Comment by cardanome | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cardanome | Hacker News Reader

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The problem is that with generative AI, I have no means of protecting my work from being stolen.

It does not matter what license I put up. It doesn't even matter if I make it publicly available or not. LLMs have been trained on pirated material, they don't even have the decency to buy a copy. Even if I show my project to no one and just have a private repo on Github the code might still be used to train LLMs.

Your GPL licensed library? Yeah, we used claude to rewrite it and released it under MIT.

Now that wouldn't be so bad. One could argue copyright has long held back progress in certain areas. The problem is, the rules only apply one way. The rent seeking oligarchs of the tech industry can steal everything but I can't.

They can just eat the cost of a lawsuit, I can't. They can just decide to make a special deal with Disney to use their copyrighted material, I can't.

Sure the days of free markets capitalism are long gone. A few monopolists controlling the market has long been the norm. But AI makes it even worse. So much worse.

AI will be the straw that breaks the camel's back on copyright Imo. We've known since 90s Napster music piracy that copyright is broken in the information age, and its just a flimsy set of unprincipled edicts meant to protect those with power and money.

Nowadays AI companies have more money and lawyers than most movie studios, so

I predict that there will be a billion dollar company/ies (probably exist even now in stealth mode), whose business model will be to slopfork existing software - after all AI has proven to be very capable at that.

With trillions of dollars both supporting and opposing this business model, something will probably change in some way wrt copyright, and hopefully in a way that's an improvement to the average person.

> hopefully in a way that's an improvement to the average person.

Given the current political and economic environment, I wish I had the sort of optimism to believe any changes in the law would benefit the average person.

> Your GPL licensed library? Yeah, we used claude to rewrite it and released it under MIT.

Good. "You" made the world a better place at the expense of "me", the rent-seeking GPL author. I can go suck it if nobody wants my equivalent product with a worse license anymore. How do people not get this? If AI enables somebody to reproduce somebody else's hard labor much more cheaply, then it should do so instead of holding everyone else to ransom just because some self-entitled programmer wants to prevent competition when he's falling behind the market.

If you're a programmer, you have no moral right to complain about that because it's also the whole point of computer software. To do things more cheaply - ie to make somebody else's work worthless.

> a private repo on Github

Delete your github repos and operate your own gitolite instance. Feed vibecode to GitHub so the LLMs coprophagically train on their own slop.

That's only a half measure if AI companies ruthlessly consume anything they can get. Microsoft might ignore repo visibility, they can still consume it. OpenAI may have a backdoor by nature of its apps/harnesses running on dev machines that do have copies of your project.

I guess you're safe with a privately self hosted project that you only share with people who don't have any AI and won't reshare it.

Then again, if you even distribute only binaries then in theory the AI could copy those and reverse engineer them, or just mutate the binaries.

> Feed vibecode to GitHub so the LLMs coprophagically train on their own slop.

Someone needs to build an easy to run AI agent that does that automatically, maybe with strategically bad choices (like complex no-op tests, bad algorithms, introduction of security vulnerabilities described as fixing them). I'd run it. Maybe it could even star/interact with other slop repos, so low activity couldn't be used as a filter.

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