Code as Art
I covered this before in Art or tool? If you think of software as artistic output then generated software isn’t real because it doesn’t have the creative ineffability that’s a sign of true art.
There’s no argument against this one except that the people who want software typically aren’t paying for artworks, they’re paying for outcomes. And the outcomes of using a given artefact are the same regardless of how the artefact is made.
That also means there’s no argument for this one, unless you accept as axiomatic the ideas that things that can be considered art should only be made by people, and that using this particular set of tools is too big a separation between the person and the work when no other historical set of tools was too big a separation between the person and the work.
AI as Employment Thief
I covered this one before too, in On working machines. If you think of typing in code as the thing you get paid for, and the employers now have access to a machine that can do the typing, then the machine “stole your jobs”.
Except that the job was never to type code, it was to deliver valuable software. People who can still do that can still get paid by organisations that need that to be done. And, as I said in the linked post, demand only increases as application becomes more efficient.
Humans as Meat Proxies
If you think that software creation is an interpersonal endeavour, then taking task descriptions generated by software and turning them into prompts that the software uses to generate more software is a dehumanising experience.
This has been the trajectory of society for centuries. Here’s a quote from the Fragment on Machines:
…once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages. […]
The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital, in so far as it enters into the production process as a means of production proper.
This passage, written by Karl Marx in about 1857-1858, shows that both mechanical and intellectual work was always intended to be replaced by machinery (in predicting the alienation of intellectual work, Marx probably relied on his knowledge of contemporary mathematician Charles Babbage). In this situation it isn’t the technology that takes the job, it’s the mode of production. And given that programming is intellectual work, the means of production is literally our heads, we ought to be able to seize those.
Software Engineering as Rules
Motivated by Bertrand Meyer’s AI for Smarties, if you believe that software engineering is the careful application of the mysterious knowledge of software engineers, encapsulated in rules like the SOLID principles, “prefer composition over inheritance”, “use you’re type’s good“, the Law of Demeter and so on, then AI can’t possibly write software because it doesn’t apply those rules, it just generates text that happens to compile.
Never mind that much of the history of computing involves people taking an empiricist approach to software: copying it from Stack Overflow and tweaking it until it works; writing it out from a listing in Numerical Recipes or Sinclair User and tweaking it until it works; writing macros to automate the copying phase, and so on.
AI Companies as Bad Actors
If you believe that the big AI companies is run by people who don’t have humanity’s best interests at heart (further reading: all the Karl Marx writings I didn’t already quote above), then AI coding is bad because it supports those companies. As long as you don’t allow for the creation of other companies, the use of non-corporate models like academic or community models, and so on.
