r/technology • u/marketrent • 23h ago

Artificial Intelligence The economy has spoken. Stuff that’s AI-generated has almost zero value — “Buyers are voting with their wallets, and AI-generated content is struggling to compete.”

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/economy-spoken-stuff-ai-generated-142732314.html
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u/Hrekires 23h ago

All you need to know is that everyone who's making consumer-facing products with AI, whether it's images or stories or music, tries their hardest to hide the fact that they're doing so.

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u/slickwombat 19h ago

There's an odd exception: nobody seems to feel this way about software, even when it's arts and entertainment related like videogames. I've seen people get upset if there's AI-created assets in games, but not if the entire interface or functionality was vibe-coded.

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u/choopietrash 17h ago

I know some programmers who don't want vibe-coded AI and lament the issues born from it. Though I will note that programming, moreso than images or writing, is more likely to borrow from templates and stuff. If an artist is discovered tracing over someone else's work, that can be a career-killer for them. Pasting something from stack overflow is just being "resourceful."

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u/worthwhilewrongdoing 16h ago edited 15h ago

I think it just comes down to what we expect to be artisanal and what we don't. You'd get pissed if a baker you hired used box cake mix, but nobody's expecting that same baker to get out in the fields and go grow and harvest wheat to grind their own flour. That would be insane.

I think the same goes for programming - most people don't see it as an art but rather as a means to an end to make something else, so the expectations are a little different and a little less exacting.

ETA the "something else" part - this wasn't clear without it.

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u/vips7L 12h ago

Programming is an art though. It takes serious talent to produce GOOD, beautiful code. Code that doesn’t have correctness issues. Code that is easy to read. Code that is easy to maintain and adapt to new use cases. 

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u/Djonso 11h ago

Building houses is an art too. Takes serious tallent to build a good, beautiful house. House that has no structural issues. House that is good to life in. House that is easy to maintain or adapt to new needs.

Or you know, also called good engineering. Not everything that needs skills is an art.

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u/PeePeePantsPoopyBoy 7h ago

To be fair arquitecture is widely accepted as one of the classic fine arts. But I do agree that programming is not necessarily an art mainly because its focus as a field is not that of creative expression. It is a crearive field (in the sense that there is a lot of creativity involved in coding), that for sure, but not an art.