Ricardo Toureiro

Why are we even arguing around this? Programming is creative problem solving, even if it isn’t art. It’s personal labor and intellectual property. The person who engineered a solution deserves to benefit financially if a sizable portion of their intellectual contribution is used by some business. Pay people for their work. Art is not to be protected from AI just because it’s art. That’s just circular thinking some artists might participate in. Art like any profession should be protected alongside programmers because both used their minds to create something, and both deserve to profit from the fruits of their labor. AI steals that labor without compensation and then seeks to undercut the very people it was trained on without permission. This is different from tutorials and open source gifts to community members. Tutorials and open source were made with the understanding of a mutually beneficial exchange. The teachers pass knowledge to create good practices and create a community of competent professionals that might one day work besides them. Open source contributors gift their labor to fellow programmers under a similar social contract. AI companies have no such interest in this contract. They want to become the sole suppliers/gatekeepers of labor and knowledge work by making cheap automation replacements for labor. The intention is to steal from the people you plan to replace. There is no real end goal of collaboration or growing a professional community. This is no different than the current firms buying up individual medical practices and then establishing themselves as the only viable source of employment and labor supply of medical practitioners. The cost of medical services never goes down; they just shift whatever the medical workers were earning to the executive class. That’s the end goal here and instead of artists and programmers being dumb and arguing over which job is special or has inherent dignity/social value, they should band together and push against this takeover of labor from the executive class.