AI art is everywhere these days. Type in a prompt, and boom. You’ve got a “masterpiece” in seconds. It feels magical, but also… kind of wrong. And as programmers, I think we should step back and ask ourselves: is this really the kind of creativity we want to support?
Because if anyone understands what it means to create, it’s us.
Code Is Art Too
People outside our world often think coding is just math and rules; cold, logical, robotic. But you and I know that’s not true. Writing good code feels a lot like writing poetry, painting, or composing music. Because, it is just that.
- We agonize over function names like a poet over word choice.
- We refactor messy blocks of logic the same way a sculptor chips away at stone.
- We structure systems so they’re elegant, not just functional, like a designer shaping form and function together.
Code can be beautiful. Code can be art. And if we believe that, then we’re artists too.
The Problem With AI Art
Here’s the thing about AI art: it doesn’t actually create. It doesn’t wrestle with ideas, make mistakes, or carry intention. It just chews up huge amounts of human-made work—art that real people put hours, years, sometimes entire lives into, and spits out something “new.”
It’s basically remixing without asking. And if you’ve ever had someone rip off your code without credit, you know how bad that feels. Now imagine that happening on a global scale to entire communities of artists.
We Should Get It More Than Anyone
As programmers, we’ve been there. We know the difference between throwing together spaghetti code and carefully crafting something that’s a joy to use and maintain. We know what it feels like to build something from scratch and feel proud of it.
That’s the same pride artists have in their work. And just like we’d hate to see our craft treated as disposable or easily replaced, they deserve the same respect.
So What Do We Do?
I’m not saying AI tools are evil. They can be fun, even useful. But when it comes to art, we should think twice. If the tool is built on the unpaid labor of thousands of creators, maybe that’s not something we want to normalize.
Because at the end of the day, we’re artists too. And artists should have each other’s backs.
If we really believe code is art, then we should treat other forms of art, and the people behind them, with the same respect we expect for ourselves.
Top comments (3)
And that "without asking" is the most important part here: If artists (painters, writers, programmers, whatever) volunteer their work to train AI, then there's nothing wrong with that. It's just not what's happening in practice.
Overall, as a rule of thumb: Use AI for tasks that don't replace the work they were illegitimately trained on. Having a toaster pad out a 1-sentence summary into an email to your boss harms nobody (other than your boss, but that's on them); using AI instead of paying an actual artist to draw you an image is harmful.
I don't think that's inherently a bad thing; it's how FOSS works. The problem, for me, is the lack of consent. People's contents are misappropriated in ways they never allowed, and to make things work, that is then used to make those same people's jobs redundant. It's a really disgusting business model.
oh don't misinterpret what I said here. I meant exactly what you have argued. FOSS isn't really "Unpaid labor" in a sense, you contribute what you want to. It's like your hobby and you wanted to. But artists didn't consent to their work being stolen, so it is indeed stealing unpaid labor since the artist isn't getting anything back in return. And also accounting for the fact that corporates are consistently trying to throw artists out of business ? Which needs to be stopped
So yea great argument :))
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