Generation is Generation
In a lot of organizations right now there’s a quiet double standard about AI. Using it to write code is fine. Encouraged, even. Using it to write a song, make an image, or punch up a piece of copy is treated as something closer to cheating. Same tool, two verdicts.
I’m not a software engineer and never have been. I learned to code in college and didn’t write a line again until I started building the software the Joinery runs on. What I am is a guy who manages engineers and has lately been doing a fair amount of that building himself. I’m also a drummer, and I’ve been making things with my hands for forty years. So I’ve stood on both sides of this, and I don’t think the line holds.
I want to be clear about what I’m not arguing. This isn’t a case for AI, or against it. It’s that I can’t make the two verdicts agree. If a machine helping you write code is fine, I don’t know how a machine helping you write a song is not.
I see it up close. I built a tool that lets members reserve bench time, and the people who use it think it’s clever — nobody asks how it got made. I also generated an image for the top of a page once, said so out loud, and got a different look entirely. Same people, same afternoon, two reactions, and the only thing that changed was what came out the end.
The distinction usually rests on an unspoken idea that coding is plumbing. Mechanical. A means to an end, like wiring an outlet, and the real creative act is the picture or the melody, the thing with a person in it. Anyone who has watched good engineers work knows that’s backwards. There are a hundred ways to solve a problem and most of them are ugly. Choosing the one that’s clean, that somebody else can still read a year later, that does the job without showing off, is taste. It’s a made thing. So the line doesn’t separate creative work from mechanical work. It separates two kinds of creative work and decides, quietly, that one of them doesn’t count. That’s the part I’d call hypocritical, and I don’t use the word lightly. It’s the same act getting two different moral grades depending on what comes out the end.
And even if you granted that coding is the boring one, the logic still doesn’t split. I don’t think creativity comes from the machine. It’s a human trait. The machine assists. When I build a tool for my members, the idea is mine, the judgment about whether it’s any good is mine, and the AI fills in the parts I can’t or won’t do by hand. When somebody writes a song with the same kind of help, the idea is theirs and the judgment is theirs and the tool does what tools do. I don’t see where you put the knife. You’d be cutting through the middle of one act and calling the two halves different.
Here’s where I have to be fair, because I feel the pull of that line as much as anyone. I’ve played drums since I was a kid. These days that mostly means high school pit orchestras and the occasional fill-in. Nobody’s livelihood rides on my snare drum. And still, when someone plays me a song a machine generated, something in me goes cold in a way it never does when I generate a chunk of code. I want that reaction to be a principle. It isn’t. Trace it honestly and it comes down to this: I protect the thing I am and shrug at the thing I’m not. If I get to be annoyed about the AI song, the engineers I work with have every right to be annoyed at me, cheerfully generating code I couldn’t write by hand. A flinch isn’t an ethic. It’s a flinch, even when it’s mine.
So I’ve ended up somewhere uncomfortable. Creativity is human. The machine is a machine. And where a person’s judgment is steering the work, I’ve mostly stopped caring whether what comes out the other end is a bookshelf, a working piece of software, or a four-bar intro. The line people keep trying to draw between the acceptable kind of generation and the shameful kind is one I’ve decided not to respect. Part of me still feels it every time I hear that song. I just don’t trust the feeling enough to make a rule out of it.t the table.
