Agree to some extent. At some point though we jump the thin line between creative expression and… magic?

Like if at some point I can just say “Generate a song similar to Smooth Criminal, different enough to not trigger copyright claims” and it just works, and everyone loves it… well is that creative thinking?

I think you can quantify the amount of creative expression you engage in by looking at all the decision points in the creative process where you are directly involved in making the decision. For an LLM prompt, that is going to be fairly limited by definition. I suppose the quality can be measured then by how novel and effective the output/approach of each decision is then, how much impact is made.

The amount of creative expression does not necessarily correlate with impact. Something can be created with nearly zero creative expression, that ends up making a significant impact. In that case you are more of a director than an artist I suppose, in that you direct the high-level process and only make decisions there. You can call it creative thinking in the same way a good businessman makes smart high-level decisions and then delegates what is downstream to others, with decisions being optimized for impact.

I think you can be creative "within a frame" in that sense, e.g. creative in the way you wield an LLM for instance, which is on a different scale compared to being creative on the piano roll with how you organize and brainstorm your melodies. It's just a different skill set at a different granularity altogether. But the one thing that I think holds, is that higher level methods have less creative expression by definition, because you are delegating more decisions to other faculties; you are seeing less of the "creator" in the work.

I think there is something to it. First, it would still need to be different enough from Smooth Criminal to avoid listeners just going back to the original. Then, if anyone could just type a simple prompt like that and get a hit, wouldn't we be flooded with 'sounds like' singles, which would turn the audience off of those, and now, you're not making hits...

I think there will always be more to it then just a simple prompt, but having the vision to make a song that sounds pleasing, and unique enough is certainly creative to me.

Of course, there's also a huge demand for generic, inoffensive music (think theme/intro songs, waiting room and elevator music). If we could make that more enjoyable to listen to, would anyone care if that's not creative thinking?

You could make (and many do) the same arguments over covers of songs, even when the covers end up eclipsing the original. Where was the creative thinking in that?