I made a statement to a friend last week.
It doesn’t matter if you use AI to make your art website. I made my website with AI, and I wouldn’t have had the time to do it without AI, so AI enabled me to direct my vision and build a website to my taste. I acted as the Art Director while my AI agent just implemented the technical solution.
But since then, I’ve been conflicted on if I truely believe this view. On one hand, I think this is a good argument. Artists often get a technician to implement their vision, this isn’t that different. On the other, I think something is lost when I build something with AI. I feel like a plagiarist, a phoney, an imposter.
Lost Craft
The main reason I am conflicted is that I feel like I lose a bit of my craft when I rely on AI to build for me. I’m both passionate and proud of my craft—my ability to summon my imagination into reality with code—but building also takes time that I often don’t have anymore outside my professional career of building things with code.
When I build outside of work, it’s because I want something to use, or want to express my vision, and in serving those goals, building the tool / site myself doesn’t score high on the list of priorities. I’ve built way more with AI than if I didn’t have access those tools, and that’s enabled me to execute my artistic vision. But, it still feels like cheating.
I think part of this comes down to the craft of artists we respect. Famous painters become famous not just because of their artistic vision, but their skill in execution. One of the most frustrating things in attempting to create your own art is the gap between your taste and your skill.
Creating art is a pure endeavour. It’s not about making money, or achieving fame. It’s purely about making art. So, when I list priorities and claim that writing the code isn’t high on the list, it feels like I’m making a commercial tradeoff rather than an artistic one. If I wanted the experience to be pure, I should write it myself.
Despite my AI use in writing code. All content on this site is purely human generated, from idea, to planning, writing, and editing.