AI generated code is so much worse. AI generated/assisted art can at least hypothetically serve a space-filling role in a sort-of ok fashion for a small project with no budget, particularly if its curated and being used as a fancy photoshop tool to merge sketches and references instead of making things from whole cloth. The worst case scenario with art is that it’s just not really that great. With local models, which are the only ones that can actually be controlled to any meaningful extent anyways, it’s also a lightweight program that’s no more energy intensive than playing a modern game is.

AI generated code is an active cognitohazard and a massive threat vector. It’s taking the actual core of project, something that has to be designed cohesively and made to work with countless moving parts in an intelligent manner, and replacing it with the equivalent of massaging copy/pasted stack overflow answers until they squeak through a compiler without crashing. It can spew out boilerplate GUIs and stuff you might find in an “intro to making [whatever sort of thing]” tutorial, but in a nonsensical and impossible to follow way. The inherent, inevitable end result of using it is creating an abomination that can’t be maintained and you can’t fix it because it’s eldritch madness spewed out by an unthinking machine and trying to follow it is physically painful. These code-generating LLMs are also part of the massively bloated and inefficient datacenter models that can’t be run locally.