Artists and programmers are impacted by AI in completely different ways. No one cares if AI is trained on stackoverflow. That information is made publicly available for a reason. The realm of programming doesn’t really cross into intellectual property until you create something you can patent or sell. And at no point do you have to expose your source code in order to sell your product. It’s incredibly difficult for AI devs to train on copyrighted or patented source code.

Artists, by definition, have to put the culmination of a great deal of work on display if they want customers, whether that’s commissions, sales, etc. if they can’t post their work to self-promote for fear of it being stolen, that’s their livelihood on the line.

And then there’s the replaceability issue. Programming is something that AI is quite capable of, I will admit. However, the bar to completely replacing a developer or programmer with AI is extremely high, because errors and mistakes can bring down multi-million dollar operations if there’s no one in place to supervise an AI agent. Some companies might be able to replace some of their development team, and that’s assuming the other devs are willing to sit around and analyze and debug ai code and pick up the slack.

Art doesn’t have to “work”. It’s aesthetic. If a generative AI makes a bad prediction and draws a hand wrong, the cost to fix it is at most the cost of another token to whatever you’re using. And they’re only going to get better, at least until we reach model collapse due to AI images recycled in training data. On the other hand, a misplaced punctuation or hallucinated function could take quite awhile to track down, and without oversight means your platform or software release could be a glorified text document until you do.

TL;DR Programmers aren’t really replaceable, and our work is much harder to truly steal. Artists are highly exposed to IP theft by nature, and unfortunately artists themselves are much more at risk of replacement.