They don’t only say static types. They add classes, inheritance, subtyping, and virtual calls. Mind you, the difference between the last 3 is quite subtle.

So, since I’ve started nit-picking, Self is also OO and has prototype-based inheritance (as does javascript, but I’m not sure I’d want to defend the claim that javascript is an OO language).

In this post I use the word “OOP” to mean programming in statically-typed language

So Smalltalk is not object-oriented. Someone tell Alan Kay.

The author mentions that some of the changes broke things, but it’s a long way into the article before the word “test” appears. It’s only point 6/7 of his recommendations.

Making changes with no test coverage is not refactoring. It’s just rewriting. Start there.

AI developers: your copyrighted work is such a small contributor to the AI’s output that copyright doesn’t apply. Also AI developers: but our AI won’t work without it.

If you make a painting now, it wouldn’t be based on those thousands and thousands of paintings since, although you have seen them, you apparently do not remember them. But, if you did, and you made a painting based on one, and did not acknowledge it, you would indeed be a bad artist.

The bad part about using the art of the past is not copying. The problem is plagiarism.

Inspiration is absolutely a thing. When Constable and Cezanne sat at their easels, a large part of their inspiration was Nature. When Picasso invented Cubism, he was reacting to tradition, not following it. There are also artists like Alfred Wallis, who are very unconnected to tradition.

I think your final sentence is actually trying to say that we have advances in tools, not inspiration, since the Lascaux caves are easily on a par with the Sistine Chapel if you allow for the technology? And that AI is simply a new tool? That may be, but does the artist using this new tool control which images it was trained on? Do they even know? Can they even know?

Maybe the AIs should mix their own pigments as well, instead of taking all the other artists’ work and grinding that up.