13
spasma
1y

Today, a freelance javascript developer at my office told me that he designed a new website for one of his customers. I was intrigued that he is also designing and was very interested.

He showed me some images and I asked how he designed it. I thought he would come up with Figma, Sketch or whatever software, but he showed me the AI prompt.

I told him that he did not design it, but AI did that, prompting AI is not designing. He did not agree and rephrased it as "I made this".

After I said "But if I go to a bakery and ask for a cake with some nice decorations, and the baker is making that, I did not make the cake". He angry said, "You don't understand AI," and put his earplugs in and isn't talking to me since.

Prompting an AI is not creating. The AI/computing power with it's context is creating your stuff..

Comments
  • 6
    I dunno, I've seen some discussion on this. Is it just a higher level language, in the way that python and javascript are? Particularly with art, there is some finesse to the creation of prompts. I can accept that as a craft that takes some skill.
  • 2
    I'd assume that the resulting code/design still requires some manual work to be usable or good enough.
  • 6
    Dunno. I wrote this code can be reconstructed as: no, you didn’t write software. You just declared some variables and logic, compiler did the hard work and came up with most optimized binary.
  • 8
    So far there is big copyright issue with AI solutions, since essentially they are laundering copyrighted materials.

    Same problem regarding Github Copilot, offering code from open source licensed repositories. GPL3 code added to your code, requires u to be too GPL3
  • 1
    @darkwind does Github Copilot not check what license the repo has before using it?
  • 5
    Hard Topic honestly.

    Something to be discussed further for sure.

    My current view is that he did provider the design in the sense that he wrote the prompt with something in mind and tweaked it to get something he liked. Think of the first Iron Man movie when Robert Downey designed the first iron man suit using his AI assistant.

    He is an engineer, and he knows what the output should be, but he only provider high level instructions and some tweaking to finalize the design. So did he design it, or did his AI assistant?

    Currently it seems like a bit of both, so the way I see it, we should consider this "AI assisted design" as well.

    A bad designer will still get a sub-par result with an AI assistant ultimately.

    Thoughs?
  • 1
    @Hazarth well Tony Stark built that AI, so...
  • 1
    @iSwimInTheC well ok, by that logic all outputs of SD or ChatGPT belong to OpenAI?

    Not sure what the point is here. Surely, if someone else used Tony's AI to design something then it would still be an AI assisted design of theirs, not Tony's. Right?
  • 2
    @Hazarth it's an interesting idea, your guess is as good as mine on this.
  • 2
    @iSwimInTheC true. But at least It's some new tech that we can all talk about xD and if that isn't a fun part of life I don't know what is
  • 0
    What AI did He use to create Design?
    Are you taking about images or Code for the Website itself?
  • 1
    There are people, who believe that photography can't be art because a camera does most of the work.
  • 1
    If everything you do can be replicated 100% by a third party tool, or worse yet is 100% created by a third party tool, then you are not a developer, you are a user of a tool a developer created.

    Would that make the client a developer if they knew how to access that tool?

    I tinker with Stable Diffusion and have come up with a few pretty neat outputs. But in no sense of the word does that make me an artist. I didn't create the original artwork that SD was trained on. I didn't develop the algorithms SD uses to build the image. All I did was use the prompt and consume the output.

    The only honest way to integrate AI into your workflow, especially when dealing with clients, is to be crystal clear that what you are giving them is AI-assisted and you should be paid accordingly.
  • 0
    @Oktokolo But the photographer has to actually know what is worth photographing, and every photograph is a new entity. AI output is a mish mash of other people's work that happens to look like what you want.
  • 0
    @cuddlyogre So photographing architecture can't be art?

    You also definitely need to know what and how to ask the AI to get useful results.
  • 0
    @Oktokolo A photograph can be art. Photography is a skill used to create art, but not art in itself. The same way swinging a hammer is not art, but can produce art in the right hands.

    Downloading a photograph of a building is not art or a skill. Consuming a work of art is not art. Using the output of an AI does not make you a developer.

    Just because you can use the prepackaged output of a tool, that doesn't mean you are what that tool emulates. And to suggest to people that you are is dishonest.
  • 0
    @cuddlyogre Yes, i too believe, that tools like a landscape and a camera or an AI trained on landscapes can be used to create art.

    Btw, i started with photograophy because the exact same discussion about whether it is art or just replication came up at the invention of cameras. Back then it couldn't be art because you aren't painting the picture yourself.

    Btw, for me this is art: https://petapixel.com/2022/12/...
  • 1
    @Oktokolo The output of an AI does not make its user an artist. At best, that means the user knows how to ask a program to create something that resembles the actual artwork of the people it is trained on.

    If I download the Big Buck Bunny project files and render them out, that doesn't make me an animator.

    Using SO without actually understanding what I'm doing doesn't make me a developer either.
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