but that they will create well enough for us to stop asking whether the result is any good.

Taste may become more important than execution

When almost anyone can produce ten attractive designs, the rare ability is no longer producing another one. It is knowing which one belongs.

Why this typeface? Why this image? Why does this sentence stay while another is removed? Why should the page remain empty here? What is the work trying to make someone notice or feel?

Taste is often mistaken for preference. But it is more demanding than liking something. Taste is the ability to recognise what serves the work, including the ability to reject something impressive that does not.

While building Hecimal, AI could offer many solutions. It could not decide what Hecimal should be. That decision depended on what I wanted the website to hold: unhurried writing, room for uncertainty, and as little noise around it as possible. The machine helped me express those values in code and design. The values did not come from the machine.

As execution becomes abundant, intention and judgment become more visible. Perhaps this is where some part of authorship is moving.

But taste alone is not the whole answer. Exercised only at the end, taste makes us a good curator, nothing more. It has to enter the work early and often (shaping the parts, not just choosing among wholes) before it begins to look like making.

The machine has nothing it needs to say

There is another difference between human and machine creation that is harder to measure.

Human work often begins with a small necessity. Something has stayed with us. An experience has not settled. A question refuses to leave. We write, paint or build because something inside us wants a form.

The machine has no such need.

It can produce a moving sentence, but it was not moved to write it. It can create an image of grief without having lost anyone. It can compose a prayer without longing for an answer.

This does not make its output useless or empty. A musical instrument feels nothing either, yet it can help produce music that changes us. But an instrument does not claim that the music needed to exist.

The need still comes from the person.

Hecimal did not begin because an AI wanted to build a website. It began because the old space no longer matched the writing I wanted to do. The machine shortened the distance between that dissatisfaction and a new possibility.

Perhaps that is why the site feels like mine despite how little of its code I wrote. It arose from a need the machine could assist but could not possess.

To call something ours

Authorship is usually discussed as a question of credit. Who deserves to put their name on the work?

It is also a question of responsibility.

If I publish an incorrect translation produced by AI, the machine does not carry the embarrassment. If a generated passage misleads a reader, the prompt is not accountable. If the website excludes someone because I failed to notice a problem, I cannot say the code wrote itself.

The moment I place my name on the result, I accept more than praise. I accept the duty to understand it, examine it and answer for it.

But responsibility, on its own, does not make us the maker. A publisher stands behind a book without having written it. A producer answers for a film without directing a single scene. Responsibility is the floor, not the proof. It earns us the right to sign the work. Judgment, running through the work, earns us the claim to have made it.

So the test for AI-assisted work may need both halves. Not “Did I personally produce every part of this?” but “Did my decisions shape this at every level, do I understand what I am presenting, and will I answer for it?”

That standard does not turn every generated result into original creation. But it asks more of us than writing a prompt and claiming whatever follows.

An older account of the doer

The Bhagavad Gita, in its final chapter, says that every action arises from five factors: the ground on which it rests, the doer, the instruments, the effort, and the unseen. Whoever believes the self alone is the doer, it adds, does not see clearly.

That verse was not written about machines. But it settled, long ago, something we treat as a new discovery: action has never had a single owner. The idea, the skill, the instruments, the labour and the outcome were always distributed. We simply grew used to bundling them under one name.

AI is unbundling them again, more visibly than ever before. We are only beginning to understand what happens when these pieces belong to different actors.

So, did I build Hecimal?

I still hesitate before saying yes.

I did not build it the way a developer writing every component from the ground up would have built it. That distinction matters, and pretending otherwise would diminish a real craft.

But I also did not simply receive it. I imagined the place, directed its development, made hundreds of choices and accepted responsibility for what now exists. The AI supplied capabilities I did not have, or did not have the time to exercise. It did not supply the reason, the taste or the final judgment.

Maybe “I built it” is too simple a sentence for what happened. Perhaps “I created it with AI” is closer, while still leaving room to ask how much creation each of us contributed.

When everyone can create, the finished object will tell us less about its creator than it once did. The more important question may not be who made every part of it, but who knew why it needed to exist, and who is willing to stand behind it now that it does.

That is my reflection today!