Yes, because ideas are not worth much if anything. If you have an idea of a book, or a painting, and have someone else implement it, you have not done creative work. Literally, you have not created the work, brought it to existence. The creator has done the creativity.

I guess that depends on how much oversight you engage in. A lot of famous masters would oversee apprentices and step in for difficult tasks and to finish the work, yet we still attribute the work to those masters. Most of the work in science is done by graduate students, but we still attribute the lion's share of the credit to PIs.

If you write a screenplay (the idea), and direct actors to act it out according to your vision (the implementation), did you _create_ the film?

I think my answer would be "Does it matter?"

If it brings joy to you or others, who cares about the semantics of creation

A screenplay isn't just an idea; it's an implementation of an idea.

Nope. Films acknowledge a difference between the writers, the book that inspired it, and the director.

You kind of missed the “and direct actors to play it out” part. If you did all of that, that’s essentially the creator.

... What was the last word in my comment?

The parent is making a philosophical argument. The exact Hollywood definitions aren’t important since there are far many more job roles in film production compared to software development. If you insist though just replace creator with producer in his original argument and it’s the same - you can produce a movie without doing the acting yourself.

And my response is that creation is never, ever, just assigned to a singular person. All work that goes into a work, is acknowledged.

Pretending that your model use doesn't matter, is ignoring all the people's works that are being used to construct it.

If one director or producer went around bragging that the film was all their work, the Actor's Unions and Writer's Unions would tear them to pieces.

You can't pretend only you are the creator. Because it does matter.