[wk_end]

> while they 100% against using AI to generate art or game design, when you ask them about using AI tools to build software or websites the response is almost always something like "Programmers are expensive, I can't afford that. If I can use AI to cut programmers out of the process I'm going to do it."

Three things:

1. People simply don't respect programming as a creative, human endeavour. Replacing devs with AI is viewed in the same way as replacing assembly line workers with robots.

2. Somewhat informed people might know that for coding tasks, LLMs are broadly trained on code that was publicly shared to help people out on Reddit or SO or as part of open-source projects (the nuance of, say, the GPL will be lost). Whereas the art is was trained on is, broadly speaking, copywritten.

3. And, related to two: people feel great sympathy for artists, since artists generally struggle quite a bit to make a living. Whereas engineers have solid, high paying white collar jobs; thus, they're not considered entitled to any kind of sympathy or support.

[DrewADesign]

I've been a professional artist, designer, and developer. Mostly a developer, and working in academia throughout the late teens meant being privy to the development of neural networks into what they've become. When I pointed out the vulnerability of developers to this technology, the "well maybe for some developers but I'm special" stance was nearly ubiquitous.

When the tech world realized their neato new invention inadvertently dropped a giant portion of the world's working artists into the toilet, they smashed that flusher before they could even say "oops." Endless justification, people saying artists were untalented and greedy and deserved to be financially ruined, with a heaping helping of "well, just 'pivot'."

And I did-- into manufacturing because I didn't see much of a future for tech industry careers. I'm lucky-- I came from a working class background so getting into a trade wasn't a total culture and environment shock. I think what this technology is going to do to job markets is a tragedy, but after all the shit I took as a working artist during this transition, I'm going to have to say "well, just pivot!" Better get in shape and toughen up-- your years of office work mean absolutely nothing when you've got to physically do something for a living. Most of the soft, maladroit, arrogant tech workers get absolutely spanked in that environment.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Harsh, but some people just gotta hear that.

... although it's a bit unfair to the many tech people who never wanted to throw artists down the loo or indeed anyone else. E.g. when I was fiddling with language generation during my MSc it never occurred to me that someone would want to use it to replace writing, let alone coding. What would be the point in that?

[DrewADesign]

I mean, I know that — I was a developer. Generally, something doesn’t have to be universally true to be true enough to matter.

[bayarearefugee]

> Whereas the art is was trained on is, broadly speaking, copywritten

The overwhelmingly vast majority of the code you're talking about (basically, anything that doesn't explicitly disavow its copyright by being placed in the public domain, and there's some legal debate if that is even something that you can do proactively) is just as copyright protected as the art is.

Open Source does not mean copyright free.

"Free Software" certainly doesn't mean copyright free (the GPL only has any meaning at all because of copyright law).

[krainboltgreene]

> is just as copyright protected as the art is.

This is lost on a lot of people, thats' why there's a special phrase every FOSS person knows by heart.

[avadodin]

> there's some legal debate if that is even something that you can do proactively

Public Domain in the US is the only factor that truly matters on the Internet today, but people who care do both.

Release into the Public Domain and provide a 0-type license.

[seanmcdirmid]

> 1. People simply don't respect programming as a creative, human endeavour. Replacing devs with AI is viewed in the same way as replacing assembly line workers with robots.

It is about scarcity: art is a passion; there is a perpetual oversupply of talented game designers, visual graphic artists, sculptors, magna artists, music composers, guitarists, etc...you can hire one and you usually can hire talent for cheap because...there is a lot of talent.

Programmers are (or were?) expensive because, at least in recent times, talented ones are expensive because they are rare enough.

[ronsor]

A good artist is just as expensive as a good programmer. Commissioning art is expensive. Outsourcing to third world countries is cheaper (just like programming!).

[seanmcdirmid]

> A good artist is just as expensive as a good programmer.

Let's look at industry, and just go look at what video game artists make compared to programmers with a similar amount of experience. Now, are you just claiming that they just aren't very good artists, so they aren't paid well? Because I've seen their work, and its not shabby at all.

[ronsor]

Video game companies are a special case (even for programmers). They work people to the bone for lower pay because people are passionate about video games, but the common denominator there is gamers wanting to get into the industry—not being an artist or programmer.

[danaris]

But if you want a finished artwork, chances are it's going to take an amount of time worth $50-150.

If you want a finished (nontrivial) program, chances are it's going to take at least an order of magnitude more than that.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> Programmers are (or were?) expensive because, at least in recent times, talented ones are expensive because they are rare enough.

In all the years I worked in the industry, I never knew anyone trying to hire "talented" programmers. Only trying to hire people, usually inexperienced juniors, willing to work twice the time they're paid for if you tell them how smart they are.

[seanmcdirmid]

Ya, there is that also. But sane orgs will want to hire programmers with some level of talent, at least. Not just some kid out of bootcamp, they will have to show that they can actually program something first.

[CyberDildonics]

> In all the years I worked in the industry, I never knew anyone trying to hire "talented" programmers

I think this says more about the places you worked.

[throwaway2027]

Most of the code that was publicly available to be trained on is written by people in their spare time, not directly making any money off of it though. Personally I think if you are fine with AI used to generate code you should also be fine with it being used to generate art. That doesn't mean that I think that big companies just scraping the entire internet and training on large amount of portfolio pieces from ArtStation or people making open source projects is good either.

[heavyset_go]

> Most of the code that was publicly available to be trained on is written by people in their spare time, not directly making any money off of it though.

So what? The code is offered under specific licensing terms. Not adhering to those terms is just as wrong as training on a paid product.

[Groxx]

There is the nuance that much code that is available publicly (which includes a GIGANTIC amount of that "written by people in their spare time" stuff) is put there for the explicit goal of showing other people all the details so they can read, reuse, and modify it. Open-source licenses in some form are incredibly popular, though the details vary, and seeing your side project in a product that 100k people use is usually just neat, not "you stole from me".

Artworks have their relatively-popular creative-commons stuff, and some of those follow a similar "do whatever" vibe, but I far more frequently see "attribution required" which generally requires it at the point of use, i.e. immediately along-side the art-piece. And if it's something where someone saw your work once and made something different separately, the license generally does not apply. LLMs have no way to do that kind of attribution though, and hammer out stuff that looks eerily familiar but isn't pixel-precise to the original, so it feels like and probably is an unapproved use of their work.

The code equivalent of this is usually "if you have source releases, include it there" or a very few have the equivalent of "please shove a mention somewhere deep in a settings screen that nobody will tap on". Using that code for training is I think relatively justifiable. The licenses matter (and have clearly been broadly ignored, which should not be allowed) but if it wasn't prohibited, it's generally allowed, and if you didn't want that you would need to choose a restrictive license or not publish it.

Plus, like, artists generally are their style, in practical terms. So copying their style is effectively impersonation. Coders on the other hand often intentionally lean heavily on style erasing tools like auto-formatters and common design patterns and whatnot, so their code blends cleanly in more places rather than sounding like exclusively "them".

---

I'm generally okay with permissive open source licensed code being ingested and spat back out in a useful product. That's kinda the point of those licenses. If it requires attribution, it gets murky and probably leans towards "no" - it's clearly not a black-box re-implementation, the LLMs are observing the internals and sometimes regurgitate it verbatim and that is generally not approved when humans do it.

Do I think the biggest LLM companies are staying within the more-obviously-acceptable licenses? Hell no. So I avoid them.

Do I trust any LLM business to actually stick to those licenses? ... probably not right now. But one could exist. Hopefully it'd still have enough training data to be useful.

[eli_gottlieb]

Yeah people clearly think "creatives" are a class apart from white-collar workers.

[bartread]

> 1. People simply don't respect programming as a creative, human endeavour. Replacing devs with AI is viewed in the same way as replacing assembly line workers with robots.

Very reminiscent of the "software factory" bullshit peddled by grifters 15 or 20 years ago.

And I think, frankly, a lot of agile practice as I've seen it in industry doesn't respect software development as a creative endeavour either.

But fundamentally I, like a lot of programmers/developers/engineers, got into software because I wanted to make things, and I suspect the way I use AI to help with software development reflects that (tight leash, creative decision-making sits with me, not the machine, etc.).

[oytis]

> People simply don't respect programming as a creative, human endeavour.

Because it's not? Programmers' ethos is having low attachment to code. People work on code together, often with complete strangers, see it modified, sliced, merged and whatever. If you rename a variable in software or refactor a module, it's still the same software.

Meanwhile for art authorship, authenticity and detail are of utter importance.

[jakelazaroff]

That's no different from any art. It's like saying that woodworkers' ethos is having low attachment to screws, or guitarists' ethos is having low attachment to picks. Code is a tool; the creative, human endeavor is making an artifact that people can perceive and interact with.

[oytis]

So UX is art, not programming? Don't know enough about it to have an opinion. My code almost never interacted with people

[abakker]

People don't respect the salary premium software developers have received and expect relative to other creative, human endeavors.

You lay it out perfectly in your answer, and I'll add that the entire non-tech world generally feels that if tech jobs lose their shine due to AI, its actually a welcome reversion to the mean. Software has likely depressed wage growth in many other jobs.

[sensanaty]

Which is unfortunate, because the thinking people should be having is that we should bring everyone else up to our level, and not trying to bring down the lucky few that are well compensated in this world full of leeches in the form of CEOs and middle managers.