On AI Coding Part 2: Creative Alienation

This is the second in a series on AI coding. Part 1 looked at the economics of AI coding tools; this instalment is more philosophical than practical: an examination of a problem I consider profound, one that extends well beyond coding into creative work of every kind.

Creative Alienation

After reflecting on my own AI usage and what I have observed in others, I have felt compelled to apply the term creative alienation to a phenomenon I find deeply troubling. I borrow the terminology of alienation from Marxist theory. I won’t get into a lengthy discussion here, but Marx posited that people suffered greatly from being separated from the output of their work. Essentially, the transition from craft-based work, where a labourer would build a product from start to finish alongside other labourers, to factory work separated workers from a part of their essential human nature. Instead of handcrafting a piece of furniture, a worker on an assembly line would be responsible for a single component of the ready-to-assemble furniture so common today. I find this argument compelling on its face, especially as someone who chose to work in software because I love the craft-like elements of building complex digital systems. I have always loved the puzzle of solving a complex problem through code, iterating on and refining my solutions.

Marx was most concerned with separation from the product of one’s labour, but he also described alienation from fellow workers, and it is this second form that concerns me here.

Isolation

Often a puzzle is bigger than any one person. As much as I love solving creative puzzles on my own, humanity’s best works are collaborations. Many hands and many minds, working together, or sometimes even in spite of each other, are the foundation of the modern world and of the best things in life.

Unfortunately, the modern world, and the tech industry in particular, has thrived on reducing or eliminating human friction. The social media age has had vast consequences for how we connect and relate to each other, and the importance of third places and organic human interaction has diminished with time. An easy example is how we meet romantically: a 2023 Pew Research study found that 53% of American adults under 30 had used a dating site or app, and that one in five partnered adults under 30 had met their significant other on one. These numbers have likely only grown since.

Food and grocery delivery apps take this further: you no longer need to interact with a person at all to eat. Sharing food has been a cornerstone of human culture since before we had language, and yet interacting with another person to get our food or groceries is something we have managed to abstract away entirely in the name of convenience. It isn’t just shared meals that disappear; it’s the small everyday exchanges like speaking with a cashier, a server, a neighbour that were a quiet but foundational element of our shared culture. A lot of work is done from home now too, which certainly has its benefits, but it furthers the social isolation we feel. In this sense, the modern era has deepened our alienation by eliminating the friction of human interaction.

The Next Step

To tie these threads together, I believe AI is the next step in this societal alienation. AI is a powerful tool that allows one person to become far more of a generalist than would otherwise be possible. That is a genuinely powerful capability, and it makes an individual far more productive, but it carries significant consequences. In my own work, I’ve benefitted greatly from the ability to create one-off scripts and automations with AI. I can write Python myself, but it isn’t my favourite activity, and it’s not a tool I have historically reached for as often as I believe I should. When I started using AI to do that work for me, it dawned on me that I had stopped discussing automations and scripting with peers, or looking at what other talented and creative people had done in the field. It quietly became routine, and as a result my inclination to communicate and collaborate with other programmers has gone down. I imagine I’m not the only one experiencing this.

I can see how the talented comic book artists of the future might reach for AI to help with their writing instead of partnering with a talented writer, because an AI writer might be just good enough. There will be musicians who use AI instead of forming a band, and across the board I see the potential for every creative endeavour to suffer from this same instinct.

We have spent decades optimizing away human friction, and often for good reason. But the best work and, more fundamentally, the best culture comes from teams of human specialists collaborating and experiencing friction in their work. The same friction that dating apps and delivery apps and remote work strip out of our lives is the friction that produces collaboration, community and craft. This is why creative alienation feels like an apt term: we have created a technology with the potential to eliminate human collaboration from creative pursuits entirely.

For this reason, I have chosen to be deliberate about always showing and discussing my work with others as much as possible, something I had previously taken for granted.