Artists and programmers see AI completely differently
A couple of days ago Rick Brewster made a post on Bluesky about how he’d used AI to help him get paint.net working on Linux and my goodness was there a negative response.
I have no idea what paint.net is and he’s since deleted the original post but the gist of it was…
Paint.net has always been Windows only and I just had Claude Code port it to WINE so it might work on Linux now. How cool is that?
Even with zero knowledge about Windows or WINE1 it was pretty clear that neither Rick nor anyone else was ever gonna bother doing this by hand. Because big ports like this are long, complex, fiddly, and extremely boring. Especially when nobody’s paying you.
As a programmer, one of the coolest things about the AI tools we have now is that they make things like this possible in the first place, so my instant reaction to Rick’s skeet was “Oooof yeah sod doing that it sounds horrible without LLMs. How cool is it we’ve got tools for this kinda stuff now?”.
Quite a lot of other folks responded like that too, but they were drowned out in the absolute torrent of hatred and abuse from people who hate AI. Leaving aside how shit Rick must’ve felt, the most interesting thing for me when scrolling through all the vitriol was this…
The vast majority seemed to be from digital artists, not programmers.
And that feels worth talking about for a second.
Paint.net is an image and photo editing app, so it stands to reason that many of its users are gonna be artists and not software engineers.
I’ve long said that the experience us programmers are having with AI is completely different to that of most other folks, but this is doubly so for artists and order-of-magnitude-ly so for digital artists. This site’s AI policy states something I believe at the moment:
AI-generated “art” is not art.
It does not state that “AI-generated software is not software” because software and art are not at all the same thing.
Reading the responses to Rick’s post, it felt like everyone replying doesn’t get this – that using an AI coding tool to do some mega-giant, mega-boring software port is somehow the same as using ChatGPT to write a shitty story and then generate a bunch of shitty AI slop images and call it a comic book.
I can’t judge anyone for that because the only people likely to read Rick’s post how it was (probably) intended are those with sufficient experience of both programming and using LLMs that their first thought was “Oooof yeah sod doing that it sounds horrible without LLMs. How cool is it we’ve got tools for this kinda stuff now?”
If you thought “OMG no he’s putting AI in the app and I hate AI” then you didn’t understand what the post was about, which is totally understandable if you’re not someone who makes software.
If you thought “OMG no he’s turning an app I use and love into AI slop code and it’s gonna be super broken” you’re either on Windows (so this is nowt to do with you) or you’re on ’nix (so happy days away, surely? 🤷♂️). In either case if you’re worried that Rick using LLMs to build the software you like will lead to it being super-shitty, I’d suggest that he probably cares about its quality a shit-ton more than you do.