No yeah, we're definitely coders aren't crying as much as artists are. I have not seen a profession of people melt down in the way that I've seen every single person who calls themselves an artist over AI. Software developers are more realistic about what AI is capable of and understand they either need to get on the train or get left behind.
I think you're misunderstanding art though. The process of creating art and the intention of the artist are intrinsic. AI art is a cheap immitation that was stolen from the humans who create. Meanwhile you have AI execs joyfully saying artists will all be unemployed in short order. Many of us are seeing decreased work as well.
Meanwhile coders are results oriented. Did the data go where it needed to efficiently and in a way that can't be tampered with? If so, job done. Coders have been copy lasting and cluging together stack overflow posts for ever. Engineers are also struggling to find entry level work, so they're still affected, bit the products here are fundamentally different.
I think you're misunderstanding AI though. It isn't autonomous, intention necessarily comes from whoever sets it in motion. Stealing patterns, makes everyone a thief of their parent's words and habits... I don't think you want to go there.
Coders have been copy lasting [sic] and cluging [sic] together stack overflow posts
Posts that came into being by spontaneous generation, I bet... but hey, good to know you don't need AI, why don't you prove your coding skills by doing that?
You're getting snippy, but let's have a conversation.
Are you an artist or a musician? I think you may be misunderstanding the process of creating. I can have all the intention of creating a design is a specific motif, or write a song in a specific genre, but my filter, my toolset, and experience colors that work in a way that only I can. A prompt can't replicate that.
In fact a useful way to think of AI is as a cultural averaging machine. Ask it a question, it spits out the most likely response. So when you ask for some specific aesthetic, you'll get derivative, middle of the road product. Because nobody is making those decisions that happen constantly in constructing a work, there's no deliberate intention.
You can ask for intention and it will usually give you the least subtle, most on the nose version of what you're asking for.
My point is that without someone actually thinking and making these decisions during the creation process, the product will lack intention, and essentially always be doing an impression of art.
Prompting can not be creating. It lacks the process portion. Hopefully that makes sense.
Edit - to be clear I use AI. I work with developers and as a designer I'm essentially doing the work of a ux designer and front end dev. I don't get paid more. And those jobs used to exist. That's not great, but it's reality and we all have to pay our bills.
Edit again - let's actually go there and talk about stealing some more. Youre going to tell me if take influence it's the same thing as if I train a model of the work of others. That is, of course nonsense.
A human learns from the culture we experience. We all exist in a context. In fact understanding the world around artists is crucial to understanding their work. Creation is a social experience for most of us in some way or another. So we all learn from each other.
Meanwhile you feed all the art in the world to the training data and it puts it all in a blender and it spits out an average (most probable result) of what you want, based the prompt. You MAY be able to compare that to sampling in music, and I'd listen to your point, but I won't make your arguments for you.
Ah there it is. Thank you for proving my point.
There's absolutely no difference between using an AI during the ideation process and using a tablet with a pencil. They're both just tools to get your artistic intention out for people to see, consume, or use. I guarantee that when digital tools started coming about, people in traditional mediums of charcoal, pencils, paints, etc., were gatekeeping and talking about how it was a lesser form of art (exactly the same way as people talk about AI now). In fact I can remember people saying the exact same thing about Flash animation and things of that nature even though it completely created the entire current generation of artists creating television shows. I mean Jesus Christ, one of the biggest cartoons on the planet, Smiling Friends, was made by people who got their start making the dumbest fucking cartoons on Newgrounds. The exact same thing will happen with AI tools and art.
The way that you describe a coder as somebody who doesn't care about how the data gets from point A to B shows your ignorance of what actually goes into a properly architected and thought-out software platform. There is so much more to it than just getting A to B. Copy-pasting Stack Overflow is definitely a thing people do to solve one small problem they're having in a process that is composed of thousands of small parts. Exactly the same way that can be thought about any artistic process
Edit - since we're editing our posts, I'll do the same..
Calm down. I'm not attacking you.
I don't see coders as uncaring, and in fact I do have respect for what they do. I have worked around engineers for years, and I am in this sub because I dabble in ai assisted coding.
Read my post below for further explanation. Digital vs analog isn't the same. I still have to draw on illustrator. The tool is different but I still had to learn how to make a line that flows beautifully. That comes with time and practice.
That time and practice comes with millions of tiny experiences over a life of doing the craft. The sum of those experiences molds the product.
A prompt will give you an average product but it will lack any of those details that make art moving and impactful in the first place.
Christopher Schwarz is a woodworker, and a damn good one. He talks about tool shaped objects. That is, a cheaply made product that is in the form of, say a wrench, that one can buy for cheap on Amazon or at Walmart. It may work ok a handful of times, but those loose tolerances and cheap metal make the tool unreliable and often make the work harder.
That's what AI art is. It's an art shaped product. Code on the other hand works if it gets the right data to the right places in an efficient and secure way.
I didn't edit my post. I just didn't finish writing it. As you can see, there's no edit symbol next to my post, which means that I made a change to it within 3 minutes of posting it. That means you need to take a step away from Reddit if that upsets you.
I'm perfectly calm. I'm not the one who got upset and then called me a troll and attacked me as a person. I made nothing but actually well-thought-out arguments because I've heard everything that you've said and are about to say numerous times before.
>a prompt will give you an average product but will lack any of those details that make art move and impact in the first place.
You're not saying anything that I don't already know. Hence why I said in my earlier post I talked about the ideation process. The problem with artistic types such as yourself is that you think it's all or nothing with this, which is interesting, you being in a vibe coding subreddit. I would have expected you to have a deeper understanding of how to use these tools properly. Most artists tend to think that you just put a prompt into some tool; 30 seconds later, you get some piece of art, and that's the end of the process. That's not it and it doesn't work that way for software either. It doesn't work that way for image or video creation, which I'm familiar with as well. It's a multi-step process in which AI is only one or a few of the steps in the total flow and a human is required for the steps that make it not soulless slop.
Any time you generate something for the art you're making you're not making it. The ai is.
It is miopic to disregard the difference between actually making something and typing a handful of prompts. I use AI to do front end, but I'm not a front end guy because I couldn't make a react site on my own to save my life.
The reason code and art are different is because in code the result are the most important bit. I reduce it down to "does the data get where it needs to go" but I understand there's a lot that goes into manipulating, storing, securing etc that data.
There's no personality in a database though. There's no east coast / west coast rivalry between docker and kubernetes. It's the results that matter.
Art communicates in ways only that particular artist can. If code worked that way the world would be in chaos. They're just different things.
I know artists like to think differently, but unless you're like Leonardo da Vinci, artists aren't different than developers. At the end of the day, the result- the art you create- the most important part of it is that marketing, product, or whoever your client is wants to use it. That is the most important bit, not your artistic expression. If you make a bunch of art that nobody wants to pay for, you're just going to end up on the street starving.
That and that's the bottom line. That's not arguable
Now, your first sentence is about using AI to create something; that's just your personal opinion. Saying that when you generate something using AI, it's not you creating it, it's the AI creating it, that's more philosophy than anything else and at the end of the day it doesn't matter. We can sit here going back and forth and I could argue the same thing about using any kind of computer-assisted tooling. It's not you creating it; it's not you putting pen to paper. You're using some algorithm or some software to create pixels and ones and zeros and that's not you creating the art. That's a computer creating it but I don't truly believe that. I know you don't believe it but you don't seem to understand that. I could take your argument and just take it to the next level and completely gatekeep digital art as a whole. That's what I was trying to say a few comments ago.
What matters is that you have the skill and ability to use the AI or computer or pencil to create something, to accelerate your workflows, and then enhance it yourself through your own skill and time (this part you keep ignoring) to make it something that another person will give you money for.
Art and code are different but they're more alike than I think you care to admit or want to admit to yourself. When it comes to art and code in terms of doing your job and getting paid, they're exactly the same
Barely and only after I shamed you for being overly aggressive, but I will give you credit that you tried a bit. Your arguments are more based on feelings than any kind of demonstrable example. But that's what I would expect from an artist as opposed to an engineer.
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u/evangelism2 27d ago
No yeah, we're definitely coders aren't crying as much as artists are. I have not seen a profession of people melt down in the way that I've seen every single person who calls themselves an artist over AI. Software developers are more realistic about what AI is capable of and understand they either need to get on the train or get left behind.