I find it interesting that there's so much pushback against ai generated art and music while there seems to be very little for ai generated code.
Musicians and artists are under pressure to make money, but they cant rush it
while programmers have to rush it these days or they lose their jobs. Programmers don't have much of say in their companies.
Devs are quite used to using others peoples work for free via packages, frameworks and entire operating systems and IDE’s. It’s just part of the culture.
Music has its history in IP, royalties, and most things need to be paid for in the creation of music or art itself.
It’s going to be much easier for devs to accept AI when remixing code is such a huge part of the culture already. The expectation in the arts is entirely different.
Most code people interact with are creations shat out by soulless corporations, why would they care? Being honest here, the vast majority of people have their code experience dictated by less than a handful of companies; at their jobs they are told to use these tools or get file for welfare. The animosity has been baked into the industry for quite a while, it's only very very recently that the masses have been able to interact with open source code and even that is getting torn down by big tech.
Compare this to music where you are free to choose and listen to whatever you want, or stare at art that moves you. IF you don
At work most people are force to deal with code like SalesForce or MSFT garbage, not the same experience at all.
Why would people care about code coming from an industry that has been bleeding them dry and making their society worse for nearly 20+ years?
I think a key factor there is that programmers (in the actual sense, rather than so-called “vibe coders”) are more likely on average than (current) artists and musicians to have intimate knowledge of how AI works and what AI can and can't do well — and consequently, the quality of their output is high enough that it's harder to notice the use of AI.
Eventually that'll change, as artists and musicians continue to experiment with AI and come up with novel uses for it, just as digital artists did with tablets and digital painting software, and just as musicians did with keyboards and DAWs.
Companies sell products built on code, not the code itself. Code is a means to an end.
I won't merge anything AI generated in any of my FOSS projects, unless I'm successfully deceived.
In the first place, I do not regard a copyright notice and license on AI generated code to be valid in my eyes, so on those grounds alone, I cannot use it any more than I could merge a piece of proprietary, leaked source code.
What???
Every thread on HN that touches on the topic has countless people talking about how LLM generated code is always bad, buggy and people that utilize them are inexperienced juniors that don't understand anything.
And they're not completely wrong. If you don't know what you're doing, you'll absolutely create dumster fires instead of software
Music is art, code is engineering. "Hackers and painters"[1] was always wishful fluff, unfortunately.
When it comes to code, I don't think anyone cares how the sausage is made, and only very rarely do people care by whom. The only question is "does it work well?"
Art is totally different. Provenance is much more important - sometimes essential. David is a beautiful work, but you could 3d print or cast a replica of "David". No one would pretend that the copy is the same as the original though - even if they're indistinguishable to the untrained eye - because one was painstakingly hand sculpted and the others were cheaply produced. This sense of provenance is the property that NFTs were (unsuccessfully) trying to capture.
The pushback is motivated by the interests of the petty-bourgeois class, and those are a larger proportion of the former.
Perhaps that's because there's an enormous difference between fine art and computer programs.
Also, there's quite a lot of pushback against AI-generated code, but also because unlike music, normal people have no interest in and aren't aware of the code.