Writers, artists and musicians have gone on strike and signed open letters to protest AI, and copyright lawsuits from creative industry groups have multiplied. Across creative fields there is a concerted push to reject the technology. Yet many experienced programmers remain convinced it is fine to use AI for programming, even as they admit it is making them miserable and changing their industry.
A common justification is that programming is not art. If the tool gets the job done and the job is merely functional, the argument goes, why does it matter? The author argues that it does matter, because programming is art. The claim that programs cannot be art rests on a distorted view of art, which John Berger, in Ways of Seeing, calls mystification. Berger shows how an art historian's florid prose about a commissioned group portrait hides its mundane origins: a poor old painter needed work, and officials wanted an official portrait. The painting is well executed and beautiful, but it was made for a fairly mundane purpose and was never a divine relic.
Culture tends to mystify painting, sculpture, film and music, ignoring their functional aspects and focusing on emotional impact. The same distortion appears in how we treat labor. Novelists are mystified while journalists and copywriters are denigrated, though the skills overlap and many famous writers have worked in both roles. Working professionally with words, even mundane ones, is good practice for more purely artistic work, because mundane creativity is still artistic.
The author, who once called themselves a "code poet" as a teenager, extends this view to software. Code can be beautiful, and its creation deserves respect as skilled, creative labor rather than either mystical veneration or dismissal as mere function.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing