> I've seen people supposedly smarter than I advocate for just giving in, conceding to AI coding as it's the future. But doing so means tossing out my friends who make art or the people who work their asses off to properly test and review code or the writers pouring all of their energy into even mundane dialogue. It means throwing out my dignity Conflating things in this inflammatory way is a big mistake. Using a tec…
The author is coming from the games industry. As an arts based industry, AI is EXTREMELY divisive. The author really will lose friends over even so much as touching AI in certain ways, because the artists that built the games industry were already badly abused, and now, they're being squeezed out entirely. For business developers, AI is somewhat less existentially terrifying, as it can be seen to be really empowering…
Because someone who knows something about pixels needs to make a judgement. It is rare to see a machine-generated artifact (picture, video, text or code) that's good on the first try. And not always a non-specialist can see the issue.
Same thing why we still need human software engineers, even though a machine can generate code. Someone with actual understanding of the problem needs to make a management decision. Just like engineers see code slop (design or implementation) that laypeople vibe-coding don't recognize, artists see the visual slop where layman eye glances over.
Honestly, IMHO, this whole panic is artists' own creation. Instead of educating others on how to spot the issues (and thus reaffirming that expertise still matters - nothing had changed, and probably nothing ever will), a notable fraction went all-in on neo-luddite ideas, as if they don't know the history of their own craft and adjacent creative industries (I guess many really don't, or at least it doesn't click). Evaluate new tools, make use of them when they provide value, skip them where they fall short, and most importantly reaffirm that fancier brushes don't replace the artist in a human society - this is an already well-tested and proven strategy. Ring the existential bells when we'll get to the question of machine cognition rather than just intelligence.
Same for the engineering. Don't shy away from new tools, use them where they're a good fit, don't waste time when they are't (but periodically check out if something changes), explain everyone why you still matter - just to push back on unfortunate misconceptions.
The fact that a lot of companies' upper management went delusional and decided they want to replace humans witch machines (as if don't need responsibility anymore) doesn't help. But - hey - already plenty of stories how it bites them back, so while this period sucks, it's not exactly fucked, just in a state of (a pretty much expected) confusion.
Dishing out pixels or lines of code got somewhat cheaper. Expertise cost remains the same, though.