I think AI is useful and fine for non-creative work. I don't see programming as an especially creative work. It's about translating as best we can, the design into execution.

There is a little more creativity the further up the architecture and design you go, but the lower level you go, the less creative it is. Indeed for decades we have handed off the mechanical conversion into machine code to deterministic compilers.

Programming is certainly a skilled practice, but it isn't especially creative. Given the same problem, many programmers would produce a similar output.

This is very different to creative work, where the same requirements can lead to vastly different results. The range of art that could be described, as "Draw me the night's sky" is immense.

Generating assets, be that genAI, or procGen, takes away from the creative, and doubly so if you don't have much of a filter on the output and just accept what is given.

Look at procGen: the worlds of No Man's Sky have no soul to them. Compare that to the much lower and less detailed lands of Azeroth, which had so much soul that we're still recreating and enjoying them 20+ years later.

Generative AI can trick us into thinking there is a soul and that something creative has happened when it hasn't. Programming has no such deception.

If you're working with generation but then hand-filtering a million results back down to a hand-picked few, then there is a creative process once again, a curation that is itself an artistic process, so these things aren't absolute, there are always grey areas all over.