Programming Isn’t Special

Creative Work Writers went on strike to get protections against “AI”. Thousands of artists have signed open letters in protest of “AI”. There are so many copyright lawsuits from creative industry groups against AI that there’s a whole dedicated website for it. Popular YouTubers absolutely hate it. If they’re also musicians, they REALLY hate it. Across all creative industries, there is a concerted push to reject this technology. Yet, almost unique among creative fields, many experienced programmers remain convinced that it’s fine to use “AI” for programming. We do seem to hate it, and it’s making us all miserable, and what it’s doing to our industry, but we are using it anyway. A lot of the justification of this resignation seems to be to be because programming is not Art. If the tool can get the job done, and the job is just functional, then why does it matter? It does matter, though. It matters because we shouldn’t be using AI to produce Art, and programming is Art. Art can be…