The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing...
I think the two biggest differences between art AI and code AI are that (a) code that's only 95% right is just wrong, whereas art can be very wrong before a client even notices [0]; and (b) we've been expecting this for ages already, to the extent that many of us are cynical and jaded about what the newest AI can do.
[0] for example, I was recently in the Cambridge University Press Bookshop, and they sell gift maps of the city. The background of the poster advertising these is pixelated and has JPEG artefacts.
It's highly regarded, and the shop has existed since 1581, and yet they have what I think is an amateur-hour advert on their walls.
I know what you mean, but thinking about it critically, this is just wrong. All software has bugs in it. Small bugs, big bugs, critical bugs, security bugs, everything. No code is immune. The largest software used by millions every day has bugs. Library code that has existed and been in use for 30 years has bugs.
I don't think you were actually thinking of this in your comparison, but I think it's actually a great analogy - code, like art, can be 95% complete, and that's usually enough. (For art, looks good and is what I wanted is enough, for code, does what I want right now, nevermind edge cases is enough.)
To me, code that is 95% correct will either fail catastrophically or give very wrong results. Imagine if the code you wrote was off 5% for every number it was supposed to generate. Code that is 99.99% correct will introduce subtle bugs.
* No shade to chatGPT, writing a function that calculates shap values is tough lol, I just wanted to see what it could do. I do think that, given time, it'll be able to write a days worth of high quality code in a few seconds.
Clearly ChatGPT is going to improve, and AI development is moving at a breakneck pace and accelerating. Dinging it for totally fumbling 5% or 10% of written code is completely missing the forest for the trees.
I'm nonplussed by ChatGPT because the hype around it is largely the same as was for Github Copilot and Copilot fizzled badly. (Full disclosure: I pay for Copilot because it is somewhat useful).
The political/social factors which apply to the life-and-death decisions made driving a car, don't apply to whether one of the websites I work on works perfectly.
I'm 35, and I've paid to write code for about 15 years. To be honest, ChatGPT probably writes better code than I did at my first paid internship. It's got a ways to go to catch up with even a junior developer in my opinion, but it's only a matter of time.
And how much time? The expectation in the US is that my career will last until I'm 65ish. That's 30 years from now. Tesla has only been around 19 years and now makes self-driving cars.
So yeah, I'm not immediately worried that I'm going to lose my job to ChatGPT in the next year, but I am quite confident that my role will either cease existing or drastically change because of AI before the end of my career. The idea that we won't see AI replacing professional coders in the next 30 years strains credulity.
Luckily for me, I already have considered some career changes I'd want to do even if I weren't forced to by AI. But if folks my age were planning to finish out their careers in this field, they should come up with an alternative plan. And people starting this field are already in direct competition to stay ahead of AI.