Craftsmanship, per Million Tokens
Artists and engineers seem to be at different ends of the debate on the use of AI in their fields. While I see much more open contempt for AI from the artistic community than I do the engineering one, I think that at think at the core, this is about a clash in values between values between craftspeople and producers.
To quickly define terms, craftspeople are those who value process, mastery, and earned legitimacy through repeated practice of their work. Producers, on the other hand, are those who define themselves by their output, usefulness, and the market response to their work.
I’d say broadly that artists are craftspeople and engineers are producers. There are large chunks of each that are exceptions to that rule, which is why we see critique of AI slop from both sides, of both bad generative code and bad generative images/songs/movies. But the generalisation is a fair one, I think.
Now artists, or maybe more specifically illustrators, designers, and animators, absolutely have fair concerns. They’re worried about AI flooding the labour market, about rights over ownership of their work, and about their livelihoods. But engineers face a lot of these concerns too! So what’s causing the difference in response?
I think it’s because coding is mainly about the software it produces – it has a producer culture. The process is not usually valued in itself. In short, coding is a profession of production, whereas art is kind of the opposite.
Interesting to note is that the most successful artists I know, the ones consistently producing well regarded works and making lots of money from it, are the least resistant to AI. They are professionals, and like engineers, they will use the new tool that’s available to them to produce their works.
On both sides of the fence, AI is quite already displacing workers in supply chains that are less interested in the process and more interested in the product. Coinbase, Block, and Atlassian's recent workforce cuts, all linked at least in part to AI-driven efficiency, are just the latest examples.
So where is this all leading? Just more loss of craft and beauty in our world, another field commoditised? I don’t think so.
Yesterday I was, for the first time, truly impressed with the quality of an AI-generated song (These Clones Ain't Loyal by ai am a jedi). It wasn't just good for AI – it was good! It even had me moving. Today, I read OpenAI’s article about "harness engineering", where I saw a craftsperson’s attention to detail in figuring out how to use coding agents effectively and artfully to build high-quality software. There is, undeniably, craftsmanship here.
I think the future belongs to people who bring a craftsperson’s obsession to producer tools.