While social media feeds are currently flooded with "AI hate" and polarized shouting matches about the death of art, a much more serious and nuanced conversation is taking place in the halls of academia. Beyond the noise, deep thinkers are debating not whether machines will replace us, but how the very nature of human creativity is evolving.

Leading this discussion is Luciano Floridi, the Founding Director of the Yale Digital Ethics Center and a Professor in the Cognitive Science Program at Yale University. A recipient of Italy's Knight of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit and a former Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at Oxford, Floridi offers a framework that moves past the knee-jerk reactions.

Floridi argues we have entered a "post-Vitruvian" era—a time when seeing a text or image no longer guarantees a human hand created it. He suggests that the human role is shifting from manufacturer to designer. Just as an architect is credited for a building without laying every single brick, the future creative will be defined by their ability to orchestrate, control, and design the machine's output.

A new paradigm 

This philosophical shift isn't just academic theory to me; it is the story of my life.

I didn't stumble upon ChatGPT looking for a quick buck or internet fame. I am not coming from nowhere. I have been a creative my entire life—drawing and painting since childhood, writing poetry and prose since my teens. I remember the joy and the struggle of my first computer, painstakingly drawing in MS Paint with a mouse, and later the revelation of a graphic tablet and early video editing software like Windows Movie Maker on Windows XP.

But life has a way of grounding you. Despite my drive and talent, I didn't have the launchpad or financial safety net to pursue the arts professionally. I needed "bread on the table." So, I took a pragmatic path: working with my hands, then college, HR, and eventually engineering.

My career pays the bills, but the creative spark never died. It just became a hobby I had to squeeze into the margins of a busy life. And that is exactly where AI changed everything.

From Time-Constrained to Unleashed

Floridi talks about the shift from manufacturing to designing, and that is exactly what AI has allowed me to do. I could draw a spaceship in Gimp pixel by pixel, but I no longer have the endless free time of my youth. AI allows me to skip the manual labor and focus on the vision.

It has opened universes that were previously locked behind barriers of time or opportunity. I grew up wishing for piano lessons, wanting to play an instrument but lacking the means. Now, I can compose music. I can create complex videos that would have crashed my old computers. I can self-publish my writing without gatekeepers.

I sometimes wonder where I would be if I had these tools when I was young and had all the time in the world. But today, these tools are my wings.

Make no mistake: When I use AI to generate something, it is not an "AI creation." It is mine. I don't use AI to create for me; I use it to bridge the gap between the vision in my head and the reality on the screen. It has empowered me to finally bring my universe to life.