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Not an artist, but many people refer to the creative part of making software as an “art”, so here’s a take. ChatGPT allows for rapid iteration of ideas. I have

Not an artist, but many people refer to the creative part of making software as an “art”, so here’s a take. ChatGPT allows for rapid iteration of ideas. I have an idea, I get ChatGPT to flesh it out, I iterate. The value ChatGPT is providing is not to be the source of creativity, it’s in speeding up the process from idea to concrete implementation. It’s a tool. In software development and engineering more generally, we are used to using all kinds of tools to accelerate the process of idea -> reality. Is a song writer not allowed tools to help do the same?

wheelerof4te 3y ago
Coding is not art, it is a learned and trained skill. Even though, I believe that the use of ChatGPT or any other AI assistant will eventually lead to the creation of inexperienced and unskilled generations of developers. Using AI to generate "art" will just kill human creativity. Not only will it do that, it will create a new normal, where this AI art will be viewed as standard. Just as we currently have an over-monetized, synthetic music industry completely devoid of quality.
- caconym_ 3y ago
  Coding is technique, just like writing prose or laying down brush strokes on canvas or whatever else. All are learned skills, all can be used in the process of artistic creation.
- lll-o-lll 3y ago
  > Using AI to generate "art" will just kill human creativity. Did the photograph “kill” art? I’m sure this has been asked before, but what is so fundamentally different about AI that puts it into a different category of tool? That’s my argument; not that software development is art, but that tools accelerate the act of creation.
fhd2 3y ago
Art, at least how I understand it, is about sharing emotions and experiences. We know artists (as opposed to programmers) because we are curious about the person that put a part of themselves into the thing that evoked some emotion in us or gave us an interesting experience. Software can be a tool to create art (games for example), but mostly it's about problem solving. Sometimes creative problem solving, sure. But listening to a machine generated song is like the ultimate soulless A/B tested local maximum entertainment whose only goal is to make money. We had enough of that without generative AI, it's not gonna get better I wager. I don't care much who wrote the code I'm running or if it was AI generated. There's nothing human being shared there, it solves a problem, and all that really matters is that it solves the problem well.
- mostlylurks 3y ago
  It is relatively rare, but software itself (not just the resulting program, such as "a game") can be art. Most examples of this focus on using code to communicate something humorous about the culture surrounding software. I cite FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition [0] as a notable example. There's also code poetry, which encompasses quite a bit more than just humor. [0]: https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...
  - fhd2 3y ago
    Nice example! I also did some reading in the mean time, and I guess for a 17th century definition of "art", a well-written algorithm that does the job efficiently and is easy to reason about would even classify as art. I quite enjoyed the book "Beautiful Code" for this kind of stuff.
- lll-o-lll 3y ago
  > Art, at least how I understand it, is about sharing emotions and experiences. We know artists (as opposed to programmers) because we are curious about the person that put a part of themselves into the thing that evoked some emotion in us or gave us an interesting experience. What is art? That’s a rhetorical question, because this is a highly debated topic and the answers have changed over time. There was a thousand years where art could not be separated from religious expression. There was a period where only technical mastery was considered important and the artist relatively unimportant. It varies by culture, time period, and even down to the individual. And once you can agree on something that should be art; there will be disagreements as to whether a particular example is worthy of the title. Is Nick Cave’s “Into my Arms” art? Is the Spice Girls “Wannabe”? Many years ago at the start of my career I was an engineer of the traditional variety working for a Smart Metering company. There was one analog electrical engineer there who I would best describe as a “mad genius”. His designs were constrained to solve a very boring practical problem, yes, but they were also creative, beautiful, and I would argue, art. Yes you need a degree in electrical engineering to appreciate them, but I guarantee that any such engineer would not fail to be moved by the beauty and elegance of his designs. > I don't care much who wrote the code I'm running or if it was AI generated. There's nothing human being shared there, it solves a problem, and all that really matters is that it solves the problem well. Much like with my example of the Smart Meter, the tradesmen installing it could care less about the beauty within. However I do appreciate beautiful elegant code, rare as it is. But name for me any human creative endeavour that is not 99% meaningless, repetitive, soulless drivel?

wheelerof4te 3y ago

Coding is not art, it is a learned and trained skill. Even though, I believe that the use of ChatGPT or any other AI assistant will eventually lead to the creation of inexperienced and unskilled generations of developers. Using AI to generate "art" will just kill human creativity. Not only will it do that, it will create a new normal, where this AI art will be viewed as standard. Just as we currently have an over-monetized, synthetic music industry completely devoid of quality.

caconym_ 3y ago
Coding is technique, just like writing prose or laying down brush strokes on canvas or whatever else. All are learned skills, all can be used in the process of artistic creation.
lll-o-lll 3y ago
> Using AI to generate "art" will just kill human creativity. Did the photograph “kill” art? I’m sure this has been asked before, but what is so fundamentally different about AI that puts it into a different category of tool? That’s my argument; not that software development is art, but that tools accelerate the act of creation.

fhd2 3y ago

Art, at least how I understand it, is about sharing emotions and experiences. We know artists (as opposed to programmers) because we are curious about the person that put a part of themselves into the thing that evoked some emotion in us or gave us an interesting experience. Software can be a tool to create art (games for example), but mostly it's about problem solving. Sometimes creative problem solving, sure. But listening to a machine generated song is like the ultimate soulless A/B tested local maximum entertainment whose only goal is to make money. We had enough of that without generative AI, it's not gonna get better I wager. I don't care much who wrote the code I'm running or if it was AI generated. There's nothing human being shared there, it solves a problem, and all that really matters is that it solves the problem well.

mostlylurks 3y ago
It is relatively rare, but software itself (not just the resulting program, such as "a game") can be art. Most examples of this focus on using code to communicate something humorous about the culture surrounding software. I cite FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition [0] as a notable example. There's also code poetry, which encompasses quite a bit more than just humor. [0]: https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...
- fhd2 3y ago
  Nice example! I also did some reading in the mean time, and I guess for a 17th century definition of "art", a well-written algorithm that does the job efficiently and is easy to reason about would even classify as art. I quite enjoyed the book "Beautiful Code" for this kind of stuff.
lll-o-lll 3y ago
> Art, at least how I understand it, is about sharing emotions and experiences. We know artists (as opposed to programmers) because we are curious about the person that put a part of themselves into the thing that evoked some emotion in us or gave us an interesting experience. What is art? That’s a rhetorical question, because this is a highly debated topic and the answers have changed over time. There was a thousand years where art could not be separated from religious expression. There was a period where only technical mastery was considered important and the artist relatively unimportant. It varies by culture, time period, and even down to the individual. And once you can agree on something that should be art; there will be disagreements as to whether a particular example is worthy of the title. Is Nick Cave’s “Into my Arms” art? Is the Spice Girls “Wannabe”? Many years ago at the start of my career I was an engineer of the traditional variety working for a Smart Metering company. There was one analog electrical engineer there who I would best describe as a “mad genius”. His designs were constrained to solve a very boring practical problem, yes, but they were also creative, beautiful, and I would argue, art. Yes you need a degree in electrical engineering to appreciate them, but I guarantee that any such engineer would not fail to be moved by the beauty and elegance of his designs. > I don't care much who wrote the code I'm running or if it was AI generated. There's nothing human being shared there, it solves a problem, and all that really matters is that it solves the problem well. Much like with my example of the Smart Meter, the tradesmen installing it could care less about the beauty within. However I do appreciate beautiful elegant code, rare as it is. But name for me any human creative endeavour that is not 99% meaningless, repetitive, soulless drivel?