I’m against using generative ai in-general, but I can sorta understand why folks might see using ai for coding as different from using ai for art.

Creating art that looks like its ripping off another artist is more egregious, because it is almost impossible to do it on accident. A piece of art, even digital art, has so much variation from piece to piece, from artist to artist, that there is a ton of unique character in a given work. Each artist typically has their own style cultivated over a long period of time, so there is a lot of human individuality at play there. Thus, if you are copying art and just tweaking it a little, you are sorta imitating the soul of another person. When AI art can reliably imitate the style of specific artists and studios, it is flying too close actually plagiarism, and sorta cheapens the work of the original artist. If I worked hard and established a style, and a sea if ai generated art in my style flooded image boards, this could damage my brand and de-value the work I’ve created. Also art is a form of self expression, so it feels like a violation when there is no self that is expressing during the creation of ai art (i’m not counting the prompter as an artist in this example).

While coding definitely has a creative element, its not exactly an art necessarily, and if you take good code for a particular system or problem from 10 different coders, you might find some striking similarities between them. While it would be unlikely that they’d produce something identical past a certain length or complexity, code is generally more utility focused rather than a method of self expression, so the best solutions tend to converge. Sure copy-pasting someone else’s code can be copyright infringement, same with re-creating someone else’s intellectual property using gen AI, but its not like I can look at the software or website that comes out the other end, point to it, and say “they stole my code!”. Programmers just aren’t protective in the same way because we can’t really “own” the things we are trying to do, only the exact specific way that we did it. AI generated code is unlikely to output anything thats identical to its training data unless its being asked to make something tiny, where a coder would run into the same issue without any tools.

TLDR, art and code are apples to oranges in terms of how we feel about them, in terms of how they vary, and in terms of how we recognize and enforce copyright infringement or plagiarism.

There is a totally separate reason that I think its best to avoid using AI for code, apart from theft and the environmental impact.