Product vs Process
There's more value in a finished painting, as compared to a finished source code of a project. This question arose in my mind from the debate about whether model trainers should compensate artists, and the lack of it in case of programmers, who seem to embrace LLMs coding.
A couple reasons I could think of:
The location of value. The essential ingredient being abstract (theory or implementation details) makes the raw written text much less valuable in case of programming, since the moat is in the idea itself. Obviously not the case for painting.
More economic value for the process of programming vs the process of painting. The average programmer can get easily paid, as compared to a painter painting. Hence, the only thing of value the painter has for their efforts is the final product.
Democratization of code and lower barrier to entry. It's a lot easier to get started as a programmer, learn fast and get paid, as opposed to doing the same as a painter. It's harder to paint good, requires longer hours and more concentrated efforts, with much less monetary reward.
The culture of boilerplate code and shared solutions. Programming derives it's value from problem solving, hence solutions that are shared among problems are desired, which lead to faster solutions and require minimal time. Whereas each painting derives it's value from being unique, and looses it's value if it isn't.
Verifiability. Code is almost instantly verifiable (at least in the short term), and can easily be objectively judged (hence easier to compensate for or place monetary value upon). Whereas paintings are almost entirely judged subjectively, which takes pricing to the extremes (some might place zero value and others might place it in millions, on the same painting).