r/aiwars • u/Particular_Load5885 • 2h ago
Discussion Is coding not a kind of art?
I’m not a coder, but I’ve always been under the impression that coding while technical is still something creative in nature
If it is artful, then why do so many antis take the position that vibe coding is ok but vibe images or video isn’t
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u/More-Revenue8609 1h ago
Hi, antis mostly have stance “ai taking my job is bad”. But when they are replacing you with it they dont mind it.
Anyway I (as dev) proudly use AI to generate graphics and stuff. Its doing great job and its muuuuch cheaper and faster.
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u/Effective-Guest1601 1h ago
yeah., at this point anti-ai is basically just being against ai that doesn't personally benefit them
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u/redditscraperbot2 1h ago
It is, which is why I find the position that coding is okay and art isn't an example of people being selective in their outrage.
For the record I like AI and don't mind if it's used for art or code. I just don't like the arbitrary line drawn between them.
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u/Latte_Da_cat 2h ago
Coding is an art and craft.
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u/Visible-Hand-3797 2h ago
they're just scared of the instant gratification, code still has that compile-run-fail loop that feels earned
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u/Hefty-Reaction-3028 1h ago
It's a craft for sure
A lot of coding is fit for purpose with no consideration for aesthetics
That wouldn't be art imo unless curated as such (maybe. art is hard to define)
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u/lastberserker 1h ago
Yeah. Like 90% of each book is purpose built filler with no artistic value whatsoever.
Good thing we consider each book as a whole when deciding whether it's art.
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u/Hefty-Reaction-3028 1h ago edited 1h ago
Edit: saying 90% of most books has absolutely no artistic value is WILD and absolutely absurd
I disagree that books are like code like you say because the text of a book does not do anything except for educational content (which may or may not be part of a story or art). A story is entirely aesthetic, even the legwork you're referring to.
Code is more like gears and pipes. It does things that language does not do otherwise.
By your logic, is there literally any human activity that is not art?
It doesn't have to be made as art, it doesn't need aesthetics, it doesn't need anything. What is your definition of "art"? Do you have one?
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u/lastberserker 1h ago
Everyone has a different definition of art.
As for my 90% claim, it was obviously offered in jest. Yes, 90% of software is a filler, but there are almost always beautiful, artfully designed parts that are parts of the whole. Which is my point, in slow words.
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u/breadandolive 22m ago
gears and pipes can definitely be artful too, tho. I'm a programmer and I feel like an artisan because coding feels too much like bringing clockwork gizmos and toys to life
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u/Hefty-Reaction-3028 1h ago
(Response to the other guy's comment as this guy blocked me)
Everyone has a different definition of art.
I literally asked -
What is YOUR defintion?
Which is my point, in slow words.
What a jerk. It's not obvious because they're not AT ALL the same thing. No, not every piece of software has any aesthetic consideration or curation that would make it art. Even if small parts do, it doesn't follow that everything that contains it is art.
I don't care what you say except if you reply with YOUR definition of art. Everything you say is dead in the water if you can't give me a definition because, otherwise, you're not talking about anything.
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u/Hefty-Reaction-3028 1h ago
Yeah. Like 90% of each book is purpose built filler with no artistic value whatsoever.
Wait also this is not true. Are you only reading TERRIBLE books?
New comment because I don't want this piece to be missed. That's a wild claim
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u/West_Economist6673 1h ago
I know people are going to drag you for saying such an insane thing, but not me
I am just here to remind you that you are better than 90% filler books, and as a reader -- heck, as a human being -- you deserve better than 90% filler books
One day I know you will find the book of your dreams, and it will mean more than any Reddit comment or upvote
Until then, I encourage you to expect and even demand more from literature, because you're worth it
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u/lastberserker 1h ago
Thank you 😄 I wish the same to everyone who thinks software is not art - you deserve better!
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u/Hefty-Reaction-3028 1h ago
That guy was using it as a metaphor for coding, which of course does not work because books and code do very different things
They don't actually think that 90% of all books are BS, but it fooled me too because the metaphor they were going for is so bad
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u/XellossNakama 2h ago
For me it is, as much as it is painting, writing, or any kind of craft where you can do art with... Sure, you can write a pair of lines of random instructions and it would be no art... then again sending a text message is not literature, and painting a wall is not painting... but you get the idea... It depends on what you do while coding... more than saying that coding is art, I would say you can do art by coding... it depends of how complex, how much of yourself put in it, how much creativity... the same as any craft, art is not what you do it with, it is how yoi express through it while doing it.
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u/Hefty-Reaction-3028 1h ago
A lot of coding is fit for purpose with no consideration for aesthetics
That wouldn't be art imo unless curated as such (maybe. art is hard to define)
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u/XellossNakama 1h ago
again, not al coding is art, but there is coding that can be beauty in its way, Code can be elegant, can be creative, can be beauty... Beauty is not only image, or sound... It can be used to transmit emotion, as words can. Literature is something similar, it can be used only to fit a logical reason, and it can be used to make beauty. There is no much diference in fact between coding and literature... even more than writing in a human lenguaje, because you can even create image, or sound with coding... for me coding is the ultimate way of writing
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u/YoureCorrectUProle 1h ago
the only thing more annoying than STEMlords are people who pretend there isn't beauty or art in STEM. the "AI visual art assets = bad, awful, evil" but "AI code = fine by me" types fall into two camps: programmers who are putting visual n a pedestal for some reason, or the aforementioned annoying types who think that work being technical and precise means it can't be creative.
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u/-svde- 2h ago
it is a fundamental functional science, but it absolutely can be considered art. i do, as well as many other devs. but painting can also be a functional mechanical thing, as can many other forms of human expression/creativity. so like many other forms of output, i guess it depends on application and perception
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u/West_Economist6673 56m ago
This is a great answer, maybe even the best answer -- and I say this as someone with an allergy to ambiguity, who has always found "it depends" to be the most unsatisfying answer to any question
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u/im-a-guy-like-me 1h ago
I would say yes. I can jump into a random part of my codebase and know which team member built it. We have a coding standard and style guidelines so it all looks the same, and if you took another random dev they would not be able to do this.
You learn how people solve problems. What patterns they use. What tools they reach for.
(Assuming no git blame) If something broke and one of them tried to blame another one, I could read the code and know they were lying.
I think that if you can tell a fake by studying the artist well enough, then it is hard to argue it is not art to some extent at least.
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u/Rexxar91 1h ago
Because they don't understand the logic. It seems that these artists got lost into their own fantasy where logic works differently than how it works in the real world.
If the AI is bad because it replaces the work that artists do, then the AI is bad for replacing ANY work.
Name a work AI will replace, any, if there were people enjoying that work or being dependant on that work, then the same logic should follow.
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u/Effective-Guest1601 1h ago
I mean, people have to kind of insane to use computers and the internet, and not realize that they are looking at artwork created by code all over the fucking place lol
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u/AsahiSpeakerEars 1h ago
Idk, personally, I have not seen that many antis support vibe coding. I think that number may be misrepresented or inflated, as many things are. I don't like vibe coding at all, so maybe that's why I think antis don't: because I don't. But I don't like most generative AI, and that includes vibe coding (as a very amateur student in programming).
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u/ajwin 1h ago
Arguing that AI Art isnt legitimate art usually requires massive mental gymnastics that only communists / socialists could achieve(this is reddit so theres plenty here). You could say that sometimes the output isn't as good as manual art but even then that would depend on how much time the prompter put into the project. On equivent human input time Im sure the AI would beat out the human pretty much every time in really short timeframes(in much longer timeframes / high quality work it leans more towards the human). Its a tool that empowers people who can't/wouldn't and makes things slightly more efficient for those who can.
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u/seatron 1h ago edited 1h ago
There's definitely art to it. I think creativity in general gets built up as magic, though, a bit more than it should. It's skills. Creative writing, drawing, design, art... they're all skills you can learn and improve, not divine gifts.
A good analogy is "tone deaf" as a colloquialism is more common than the actual rate of truly tone deaf people. People who can't carry a tune often call themselves tone deaf when the reality is they just haven't been trained. Likewise for "I'm not a math person."
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u/Taiko2000 1h ago
No code is not art. No one is walking through an art gallery and looking at code on the wall going MY GOD ITS BEAUTIFUL.
People can be impressed by code as an invention, like a math equation, its a discovery of a solution. Like, wheels are impressive because its an elegant solution to making a cart move.
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u/West_Economist6673 1h ago
It's a good question -- people have also argued that mathematical equations can be art, and even that a beautiful work of art and a beautiful equation can be beautiful in the same way
One issue would be that, like equations, code can work or not, and the user of the code has no say in the matter -- a typo-riddled code would not run even if it were somehow more beautiful than the "correct" version, and uninterpretable code isn't even really code at all -- it's just text
Whereas a bad novel still basically functions as language, and what makes it "bad" is something else
I'm not saying you're wrong though, just that there are interesting and significant distinctions between code and superficially similar art forms like poetry
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u/Tarc_Axiiom 30m ago
Generally no, it's engineering rather than art.
Now, is good engineering art? That's a huge debate. I'd say so, but I also have an Arts degree /shrug
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u/deltaepsilon3 20m ago
I would say it depends on which definition of "art" you are using, there are two main meanings of the word
"skill acquired by experience, study, or observation": In this sense coding is an art because it is a skill that can be developed, but this usage is pretty broad and includes things like "the art of war" or "the art of deception".
"the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects, or works so produced": I would argue coding is not primarily used to create aesthetic objects as the output of the code itself, since the purpose of code is not to look aesthetic by itself, even if it can be used to implement an aesthetic program like a game. My analogy is that writing is an art but the act of typing is not, I see coding similarly to typing in that it can be used for artistic purposes but is not itself art.
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u/makemerry 1m ago
I'd say it's mostly a craft. It requires a complex set of skills and creative problem solving, but for most coders it's the means to an end, and the process is constrained by both the requirements of those ends and by the need to make it accessible to others (since maintainability is so central to good code).
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u/Hefty-Reaction-3028 1h ago
Is construction art?
Sometimes, but a lot of it is just fit for purpose without consideration for aesthetics
Same for code
Seems clear to me idk
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u/tenmileswide 2h ago
Coding can be an art, but it’s meant to be functional first.
There are artistic expressions of code, but they only rarely intersect with functional expressions
Something like demo scene would be an example of code as art
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u/keldondonovan 1h ago
I say this as someone who frequently gets yelled at by coders who believe the opposite, but got a degree in it and worked in the field for a time before getting burnt out.
Coding can be used to do creative, artistic things, but it is not art in any more than a pencil factory is art. It can engage your problem solving, and being creative can help with that problem solving, but it is not an inherently creative task. One person's code can (and typically is) objectively better than another person's code, despite them both performing the same task. If you design a video game that is beautiful to look at, that beauty comes from the attached assets, not the save handling or physics engine. If you write code that turns an input into music, the art is in the creation of music, not in the coding of the process.
Think of it like dipping a paint brush in paint. You might use that paint to make a beautiful picture, you might use it to slop beige onto the wall for a rental property, you might use it for all kinds of things, and some of those things are art. But the dipping of the paintbrush isn't, unless you make that some kind of performance piece in and of itself, at which point the performance is the art, still not the dipping.
You cannot objectively say that one piece of art is better than another. You can subjectively say it all day long. But subjective has no business in code evaluation, you want hard numbers and truths. How much ram does this use, what kind of latency, how taxing on a system, how reliably can you put in inputs and get the right outputs, that kind of thing.
You just can't do that with art the way you can with programming.
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u/ChronieMewX 39m ago
I'm a coder, I think coding can be art, hence why I have no issues with people using ai for art
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u/softhi 2h ago
It really depends on how you define art.
coding while technical is still something creative in nature
Creativity doesn't automatically make something art, and art doesn't always require creativity. For example, if I play a piano practice piece strictly note for note from the sheet music, it's still music and therefore art. But there are no creativity at all. There are no new emotions or ideas or spins involved to claim it is "creative"
Conversely, you can make plenty of creative problem solving choices in coding without the end result being art.
Of course, you can turn coding into art.
But most of the time, code is purely functional. It's just a tool built to do a job, with no intentional beauty/aesthetic/emotional expression meant to move an audience. Besides, people don't sit around admiring the source code like a painting.
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u/XellossNakama 1h ago
t's just a tool built to do a job, with no intentional beauty, aesthetic, or emotional expression meant to move an audience. -> have you ever do coding??? I couldn't disagree more with this
Also, playing the piano is not about repeating, a robot could do that and it wouldn't be doing art doing it (mechanically at least), it is puting your personality in your play... puting your emotions... if you don't do that, I wouldn't call it art
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u/softhi 1h ago edited 1h ago
I don't "code". I'm a software engineer, as well as a jazz trumpeter and a bass singer in classical sense.
You missed my point about playing a practice piece. An étude is literally designed for mechanical repetition to build technique, not emotional expression. I am not saying all music is non-creative. I am saying some music is intended to be non-creative. They are all music anyway.
Most code isn't intended for aesthetic viewing. You can find beauty in elegant solutions. But most code is hidden and doesn't have an intended audience. A code reviewer is not viewing code like an art piece.
I am using two different definitions for art:
“Art begins when a man, with a purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs.” - Leo Toltoy, What is Art
"The important thing about a picture, however, is not how it is painted, but whether it provokes aesthetic emotion." - Clive Bell, Art
Thus, it does not meet my definition of art. Code is not intended to communicate feelings. Code also does not provoke aesthetic emotion because that's not what the audience(code reviewer) do.
You can have your own definition of art. But I don't view code as art.
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u/Internal_Display_313 2h ago
No. They are completely different. Coding requires creative thinking to derive a solution from things that exist, creativity is different entirely.
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u/corvuscorvi 1h ago
If you want to try and claim coding doesn't have creativity, you should probably use a different adjective than "creative".
Most, if not all, art is derived from things that already exist.
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u/Internal_Display_313 1h ago
Considering I do both I'm not in such a bad place to answer this. Creativity definitely involves stuff that is not derived, instantaneous decisions to completely break rules in a way that works, for example, the speed of the decision and the rate of success as a result, when the number of choices is huge, suggests something else at work than derivative action.
As I said, coding requires creative thinking, but the solutions are derived from things like mathematics or existing code. You can't just make such instantaneous rule-breaking decisions as with the art and expect anything to work. The creative thinking is still derivative, usually borrowing from other subjects, using a piece of literature as a guide, or calculating a best-risk from a set. It's what a developer needs to survive in their role, tbh.
A great deal of art is derivative, but some isn't. I don't think I know of anything in code that isn't derived from something that exists.
That's the difference as best I can describe it, from my perspective (without intending to appeal to authority I happen to be successful at both coding and creating music).
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u/corvuscorvi 1h ago
The limitations on coding being unable to accommodate rule breaking decisions also exist in more traditional art mediums. You can't pick up an acoustic guitar and make it sound like a tuba. You can't draw with charcoal and make it looks like a colorful watercolor painting. There are inherent "rules" to each medium you use.
Coding is the art-form. The languages we use are the medium. You might not be able to break the rules of a language directly, but you can certainly create new languages and new rules to go along with those languages. Or extend existing languages to accommodate your use-case. There's honestly tons of ways to accomplish creative decisions. That's also where I think most of the art comes into coding.
I mean, just look at the evolution of modern frameworks and their APIs. A decade ago the interfaces we were producing were clunky, in-composable, and obscure. Nowadays we have clean clear-cut APIs that allow us so much freedom in how we choose to implement our solutions. That evolution happened because of the artistic expressions of developers compounding with each other over a large amount of time. Those artistic expressions evolved the way we define our code.
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u/Internal_Display_313 1h ago
There are rules you can't break due to physics in music, yes. It's the wealth that you can break that makes the difference, and the way a split second impulse can be right so often.
New programming languages just derive from what was there. The new, better designed APIs exist because developers studied the poor solution and derived a better solution from it. And ultimately it derives from things like binary systems, Boolean logic, sets, algebra and other mathematics (computing used to be a maths degree module). Maths isn't created, it exists, we derive ways of communicating about what it represents to achieve great things, but we didn't create, we discovered. The concept of NOT, AND and OR in Boolean logic weren't created, they were derived from nature and described. 0 and 1 also, people didn't create 1.
Penrose didn't create those amazing tiles, he derived the pair from 2D geometry. The next prime number to be added to the list won't be created, it will be derived from the rules that govern primes.
Mathematicians, programmers, engineers etc. do brilliant work which involves great skill, but take a bridge engineer, they couldn't just decide to replace all the steel with lead on a whim, or a programmer, they can't take Java code and have it work in a JavaScript environment. These examples always lead to failure. But an artist could pick up charcoal, decide they were going to create a watercolour as best they could and they have a good chance of succeeding at creating something, they aren't guaranteed to fail to create art like the bridge engineer is guaranteed to collapse their bridge, plus, artists seem to have a knack for knowing when to break the rules.
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u/corvuscorvi 44m ago
That artist can't expect color to come out of their charcoal pencil. At least with Java I could write a transpiler into javascript, although someone already has.
Mathematics is a logical system, it does not actually exist. People did, indeed, come up with 0 and 1. Like everything else in mathematics, these are concepts that exist in our heads. They might be logical concepts, but they are still concepts without inherent existence. Mathematics only exists within the bounds of the fictional world it was created in. For example, mathematics that's true for natural numbers might not hold true for negative or fractional integers.
Whether or not we created mathematics or discovered mathematics is a philosophical question without a clear answer. But in either case, mathematics does not exist in reality.
I fail to see how the logical limitations of programming preclude it from being an art-form, while the tonal limitations of your guitar doesn't limit it at all.
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u/Internal_Display_313 35m ago
I agreed that instruments have physical constraints, a guitar can only make certain sounds. The rules I'm thinking of are more like deliberately breaking rhythm, key, etc. And other things, usually, repeated, small, constantly different and non-random. Picasso even says it "Learn the rules like pro so you can break them like an artist". That doesn't work for bridges. Or code.
I could also derive a transpiler from coding logic, JavaScript and Java, but I couldn't just break rules like I describe above while I did it. I couldn't just thrown in a line of Ruby like I could an off-key chord or a splash of water-colour.
Perhaps we agree to disagree, I think I would only repeat myself, unless clarity on something is requested. But I'll ask this: would say it is not certain that the concept of two things existed as soon as their was the Moon and the Earth? Even though we weren't here? The answer actually provides me with my only way of explaining how creativity may actually be derived 100% of the time.
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u/corvuscorvi 18m ago
I think your analogies are off. Throwing a line of ruby into a java program would be like throwing a piano line into your guitar riff. It's not something that makes sense because a guitar cannot transform itself into a piano. The physical constraints on an instrument are equivalent to the logical constraints of a programming language.
The concept of two things is a fiction our minds created, even if we can see that two things exist. Two, in and of itself, is not something that has an apparent existence. It's a concept. It may be a universal concept, the logic of which may be independently derived, but it's still a concept.
I'm not sure that makes any difference in whether or not programming is an artform. In the end, I think programming can be an artform because a person can use it to meld their imagination and skill together into a creative expression. Whether or not other artforms don't have as many limitations as programming doesn't mean that programming is not art.
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u/Internal_Display_313 12m ago
But you just use a piano. That's the point, Ruby will never work in Java, but a piano may well work replacing any guitar notes and that is done.
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u/Chaos_Engineer 1h ago
95% of professional coding is finding out how someone else solved the problem and copying their solution. Coming up with a completely new solution from scratch is called "reinventing the wheel" and it's discouraged.
The other 5% is coming up with solutions to problems that have never been solved, or finding a more efficient or more secure solution. That's a rare skill.
But 100% of art is coming up with things that are new. No one would tell a mystery writer, "Agatha Christie already wrote a mystery novel, you're reinventing the wheel!"
That said, "vibe coding" is also bad - not because it's not creative, but because the people that do it are generating code they don't understand, and they'll never learn the difference between good code and bad (insecure, inefficient, unmaintainable) code.
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u/bubblesculptor 1h ago
It's kinda like architecture.
A building can be constructed in a functional, but ugly manner.
Buildings can also be designed with beauty and elegance.
Lots of code is unfortunately built like shantytowns. Ramshackled shacks all chaoticly shoved together. It's truly disturbing how much terrible code has been written. Usually on insufficient budget in insufficient time with insufficient experience.
However some code is pure beauty. Efficient, error-free, easy to understand, well-constructed. This takes true talent.