Programming Isn’t Special

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艺术家们明白人工智能对艺术有害。为什么程序员不明白我们也是艺术家呢？

Creative Work Writers went on strike to get protections against “AI”. Thousands of artists have signed open letters in protest of “AI”. There are so many copyright lawsuits from creative industry groups against AI that there’s a whole dedicated website for it. Popular YouTubers absolutely hate it. If they’re also musicians, they REALLY hate it. Across all creative industries, there is a concerted push to reject this technology.

创作工作作家们举行罢工以争取针对“人工智能”的保护。成千上万的艺术家签署了公开信抗议“人工智能”。创意产业团体针对人工智能发起的版权诉讼多到甚至有一个专门的网站来记录。受欢迎的 YouTube 博主们非常讨厌它。如果他们同时也是音乐家，他们会“真的”非常讨厌它。在所有创意行业中，人们都在齐心协力抵制这项技术。

Yet, almost unique among creative fields, many experienced programmers remain convinced that it’s fine to use “AI” for programming. We do seem to hate it, and it’s making us all miserable, and what it’s doing to our industry, but we are using it anyway. A lot of the justification of this resignation seems to be to be because programming is not Art. If the tool can get the job done, and the job is just functional, then why does it matter? It does matter, though. It matters because we shouldn’t be using AI to produce Art, and programming is Art.

然而，在创意领域中几乎独树一帜的是，许多经验丰富的程序员仍然坚信使用“人工智能”进行编程是可以的。我们似乎确实讨厌它，它让我们所有人都感到痛苦，而且它正在对我们的行业造成破坏，但我们还是在使用它。这种妥协的理由似乎很大程度上是因为编程不是艺术。如果工具能完成工作，而工作仅仅是功能性的，那又有什么关系呢？但它确实有关系。它之所以重要，是因为我们不应该使用人工智能来创作艺术，而编程就是艺术。

Art can be Mundane Some people will say that programs cannot be art because programs are functional, rather than being expressive. Programs are mundane whereas art is transcendent. This is based on a distorted understanding of what Art actually is. In John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing”, he names this type of distortion “mystification”. His example of this process is both amusing and illustrative. I encourage you to read it in its entirety.

艺术可以是平凡的有些人会说程序不能是艺术，因为程序是功能性的，而不是表现性的。程序是平凡的，而艺术是超凡的。这基于对艺术本质的扭曲理解。在约翰·伯格的《观看之道》中，他将这种扭曲称为“神秘化”。他关于这一过程的例子既有趣又具有启发性。我鼓励你完整地阅读它。

In summary, though: Berger critiques the florid prose of an art historian describing a commissioned group portrait, including phrases like “subtle modulations of the deep, glowing blacks” and “harmonious fusion”. The portrait is described as sublime, in nearly ecstatic terms. Berger reveals that the reality of this portrait is that a poor old painter needed some work, and some officials probably thought it might be nice to have an official portrait. So they paid some money to the poor old man, and he painted it, and then they had a painting. It’s a well-executed portrait of a group of people. Beautiful, even. But it was work commissioned for a fairly mundane purpose and it suited that purpose just fine. It was not, and is not, a divine relic.

不过，总结来说：伯格批评了一位艺术史学家描述一幅委托创作的群像画时所用的华丽辞藻，其中包括“深邃、发光的黑色的微妙调和”和“和谐的融合”等短语。这幅肖像画被描述得极其崇高，近乎狂喜。伯格揭示了这幅肖像画的真相：一位贫穷的老画家需要工作，而一些官员可能认为拥有一幅官方肖像画会很不错。于是他们付了一些钱给这位可怜的老人，他画了这幅画，然后他们就得到了一幅画。这是一幅执行得很好的群像肖像画。甚至很美。但这是一项为了相当平凡的目的而委托的工作，它很好地满足了那个目的。它过去不是，现在也不是什么神圣的遗物。

Culturally, we are prone to mystifying painting, and sculpture, and film, and music. We imbue them with “subtle modulations”. We ignore their functional aspects — we desire decoration, amusement, and distraction — and focus on their emotional impact. Don’t get me wrong: I love me some good aesthetic philosophy. I think it’s great to really examine our reactions to artwork and to try and gain a deeper understanding of our culture and our selves through media analysis. If anything we really need to do more of it.

在文化上，我们倾向于将绘画、雕塑、电影和音乐神秘化。我们赋予它们“微妙的调和”。我们忽视了它们的功能性方面——我们渴望装饰、娱乐和消遣——并专注于它们的情感影响。别误会我的意思：我热爱优秀的审美哲学。我认为真正审视我们对艺术品的反应，并试图通过媒体分析更深入地了解我们的文化和我们自己，是一件很棒的事情。如果说有什么需要做的，那就是我们需要做更多这样的事情。

This does not mean that the creation of such works is mystical or that it should be venerated beyond any other sort of labor. Not least of which other types of labor that are adjacent to, but not as culturally venerated, as fine art. We tend to mystify the work of a novelist, but to denigrate the work of a journalist. In reality, the functional prose of the journalist is no less important and deserves no less respect. Although they might be far below the ethereal realm that novelists inhabit in our collective imagination, even journalists receive more respect and thus more mystification than lowly copywriters.

这并不意味着这些作品的创作是神秘的，也不意味着它应该比任何其他类型的劳动更受尊崇。尤其是那些与纯艺术相邻但文化地位却不那么受尊崇的其他劳动类型。我们倾向于将小说家的工作神秘化，却贬低记者的工作。实际上，记者功能性的文字同样重要，也理应得到同样的尊重。尽管在我们的集体想象中，他们可能远低于小说家所处的空灵境界，但即使是记者，也比卑微的文案撰稿人获得了更多的尊重，从而也获得了更多的神秘化。

Yet, there is no transcendental distinction between “novelist” and “copywriter”; the many of the skills are the same, and the distinction is merely an accident of commerce and opportunity. In fact, many famous writers have famously inhabited both roles. This is not an accident! Working with words professionally, even (perhaps especially) mundane words, is excellent practice for working with words in a more purely artistic context, because even mundane creativity is still artistic.

然而，“小说家”和“文案撰稿人”之间并没有超验的区别；许多技能是相同的，这种区别仅仅是商业和机遇的偶然。事实上，许多著名作家都曾以担任这两个角色而闻名。这并非偶然！专业地处理文字，即使（或许尤其是）平凡的文字，也是在更纯粹的艺术语境下处理文字的绝佳练习，因为即使是平凡的创造力也依然是艺术。

Code can be Beautiful One thousand Internet years ago, when I was in my late teens, I would describe myself as a “code poet”. I was relentlessly mocked for this as what the Youth would today call “being cringe”, and at the time was referred to as “pretentious”. I succumbed to the peer pressure, removed it from my email signature and my bio. While I still believed strongly in the parallels, I accepted that — socially, at least — comparing code to poetry, or indeed to Art, was a silly thing to do.

代码可以是美丽的一千个互联网年前，当我十几岁的时候，我会称自己为“代码诗人”。我因此受到了无情的嘲笑，这在今天会被年轻人称为“尴尬”，而在当时被称为“自命不凡”。我屈服于同辈压力，将其从我的电子邮件签名和个人简介中删除了。虽然我仍然坚信两者之间的相似之处，但我接受了——至少在社交层面上——将代码与诗歌，甚至与艺术相提并论，是一件愚蠢的事情。

However, I never abandoned the idea, in my heart. The thing that I am most well-known for, the invention of Deferred, was specifically an aesthetic reaction to the tedium of passing callback and errback parameters to every single remote procedure call in an RPC client/server application. Those two callbacks got the job done just fine. But they were ugly, and annoying to work with. Deferred is an intentional poem about asynchronous task execution, with a deliberate eye to the aesthetics of the problem and the experience of using it. It was influential because of its focus on aesthetics.

然而，在内心深处，我从未放弃过这个想法。我最出名的事情——Deferred 的发明——正是对在 RPC 客户端/服务器应用程序中为每一个远程过程调用传递回调和错误回调参数的乏味过程的一种审美反应。那两个回调确实很好地完成了工作。但它们很丑陋，使用起来很烦人。Deferred 是一首关于异步任务执行的有意为之的诗，它刻意关注问题的审美和使用体验。它之所以具有影响力，正是因为它对审美的关注。

I do not want to overstate the beauty or profundity of this minor contribution, or indeed its durability. That a poem exists does not mean it is a great poem, merely that it is a poem. Our aesthetic culture around programs is more like folk epic poetry than fine art, so the influence of this contribution is less about its specific enduring power than it is about its influence on what came next; from MochiKit.Async to JQuery Deferred to JavaScript Promises and eventually to async/await; a long chain of different artisans each adding something of their own until the original has all but dissolved. (And I wasn’t the “original” here, either, as I drew heavily from the E language’s Promises, among other things.) In order to make code into a deliberate artistic expression, one must have spent quite a bit of time contemplating the problem domain. Without having experienced the

我不想夸大这一微小贡献的美感或深刻性，也不想夸大其持久性。一首诗的存在并不意味着它是一首伟大的诗，仅仅意味着它是一首诗。我们围绕程序的审美文化更像是民间史诗，而不是纯艺术，因此这一贡献的影响力与其说是其特定的持久力量，不如说是它对后来事物的影响；从 MochiKit.Async 到 JQuery Deferred，再到 JavaScript Promises，最后到 async/await；这是一长串不同的工匠，每个人都添加了属于自己的东西，直到最初的版本几乎消失殆尽。（而且我在这里也不是“原创”，因为我大量借鉴了 E 语言的 Promises 等内容。）为了使代码成为一种刻意的艺术表达，一个人必须花相当多的时间来思考问题领域。如果没有经历过……