alt Hacker NewsI think you are incorrect in assuming that the reason she doesn't want to use AI is because of democratization. She is pretty clear about her reasoning; she enjoys the effort of her work, and removing the effort removes the joy.
In fact if we're being honest, there is some weird unprompted bitterness in your response that is pretty common in the AI space. Creatives who don't like AI are always haughty elitists who don't like that the peasants can now create works as brilliant as them.
In reality, most artists I know wouldn't use AI because the friction is part of the joy of creation for them. Or maybe they want to feel like the work truly emerged from their own brain. Or they find their art practice both productive and meditative, and those are equally important to them. Or numerous other reasons, mostly compelling.
I'm not an artist, or even particularly creative, but the only reason I would undertake any hobby is because I enjoy the process. I like building Gunpla models, which seems irrational if you are only thinking about output. If someone were to say to me, "You know, they sell plastic toys of the RX-78-2. You could just buy one if you wanted it," I would stare at them blankly.
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> the friction is part of the joy of creation for them
I’d extend that to suggest—based on conversations with the artists in my life, anyway—that for many, the friction along the path from an idea to a work is where the art happens in the first place. That the art happens in the additions and subtractions and judgments the artist makes along the way as they bring the artifact into being. That without that, it’s something closer to manufacturing.
I’m reminded of how we around here grumble at piles of vibe-coded slop, even if they notionally solve the users’ problems at hand. It’s not strictly that “it’s insufficient at satisfying the problem brief,” it’s that it’s missing all the other latent considerations—structure, coherence, legibility, maintainability, determinism, good judgment—that a skilled code craftsperson would have worked in along the way almost without thinking.
Depressing for artists of code itself—liberating for the people whose artistic practice is maybe one level of abstraction up—whose obsession is iterating through “finished” products til they fit just so, til they reflect the high-level intention just right. For whom the code part was always an annoying-but-necessary slog, akin to, as another commenter said, grinding the snails for pigment…
“I dread what it means for the code base at work, but damn if I’m not cranking out every single side project I’d never gotten around to…”
> In fact if we're being honest, there is some weird unprompted bitterness in your response
Politely, I suggest that prefacing a claim about a stranger's emotions by saying that the claim is "fact" and "honest" is presumptuous.
But I do think you're right about the "friction [being] part of the joy". I think a better version of my comment is that enjoying those frictions isn't completely straightforward, and the temptations of a frictionless (and maybe subpar) alternative make those frictions less enjoyable still, as simonbw's comment observed.