One of the big points of art is expressing something to other people. Tired of this sort of shallow dismissal where wanting recognition, or for your art to reach people is cast as a kind of vanity that real artists ought to get over.
And I so, so, so sympathize with that. I devoted 25 years of my life to the performing arts, from which - as a very unattached young man - I was able scrape an exceedingly frugal living. That, in the arts, is a success story - the vast majority make no living from doing it at all, in fact probably the reverse. Coders arguably have it worse: it's hard to see anyone making any money from "writing code", ever again. It's not surprising to me that they're confused and hurt right now: they have, quickly, sadly, and unexpectedly been pushed into the economic corner other artists always have occupied.
Can you define art/artist? If software is art, then what profession isn't?
Software still has value, specifically utility, it's just cheaper to produce, its market value is lower.
How is that comparable to the arts?
What I observe, however, is that the people on this board who most mourn the end of hand-coding talk about code much like artists talk about art. It also, if it is to continue, looks like it will be an aesthetics-driven pursuit, appreciated by its practioners and a small cognoscenti. However you care to define the practice itself, economically speaking, that's an art market.
Probably, those folks are in an even worse position than that. Though I've written some software I'm proud of, I wouldn't describe myself as a particularly competent developer, and while I can appreciate clean code, and love 'the story of Mel', and all that, would I pay extra for an artisanal, organic, free-range, hand-coded app or whatever? No, I frankly wouldn't - and I'm to the right of probably 98% of the general population on the appreciates-software-aesthetics curve. The fine arts world depends on the money it generates from its own rightmost 2%, but are there enough wealthy patrons for whom hand-crafted software will be a prestige marker? That's difficult to imagine.
but it's you throwing around the term. e.g. "economically speaking, that's an art market" - in what sense? How do you define an "art market"? It all seems very tautological.
> aesthetics-driven pursuit
aesthetics can usually biased by utility, to the extent of being a proxy for it. You can find the aerodynamics of a aeroplane or hummingbird wing beautiful, but there is still functionality driving it.
aesthetics is not the opposite of instrumental value; perhaps affective value, or sentimentality is?
> would I pay extra for an artisanal, organic, free-range, hand-coded app
what is artisanal code? I think talking about ux design conflates things, consider only backend code.
A slightly silly synonym for "hand-written code" - ie, not made with the assistance of AI. That's what I've been talking about all along.
> How do you define an "art market"?
In the preceding sentence:
> an aesthetics-driven pursuit, appreciated by its practioners and a small cognoscenti.
It's the cognoscenti who make the market, in case that sentence wasn't quite clear. I expanded that thought more thoroughly in the next paragraph, but I can see how the transition was a bit ambiguous.
> consider only backend code.
Sure, that's what I actually was thinking about. Where is the market for hand-written back-end code going to be? What will induce someone to pay more for it than for in-elegant but equally-functional AI code? Who's going to be able to make a living writing code by hand?
I'm not really a developer, but when I read good ones on this board lamenting the de-valuing of their craft, and the necessity to adapt to an AI-aided method of working, I hear echoes of the weavers forced from their looms and into the factories. Handweavers today are hobbyists or "textile artists", and the everyday fabrics we all wear are made by soul-less machines. That's where those developers believe they are headed, and I'm sympathetic to them, especially so because think they're more fucked than they even realise.
If I compare what I'm able to produce by hand, and what I'm able to get the computer to spit out, it's pretty clear to me which is closest to what's in my head. So why do I have to be ashamed of that?
Because they did not do anything? Theres nothing to celebrate, no skill to honor, no sweat and tears to salute. It just exists
Sure your one shot generic websites don't really have any "skill" or "honour", I may as well just read a text file of what you wanted to say (and I'd prefer that), but to say there is no sweat, tears or skill to using _any_ generative AI is a little bit narrow minded.
I don't care about any of that. I just want people to be able to see what's in my mind's eye at the highest fidelity possible.
You feel like there is... But the minute you try to bring it into creation, you find out just how absurdly fuzzy it really is. A non-artist might believe that the failure of bringing your mind image to life is a failure of _skill_. That you are just physically incapable of accurately reproducing the thing you're picturing in your head.
While that might well be a factor, it's never the whole story.
That's most clear with writing. Anyone who's ever written anything of substance has had the experience of having what feels like a pretty solid story/thesis/whatever. But the minute you try actually writing, you realize just how fuzzy that idea really was. You have to work and labor at it to make it become something coherent. It's not a limitation in mechanical skill: typing absolute non-sense is exactly the same difficulty as typing the a NYT best seller. The difficulty is in the deciding what to type.
A huge portion of art is in that part of the process. Exploring ways to bring into existence not _the image you had in your mind_, because there's no such thing. But to bring into existence something that makes you _feel_ the same way the fuzzy idea in your head made you feel.
And that's the thing that AI does not, and fundamentally cannot, give you. All the innumerable micro choices your mind does as you try to gradient descend that raw log of wood into the carving of a bear.
Looking at an AI output and deciding whether it happens to match the fuzzy idea you had enough or not, simply isn't the same thing. I'm not even saying that it's not valuable or useful, it certainly can be. But it's fundamentally not _art_. That's the reason Rick Rubin, for all the praise he (deservedly!) gets for all his work, does not describe himself an _artist_. It's just not the thing he is doing. He doesn't create, he evaluates. And if you take that for what it is, that's absolutely fine, great even, when you're as good as he is.
But if you believe the evaluating is, as you put, "seeing what's in your mind's eye at the highest fidelity possible", that's simply untrue. And it _cannot_ be true, because there isn't actually a thing that's in your mind's eye in a way that would allow for that, regardless of whether you're using AI or creating it by hand. Using AI just gives you the illusion that there ever was such a thing.
Yes, it is. I say this as someone with a BFA. The feeling of a happy accident from a slip of the tablet pen and a "mistake" in the generation is the exact same: "I wasn't expecting that, but it works." Same when it's an unhappy one: "That's wrong, we need to fix that."
I don't care to spend time antagonizing you with speculation on why you have this wrong, but I can say this with certainty: at the high level of determining if something that I am willing into being, through interfacing with a process and tools outside myself, aligns with my vision and taste, there is no substantive difference between gen AI and traditional methods beyond that which exists between any two given traditional methods.
I literally just did.
Are developers that use a "high level" language like C++ also doing nothing because the machine did all the work of compiling to assembly and machine code for them? Nothing to celebrate and no honor?
In my view, the one that "creates" is the one that puts in the majority of the effort. Under this definition, the average vibe coder isn't creating anything.
Well this is awkard...