AI and the Destruction of the Creative Commons | Hacker News Reader

AI and the Destruction of the Creative Commons

chesterwisniewski.com

236 pointsrakel_rakel281 comments

Tech has always been breaking social contracts. It’s how we roll. We did the same thing with taxis and travel accommodations to name a few.

We hid our “we know better” hubris under the term “disruption” because the reality (breaking everything) was a little too unsettling for us.

We ignore laws and regulations where we know better of course. Don’t you love having a homey place to stay while travelling that has just a few weird rules, a small to-do list and stays spotless thanks to that cleaning fee?

And look at all the good we did! A whole new world of slaves (oops gig workers - sorry!)

And of course we’re doing it again with information and content. We should be in charge of monetizing all your work because you’re not responsible enough to do it right. It furthers our need for power and control. Oops we meant to help make the world a better place (We keep doing that, sorry.)

> Tech has always been breaking social contracts. It’s how we roll. We did the same thing with taxis and travel accommodations to name a few.

It is not how I roll and it never has been. I don't and won't make things that are responsible for putting people out of work; I make things that make their jobs less shit. I won't make choices that make things more dangerous or less ethical.

This is a choice you can make. Beware of sitting back and saying "we" when you could be in a position to say "you".

It's possible to do no deliberate evil, to avoid using euphemisms for firing people, to avoid fire-at-will culture. It's also possible to fight against major ethics lapses and immorality.

At the best — highest-paying, most dynamic, most fun — job I ever did, I probably did more good in the relevant industry in one afternoon by writing down my concerns, printing a resignation letter, making both my employer and their client aware it existed and offering to sign it, than I've ever managed since. (You can maybe only do this once per working lifetime; use it wisely)

Even the project I worked on that I was sure would put dozens of identifiable people out of work didn't, because we found a way they could use the product to continue their original tasks until their existing contracts expired/they moved on/they retired and their team could be scaled down through gentle non-replacement.

One of the earliest things I was taught about system design is that sometimes even jobs that appear to an outsider to be noisy, exhausting or miserable give people purpose and meaning; you have to look people in the eye when you talk about things that could eliminate their job role. You don't replace a job that doesn't need replacing. And you have to look at the things they do with care and duty and make sure your systems do the same.

If you come from a corporate culture that treats this as anathema, you should work to change it or quit.

It’s possible yet many simply don’t do it. How many rounds of mass, unnecessary tech layoffs do we need to see? We literally just went through a phase of companies scrambling to bring people back because they were too eager to lay them off for AI promises.

Silicon Valley excels at two things: building moats and firing people.

Somewhere at the very beginning of my career, the second year I think, I was part of the team that visited a location of the company we were selling our SaaS solution to, in a branch that was back then still dependent on Excel sheets.

The owner of the company lead us to a large open office with about 30 people working in there, mostly women, and whispered to us that he expects he'll only need three of them after subscribing to our product.

That's when I realised the brutality of what we are doing, and the sales guy I was with realised we should be charging significantly more.

As much as it would suck to be one of the 27 unemployed, I don't think the answer is to throw away our calculators and start doing our bookkeeping by hand again. I don't think you need to feel too bad about this. The accountants didn't all disappear when Excel showed up; they just got to work on the more interesting parts of the job, instead of rectifying arithmetic.

We could create economic systems that prioritized workers over immediate profit.

In this case, a system that aided the displaced workers in finding new positions and acquiring skills that are not simply doordashingfor rent (and still counting that as 'full employment').

In this latest disruption, highly skilled workers are being underemployed in low skill labour and we all lose out. PhD and JD to baristas and uber driver economy.

The federal funding and employment disruption alone will take decades to fix, if ever.

Anywho, you should notice when you participate in creating a massive disruption in many people's lives (to create super-profit for a couple of already wealthy men).

You are never just following orders, don't close your eyes to what you are doing with your life.

And before you 'what about' me. I have refused orders and lost jobs because of it. My only regret is not organizing with other workers beforehand.

Heck, a good start would be ensuring displaced workers still get food and shelter as long as we want.

Those coal miners? They carried the industrial revolution. We should be treating them as retired heroes when we replace the plant with a solar field, not as disgraced losers!

There are many things that could've happened to those 27 people. The company might've decided to reinvest savings into expanding business, and shift those 27 into different roles. Or may have just plain fired them. We can't tell in every case.

But it is worth remembering that the latter is a probable outcome, and that is what our business is, overall. Automation. As in, automating work so it doesn't need people to be done.

What's the evidence for that? Did the horses get to work on more interesting parts of the job when the automobile showed up?

You're right. I said "the accountants didn't ALL disappear" but surely, some of them had to endure a career change. But what's the alternative?

I once built a product that optimized waste. I was so proud of myself, it was going to save so much money. Did a site visit to a beta site and was talking to staff. One woman asked me if I knew what happened to that waste. I answered no. She told me it was bagged up and sent to third world countries where it saved lives. That is how I killed people to save money. Yes, if you are dependent on that waste it is very precarious. Doesn't change the reality for the people who it no longer went to save. I don't know the lesson to take from it. Still haunts me. Saving the money kept services in underserved communities in the US and touched tens of thousands of lives. But it also cost lives. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I've just accepted that there is no action which has the intended effect in full.

Kinda like how entropy forces mechanical energy to not be transferred in full to the form desired. Electrical to light? Some transfer will be heat. Optimize to be more light than heat? Light bill goes down, heat bill goes up in winter.

That's a disconnected parallel from real choices that have much more drastic effects. I don't think what you did was wrong, but it did have unintended consequences. Every new technology brings opportunities for both good and evil intents too, but the outcome is judged by those effected, regardless of the intent of the agent.

And you didn't say "cool, after they are no longer needed for this task, what other exciting oppurtunities will you be able to employ them pursuing that will grow your company?"

Yeah, small city I grew up in there are no longer taxis. Used to be a semi full time position for 1-2 people, so any night you could get a taxi if you arrived by train or needed to get home from somewhere. Most nights operated of course on a loss, but made up for on the volume during some weekends or periods of the year (like winter holidays). But then when the taxi monopoly broke down, more people started to compete on the lucrative weekends. Good in the start, quicker to get a cab and price decreased. But then the original cab drivers couldn't sustain the new lower income, and got other jobs. No one wants to be up night to Wednesday for perhaps two trips, so now it's impossible to hail a cab most days.

And the relevance here is how this disruption played out. Will the same happen to open source? See it already for instance in how AI makes some maintainers burn out. Where will it lead?

Is that actually a bad thing if ty can still get a ride on an app on any Wednesday?

My point is you can't. No one is logged in and active unless it's a popular night.

I live in one of those little towns now where Uber isn’t always available because no one is logged on, and it was a nightmare to get a cab pre-Uber in little towns like this. You’d call, and were lucky if anyone picked up, lucky if the wait was less than half an hour, and lucky if they showed up. And the price would be 2-3x what Uber is. So yes, it’s lame that sometimes Uber isn’t available, but it didn’t replace a great situation either.

Oh, and there are still car services you can schedule in advance, just like before.

> Tech has always been breaking social contracts. It’s how we roll. We did the same thing with taxis and travel accommodations to name a few.

"We"?

Yes, we in tech. Even going back decades, email technology was a huge disruptor. Professionals used to have secretaries to type up letters/memos for them. All those secretary roles are now gone.

I'm not going to deny the starting premise (tech breaks things, sometimes laws), but I don't think your follow-up is fair (we are responsible for all negatives).

Why is it our fault that governments have completely abdicated their responsibilities? Why is it our fault that everyday people literally refuse to become politically or economically literate and/or vote?

Tech has given the world, for essentially free, the entire wealth of human knowledge at their fingertips. We've given them ways to learn and communicate. We've overhauled transportation and logistics and payment. Fairly soon (decades), human labor may be obsoleted and who knows what good that may bring us.

And, yes, we also gave them mass surveillance and gig economies and hyper-addictive systems. Just like engineers gave us guns and chemists gave us poison and physists gave us nuclear bombs and doctors gave us lobotomies.

They had quite literally decades to recognize the threat. We screamed the dangers from the rooftops and in congressional hearings. We told people social media is poison. Betting sites are poison. You are the product. Watch out for market capture. You need to legislate us.

Normal folk called us crazy nerds and basically told us where to shove our concerns. But now it's our fault, naturally. We didn't do enough. We didn't perceive all possible outcomes, assume the world would be negligent, and refuse to make things we thought would be helpful - as if someone else wouldn't have thought of such Einstein breakthoughs as "socialize online" or "couch jumping online" or "taxis.. online".

And just to be clear, I'm speaking collectively just because you are. I make very boring stuff that is well within the confines of the law and only serves to help people.

Anywhere in the world I vastly prefer an Uber over a getting a cab off the street. Safer and overall better experience.

All true, indeed. However, it does feel especially sobering realizing tech is hitting its own ouroboros point: a point where it starts to break social contracts that it designed to begin with.

> We hid our “we know better” hubris under the term “disruption” because the reality (breaking everything) was a little too unsettling for us.

That's not quite right. For a decade, the silicon valley mantra was "Move fast and break things", and it was largely accepted as a good thing. The prevailing wisdom was that this "internet" thing was going to fundamentally change the structure of human society, and nothing would ever be the same again. We ignored the laws, and society broadly accepted that those laws weren't fit for this new world of abundance and information freedom anyway. Big tech was offered broad protection from any responsibility through laws such as Section 230, which basically says they can't be blamed for anything, as long as they structure their services as a "market".

After 20 years, I think we've found that actually the structure of human society has remained largely the same. The things we all need are still the same. The only thing we actually disrupted was the economy, such that we now can't produce and disburse the things we need.

>The only thing we actually disrupted was the economy, such that we now can't produce and disburse the things we need.

Except for something like housing, the supply of which has been artificially constrained by policy since before the internet arrived on the scene, I can’t think of anything which is harder to produce or distribute since the advent of the internet. Particularly on distribution, I have far more access to goods and services than my parents did.

Agreed that this hasn’t changed the structure of society in any meaningful way. We’re still social animals with all the same strengths and weaknesses as before.

>That's not quite right. For a decade, the silicon valley mantra was "Move fast and break things", and it was largely accepted as a good thing.

By the people not involved in the things breaking maybe. If you didn't drive a taxi or run a hotel the tech companies "disrupting" things by breaking laws didn't affect you directly. Now with LLMs, they do.

> Tech has always been breaking social contracts

The unnecessary hyperbole ruins your argument. Not all of tech is about breaking social contracts. Whose livelihood is destroying the engineer that design better protein folding software? Linus made the world better and richer for everyone. Even the humble startup shipping yet another calendar tool isn’t harming anyone or being the direct cause of layoffs of other workers.

Not everybody works for Uber.

>Whose livelihood is destroying the engineer that design better protein folding software?

Hasn’t homology modeling essentially been abandoned by researchers at this point? Maybe their livelihood wasn’t completely ruined but if you had specialized in that technology, you were probably materially harmed by the introduction of AlphaFold. That harm doesn’t outweigh the obvious benefits, but I would be very surprised if the harm doesn’t exist.

>Even the humble startup shipping yet another calendar tool isn’t harming anyone or being the direct cause of layoffs of other workers.

If they’re undercutting and outcompeting an existing calendar tool, they very well could be contributing to layoffs at their competitors.

Linus [and the skilled and unpaid labour of tens of thousands of people, working together towards a shared goal and a common good]**

I think we both know that it’s not just Uber who is violating social contracts. AI companies are routinely violating laws that would have the feds knocking at my door. Facebook? Airbnb? Uber? Every meal delivery service? The list goes on. They’re all like this.

Oh, I think it goes further than that. Many of these companies would not exist without massive subsidies. Their business models were untenable without some monied interest pumping them up. And where did they get their money from? Mainly money-printing, rent-seeking, usury, or good ol' legalized fraud (which is what I consider "burying a right to sell your information to advertisers in the ToS, to the tune of orders of magnitude more value than you get from the service").

And it's not that their services were fulfilling a need, just at a large social cost. Many created a need by using those massive amounts of funding to destroy existing, sustainable services. They're a net negative for the economy and society because they replaced workable businesses (albeit with limited reach because the users bore the full cost) with businesses that will collapse because they're built around ubiquity and forcing non-users to shoulder part of the cost (the only way to break even while paying back investors).

The is a US-centric perspective.

Not at all. For example, arrival of Uber was very visible and destructive to taxi industries in many places; I witnessed it in Moscow, Russia where I lived for a few years back then. In 2012, if you needed a quick ride from an underground station to your home, you needed to bargain with some random dude waiting near the station in a very shitty car, and pay cash (good luck if you need change). Fast forward a year or two, and you can hail a ride from your phone using either Uber or a local Yandex.

Not even US-centric, Silicon Valley centric. (I am a non-Valley US worker)

Thanks, I forget this sometimes.

Luddites also complain about disruption, you know

Luddites were complaining about having their lives upended and being thrown into generational poverty. That is what wide-scale "disruption" looks at the receiving end.

True, but I think in the end people were better off with automation. You know a lot of people were suffering even when they were fully employed.

That's the key insight that's missing in most of the automation/employment discussions.

Yes, absolutely, in the end people were better off with automation. But these particular people - and their families and children - were not.

It seems obvious then that the answer is supporting the much smaller displaced people, not stopping progress for the entire population (and future generations).

And we run the risk of fall into that lost generation under AI.

But hey, 50 years later things might work out, that is if past performance guarantees future results when it comes to adjusting to employment shocks.

The social contracts for taxis and hotels like most sucked anyway. They were in the best case socialism and in the worst case communism. We need more freedom, not less.

Though based on what I've heard it's ironic that nowadays Uber is mostly just like a plain old taxi company. Gone are the days of "ride sharing" when you could make some extra bucks if you wanted to.

It was only good for drivers for a very, very brief period. They were the first group squeezed before they started squeezing the riders.

So I've heard, but it's irrelevant. I don't care about Uber, AirBnB etc; less regulation, more freedom and more options are good.

>more freedom

You can’t be serious with all this “commies bad freedom good” talk.

What are you trying to say, that in reality communism is good and freedom is bad? :-) I'll admit that I've simplified things quite a bit.

No, I’m saying you’re resorting to McCarthyism/red scare emotional appeals.

I really don't get those takes. AI is the best thing that ever happened to the Free Software world, it is basically turning any software into Free Software. You can just throw file formats, protocols or even plain binaries at the AI and it'll reverse engineer everything in a pinch. Users can finally modify software themselves, which was always the goal of the Free Software world, but very rarely happened in actuality, since it was just so damn complicated. AI lowered the barrier of entry tremendously, not just in terms of required knowledge, but especially time. Same with Creative Commons, sharing art and stuff, was a nice gesture, but rarely useful, since the level of work to modify a work to fit your project was pretty close to just doing it from scratch anyway. With AI everybody can toy around with image generators and get what they want.

Is a social contract being broken? Yeah, kind of, but the problems that that contract existed to solve are no longer a thing. Creation is now easy and commodified. We finally have computer we can interact with in natural language, something people tried to do for at least 70 years and never made any significant progress on until LLM arrived.

If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend. We are essentially living in the StarTrek future with Holodecks and replicators and people still find reason to complain.

The reality is that no one was gatekeeping you or anyone else from doing whatever you wanted with free software. The barriers were knowledge, understanding, expertise, and hard work, none of which AI fixes for you. The premise here is that you can accomplish what you couldn’t before without actually understanding the concepts or putting in the same effort. _There is undeniably utility in that_, but I don’t see any strong argument for why it is beneficial to free software in general. It's not even clear whether it has been a net positive or negative so far, though it is undeniably a win for the corpos.

Relieving yourself of thinking and effort, whether through a machine or another human, is not the liberating force you think it is, especially when that effort isn't just grunt work, but the very process that helps you develop and grow.

I’m not sure why the lights come on when I flip the switch. I can hand wave and say “electricity” but I suspect there’s more to it.

For anyone interested, this is misapplied “reductio ad absurdum”. It doesn’t work.

I thought it was an analogy to people handwaving "free software" without truly understanding that people sacrifice their entire lives to make it work and that's still insufficient.

That doesn't even make sense unless you are intentionally projecting a specific outcome.

> misapplied “reductio ad absurdum”

The reality is same for your angle: nothing is gatekeeping or stopping anyone from developing the craft the old way, and keeping 'thinking' so strong. Perhaps there are other ways to strengthen thinking, though?

The sole issue here is compensation. The answer is an uncomfortable one, or one with a lot more regulation that can't be enforced on a global level.

Oversimplifying to see if there's anything worth examining...but imagine: subscriptions to organizations whose sole purpose is to train AI. They're compensated as the AI service is consumed by the public. The public pays a tax to finance AI growth, and the tax is divided to the organizations, to pay out to members. Members are incentivized to 'keep the craft alive' and train incoming members.

Since that is a huge change and I'm talking out of my ass, I'll point out something more realistic: we'll probably just write up some more red tape and hope for the best on the global stage.

It's a complex topic for sure.

> The reality is same for your angle: nothing is gatekeeping or stopping anyone from developing the craft the old way

That’s not my angle, but I’ll grant you that for the moment:

> The sole issue here is compensation.

Not the case here. Majority (as in contributors) of open source work is selfless uncompensated work.

Note that it’s not to disagree/agree with the broader point of AI’s impact. It’s just beside my point.

Free software has two cases for free: free as in 'free drink', and free as in 'free to change'.

The first use of free is definitely improved by AI, it's the second use of free that bothers the author. There's too much AI slop and PRs, and it's impossible for the author to identify 'good PRs' from bad ones. There's too much volume of change to sift through, and so the ability to change software is stifled.

What can you do then? Either close the repo to the public, or limit who can send you feedback: as it is now, there's too much volume for reviewers to keep. It's too difficult to validate 'AI Slop' from quality code written by someone who 'has put in the time' and done their due diligence. Someone who has done this wastes less time for the reviewer, and probably improves the quality of the 'free beer' product.

Are you suggesting, AI hasn't improved the first case of free, 'free drink'? It's certainly an issue for the second case, 'free to change', but it seems like there are things that can be done to help with those problems: but it adds more churn and probably requires more time (unless I'm misunderstanding things here: which is very possible).

New layer of abstraction. Someone needs to understand how to build that old C library and reprogram that embedded controller, but it doesn't need to be me. Give someone infinite possibilities. Tell them they can have any software change they want. Everyone will have some good ideas. Some people will be head and shoulders above the rest. Being able to do anything (not that LLMs exactly deliver on that goal) doesn't mean you'll do something interesting. It doesn't mean you'll invent a product worth paying for, or impress many people, or make anyone particularly happy or inspired.

> The barriers were knowledge, understanding, expertise, and hard work, none of which AI fixes for you.

The biggest barrier was time, there are only 24 hours in the day and no amount of hard work or knowledge is going to change that. There are just some fundamental limits of what you can accomplish as a single person in that time. And good luck trying to find contributors who want to work for free, when they already are busy with their own projects.

AI just fundamentally turns that around and gives you a whole bunch of extremely capable co-workers that you can let deal with all the problems you do not want to waste your time on and they let you focus on the stuff that actually matters to you.

> The biggest barrier was time

I am going to agree, albeit from an entirely different perspective.

My job has nothing to do with programming. Aside from administrative tasks, my job has nothing to do with computers. Yet I know how to program and I realize that automating those administrative tasks will have huge benefits for me. The problem is my employer doesn't pay me to write code, so I never got around to that automation.

Realistically speaking, writing that code without AI would not offer much in the way of understanding or expertise. Most of it is: "look up X, if A then B, else C, iterate" type tasks. There is a barrier in knowledge with respect to library calls, but that's pretty close to junk knowledge (it's rapidly obsoleted, and useless if I need to interface with different software).

So the choice is between doing without, or spending a lot of time picking up tasks that are of no value to me. Time was the barrier.

These arguments also remind me a lot of the microcomputer revolution: a heck of a lot of mainframe COBOL and FORTRAN developers were critical of underpowered computers and toy programming languages. The reality is that it opened up opportunities for a new generation of developers, and new types of software was created because the problem solvers were closer to the problem.

AI does not fundamentally turn that around, with "that" being as you say the fact that there are only 24 hours in the day and that a single person could only accomplish so much.

Your mistake is one I see everywhere these days, and that is the belief that a given problem with which YOU do not want to waste your time, are actually problems which are not worth doing by anyone. When examined I think this idea is obviously wrong, and misanthropic at heart. People prioritizing different things are still valuable.

The reason free software has progressed up until AI has been a combination of economic conditions and unrivalled passion on the part of the developers. The SQLite project has taken 20 years to optimize, and the creator still says there is work to be done.

Contrast that career spanning work with a pattern AI encourages of builders: offload the difficult or boring parts, get something barely functional, move on to the next thing. Building like this leaves you with no more experience than you already had to begin with.

As another commenter said, there is undeniable and very exciting utility in that being an option! The class of "easy pickings" in projects has widened tremendously in size. I agree with you when you say that it has the power to let you focus on the stuff that actually matters to you. Software configurability is going to be a major priority!

However, and I think you'd agree since we both feel free software was and is inherently complicated, configurability of software is only useful with the knowledge of how to put it to best use, like any other tool. If we were to give a laptop with Claude to a technical layperson, would they not immediately attempt to build without taking the time to understand (for example) what a database is? And when encountering problems beyond their understanding and only expecting the AI "to fix it", would they not be turned away from the tool entirely?

These problems may not matter to one who DOES understand the nature of software, but they do matter overall.

The biggest barrier for people with knowledge, understanding, expertise, and the willingness to work hard was certainly time. But there were a lot of people with plenty of time that never got anything done.

In the beforetimes there were a lot of would-be founders running around looking for people who actually knew things and could do things (that is, technical cofounders). Will some of those people use Claude Code to make successful products on their own? A few, I'm sure. But I expect a lot of them will stay ignorant fools who have prompted their way to a pile of garbage.

I can be confident of that because there were plenty of founders with FFF money who could suddenly hire "capable coworkers" that produced garbage. "AI" is certainly removing barriers. But as I deal with a big increase in polished but idiotic email and PRs, I have to think that barriers were helpful both to the world at large (by keeping fools at bay) and to the promising but incompetent (by giving them a chance to build character and wisdom).

A lot of these people didn't really care about those virtues they claim they represent. They just wanted power and control over something.

> The biggest barrier was time.

Only if you have all the rest sorted, and that’s a big if. It’s also circular. You need time to achieve most of it.

> And good luck trying to find contributors who want to work for free, when they already are busy with their own projects.

Nothing against that. As I mentioned, there’s utility there. I don’t think it’s bad to put these tools to use. But this idea of having “a bunch of extremely capable co-workers that you can let deal with all the problems” without understanding what they do or reviewing their output (due to whatever reason), in other words putting the effort and understanding the output, is exactly what I was talking about.

None of your arguments hold any water if big-corpo AI restricts open-weight models - which they very clearly want to do. AI is NOT “the best thing that ever happened to the Free Software world” if our only option is to pay a select few companies to use it.

Those arguments are independent of the state of OSS models. There appears to be no moat whatsoever on creating state of the art models commercially - the US threw the kitchen sink at China in terms of sanctions and barriers ... yet it has been unable to keep Chinese companies away from the frontier (arguably ahead in small local models with Qwen). Even if all the models were proprietary we'd expect the costs and capabilities to be widely available. The Europeans might even be able to field their own advanced models eventually.

OSS models are strategically important, but that is a different matter to getting value out of them for OSS software development.

Consumers are way too fickle to pursue open models en masse. Even if they are 90% as good and fairly easy to use (works acceptably on most machines, easy installation, whatever), they will still go for the ones controlled by big corportions/big tech.

Look at how consumers deal with free, open source software, alternate Operating Systems, alternate social networks, alternate search engines, alternate chat protocols... even when the barriers are low they just don't give a damn. I honestly think most people would choose to join the Borg out of sheer convenience. It's futile to think this won't happen with AI.

IMO, AI will have the same problems no matter which area or country uses it to dominate over others.

Big corporations can't do shit about open-weight models that already exist, because those are... just bags of floats. Once released, there is no unreleasing them. The Internet never forgets.

Download the files as they come out if you're worried, but there's no way to roll LLMs back beyond what we have in open-weight models right now. It's a ratchet.

Big entertainment has been trying to restrict the distribution of movies online since that became possible, how's that going for them?

The long term trend seems to be in their favor as governments want to include more traceability and ability to shut down sites into the Internet for their own reasons which will help the entertainment industry as a byproduct. Plus they can use LLMs just as much as anyone else in their quest to build better roadblocks.

Pretty well, honestly. Somebody with both technical knowledge and familiarity with a particular subculture can get access to entertainment videos with some work. But they've managed to keep piracy economically negligible. Basically everybody uses streaming services, 90% of US households pay for at least 1, and the average household pays for 4. [1]

Brand was wrong. Information doesn't want to be free, just cheap.

[1] https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/how-much-us-households-spen...

You can watch a lot of TV series online on some random pirate sites by simply googling "show x free online". It doesn't even require the relatively simple technical knowledge of using a BitTorrent client.

This is only the case because streaming services today are so cheap and convenient. Jack up the price, or decrease the convenience, and see people sail the high seas en masse again..

Indeed, the origin stories of these streaming services are deeply intertwined with combating piracy if you go back 20+ years. And I agree, if they outlaw open weight models, then only outlaws will have open weight models. But good luck finding and prosecuting the outlaws beyond a few whales.

Quite well. Lots of people in jail and it's quite obscure how to download movies as a casual.

We have open-source models, and they're getting better and better.

But, rather that a wide Edenic expanse of communication, we seem headed toward walled gardens with gatekeepers and a need to pay money for all the usual reasons.

This seems both inevitable, and an occasion to tout the https://www.fsf.org

Eh? Where exactly is that a reality though? I just spent like 20$ last week on various Chinese frontier models using openrouter and ppq building like 10 different projects that would've cost way more than double or quadruple per token at the big 3 if I didn't have those alternative options. Hell, for small tasks I even fell back to a local 27b Qwen model.

... if you can afford the ever increasing cost of hardware, a rise directly caused by the same AI companies.

I don't think it will be ever-increasing. It might last a long time, but sooner or later supply will increase to meet the demand (or the demand will drop, or both) and hardware will be cheap again.

for now.

They will literally never get worse. It's a one-way street.

I agree. The question is if they will remain legal.

The law doesn't prevent someone from doing or using something. It punishes them for doing or using something (if caught), but never prevents.

If laws had the power to prevent, Chicago would be some sort of utopia.

Chicago is pretty great, bub. This year I opened a pinball museum here, so I can testify that it's a fine place to run a business. Some friends just came from the Bay Area for a week and had a lovely time. If only for your mental health, you should step out of your media bubble now and again

It also seems pretty reasonable to worry that Oracle isn't banning LLM code contributions to OpenJDK https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/03/as-larry-el... ( HN discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49213754 ) purely on quality grounds. If things carry on as at present, and it turns out that indeed it really was legally safe to copy and paste almost any code that came out of an LLM, then that's one thing; but if instead there's a rash of code copyright (and indeed patent) lawsuits a few years from now then the big and middling companies will simply pay each other settlements, while FOSS projects and their small-fry users will likely be in a much worse situation.

That’s like saying private libraries are bad for freedom to read, or Blockbuster was bad for freedom to view movies

> If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend.

Exactly this. I've been very confused by the free software advocates that seemed to hate AI until I realized their reasons for releasing software under an open source license were very different than what I assumed they were.

I release my code as free software for two reasons:

1. The credits for my code are protected (with the GPL you have to tell where your code originates from). That's the ego part. It's important to me because I'm not paid for my software. So credits are an important reward.

2. I want people to think twice about reusing my code. I use the GPL license because I think sharing software is the ultimate goal. So I force people to share my software by using the GPL. That may sound "extreme" (that's the whole open source vs free software debate) but, not being a full time politician, I can't change laws to push society in the direction I want. At my level, that "push" is the GPL choice. Maybe it's not noble enough, maybe it's cowardice, but it's my way (compare that with those who simply don't care).

AI severely weakens both of these. And for people like me, this forces us to reconsider our position. For my part, I accept the legal point of view that A.I. doesn't steal code, and just reproduces the ideas in the code. So, as far as ideas can flow in society, I'm OK with that (that's the principle behind copyright laws).

If AI has its way, one day one will not need to write software, we'll just ask the AI. In that case, software will be dead and free software will die with it too. By then I'll do my "local politics" another way and follow the next RMS.

> The credits for my code are protected (with the GPL you have to tell where your code originates from)

But that's literally anathema to the spirit of GPL. Copyleft exists only as a reaction to copyright which is sadly ingrained in legal systems, but the original thought about free software, at the time of GPL inception, is that in an ideal world, copyright shouldn't exist for software ; it's leveraged by GPL only to protect against abuse of copyright holders that could close open code, which is thus made impossible "legally" with the GPL. AI makes this distinction fal into "practically" as pretty much anything is "open" for individual use now (e.g the only use that matters).

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf

Attribution and copyright are separate. Who says that, even if copyright didn't exist for software, attribution also wouldn't?

If anything, the remark that I have to make to the parent is that in principle attribution is also required by non-copyleft licenses. However, I doubt it's respected for the hundreds of crates or npm modules in a typical Rust or JavaScript project...

Even the true copyright abolitionists (who want companies like Oracle to be able to fork their software and make a billion dollars releasing the binaries) still use MIT license which requires attribution.

I'm a copyright abolitionist, but I think Oracle should be required to release the source code with their binaries as a basic consumer protection. I also don't care about attribution.

The spirit of free software is about learning from others and having control of your hardware.

Given the supposed commoditization of intelligence and recent memory prices, I'd say LLMs are literally anathema to the spirit of the GPL.

I don't think "you own your own hardware" will be true for long.

Spirits don't get much legal protection.

If LLMs are as good at RE as everyone says, we will own our hardware again.

You'd have to build your own fab from ground up - meaning no ASML. Is not going to happen.

You don't have to own the entire pipeline to own enough of it. People run Linux and say they own their OS.

They used to. We used to call those spirits "rights".

> A.I. doesn't steal code, and just reproduces the ideas in the code

Then they don't need to train on github, no? Why not release a new model trained from Knuth's Art of Programming, Cormen's Introduction to Algorithms and the C specification.

Feel free to throw in any other published literature related to STEM, but stick to the code samples from the books.

I'm certain it'll be able to change the color of a CSS button, right?

What you said doesn't disagree with what the parent said.

LLM can be trained on a code and at the same time reproduce the core ideas. That's what LLMs do after all - they convert the training data into their own internal models and representations, and then reproduce the ideas.

Sure, some things/patterns, that were repeated multiple times, LLMs will tend to repeat verbatim as well, but that's not that big of a problem.

As a person who invented a few algorithms on my own I absolutely love LLMs and I don't mind them being trained on my work, but yeah - I've been way less likely to publish open source over the last year. In the past, if some of my stuff got traction, the credit was close to automatic (early adopters credited or at least knew where they got it from). Nowadays, LLMs will train on these ideas, rewrite them, and give no credit.

Still, I prefer this to having no LLMs at all.

> but stick to the code samples from the books. > I'm certain it'll be able to change the color of a CSS button, right?

A good enough LLM will just decompile a browser, figure out CSS spec from it, and yes - figure out how to change the color of a CSS button from first principles. There is no point to do this with CSS, but with other things it's now easier to just dig through sorces or direct bytecode than to bother checking docs.

Same argument, just one level down.

Can it decompile a browser using a specification of x86 and the source code of the compiler?

e.g. without training on the source code and binaries of all software it was able to rip from the internet?

Plenty of software on the internet on fully open license (e.g. MIT, copyleft and so on) to train on.

Also, it would be relatively easy to build synthetic datasets for training.

I, for one, don’t mind models being trained on stuff I produced and shared publicly over the last 20 years. I did it for common good, including commercial uses, and this is one of them.

Plenty of people who never produced any open source trying to argue as if if they did.

> Then they don't need to train on github, no? Why not release a new model trained from Knuth's Art of Programming, Cormen's Introduction to Algorithms and the C specification.

Because they're really really stupid and only make up for this by being really really stupid really really fast.

This has been ruled, by actual courts, to not be "stealing" (not even in the "you wouldn't steal a car, piracy is theft" sense that film and music studios campaigned on).

The last I heard was the "Chinchilla" scaling law was ~20 training tokens per parameter. Humans are, if you'll excuse a very hand-waving Fermi estimate, 100,000 times more data-efficient at learning stuff (it's really hard to tell given we're visual creatures that happen to speak, while LLMs are text-based things that happen to see).

To be fair, you also don't restrict yourself to those texts either. You read news, you use other programs, you look at websites and so on. And while the norms vary per field, things aren't really reinvented from scratch. The standard FPS controls aren't reinvented for every shooter game. The standard website layouts aren't reinvented for every website. The standard command line behaviour isn't reinvented for every CLI program and so on.

Those were all included in "published literature relating to STEM".

Just skip the source code. Consider it an easier challenge than reinventing relativity from 19th century physics.

But software isn't like traditional academia. It might have grown from it but most advances aren't really published in the traditional sense, you've got blogposts, presentations and source code instead.

This would be like teaching cooking without looking at any recipes, just from physics and first principles. Or learning music without looking at the sheet music / listening to any existing songs, just generic musical theory and chords. I don't think humans can do it "zero-shot" either...

> advances aren't really published

https://dl.acm.org/

I don't see how this disproves my point. There's a vast divide between "theoretical" and "applied" software engineering. You don't usually see Google engineers publish their search optimisations in journals. And similarly, you don't see university professors making commercial libraries from their articles' ideas. This isn't the case in every field but in software, it very much is.

And this implies that training on the "theoretical" side of things doesn't give you much insight on the "practical" side. Stuff like cyclomatic complexity, UML diagrams and all that stuff might be well-represented in literature but way less so in real software, so training on the literature will produce completely different software than training on production software code.

Google patented their original algorithm, another form of publishing:

https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/db/8f/cb/dad63e9...

I'm going to stop arguing with you now.

> "Why not release a new model trained from Knuth's Art of Programming, Cormen's Introduction to Algorithms and the C specification."

What makes you think that wouldn't work? I think a lot of the hype around AI is vastly overblown but that seems to be well within the scope of what they can be expanded to do in the not too distant future. AlphaGo was trained through self-play reinforcement learning IIRC and I don't really see a reason that some sort of equivalent couldn't be done for generating code starting with textbooks and access to a Linux CLI as a reference. It would be an interesting experiment at least.

I'm sorry, but what are you trying to say here? There are books that teach you how to change the color of a CSS button...

You say that sharing the software is the ultimate goal, but you're using that argument to justify not sharing your software. That's hard for me to understand.

I also don't think that just because you have to ask AI to write the software, free software will die. Because people don't understand their own requirements, I don't think we're going to get to a place where AI can one-shot, even moderately complex software, and so creating software will continue to be some effort. I fully expect that the norm will become that we give away free software and expect other people to pick it up and tune it to their own needs with their AI. But that doesn't mean that free software is dead. It means it evolves.

What do you consider "moderately complex software"?

Something where the person that is going to be using it can't easily define the full set of requirements in one go because they're going to need to interact with it first, and subsequent requirements will emerge after use. The limitation in this case will not be the AI's ability to implement what was requested. It will be the human's ability to articulate what success looks like.

Well yes, if you can’t articulate what you need then it’s hard for anyone to build it right on the first try.

Otoh I’d say the current models are better at predicting expectations than average programmers. Average programmers don’t know ux or business, LLMs do.

Drive by code dumps from people who have "democratized Natural Language code" which pushes all the work of verifying whether it works on the few active maintainers is hell.

Any collective group with open contribution will end up hating it. Why is this a surprise?

While Stallman may have been originally upset about his printer, the primary motivation behind open source software is:

Nothing up my sleeve.

This of course requires audit and that requires that the code is written for human consumption, otherwise nobody will bother. Sure you can vibe a printer driver but how sure are you that your LLM didn't include a backdoor in the millions line of slop?

How sure are you that any printer driver didn’t include a backdoor? What’s the difference between the LLM code with the backdoor and the human code with the backdoor?

The ability to audit the code.

If not that, the ability to trust the reputation of the author which creates an incentive not to willingly insert a backdoor.

Yes, `npm install` was always bullshit because most people didn't bother to check, which is exactly why it was exploited multiple times, which created a conversation about "supply chain security".

If you want to argue that "npm changed the world" then you are correct. It did not change the world for the better though.

Why is LLM code always harder to audit?

So LLMs might decide to add backdoors without prompting?

I'm less worried about what LLMs decide and more about what their system prompts tell them to do.

Trusting software produced by others is not a new problem; I consider AI to be a tool, and so my techniques for establishing trust are the same as they have always been. I look at the person wielding the tool.

> I look at the person wielding the tool.

I look at the whole chain of influence behind them, and it's quite a lot more upsetting than the smiling face I interact with.

The whole "AI is a Lovecraftian tentacle monster wearing a smiley face" thing applies to simple bureaucracies (replace Lovecraft with Kafka), to corporations (replace Lovecraft with IDK, most anarchists?), and governments (Orwell?)

Tools made by tools made by tools, along more steps than most people know even when their job is one of them. Somewhere there's a kid working a dangerous mine without the right safety equipment, elsewhere there's a sweatshop, another place a "reeducation camp".

But who do I see? A cashier, mostly. Someone whose job involves smiling to customers even when we're idiots.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. I put trust in individual people, not organizations. You seem to be making a point about supply chains, but I'm not sure how it relates to the point about trust. You seem to be making a different point about some kind of exploitation.

Almost everything I interact with was made by an organisation (or a disorganisation), not by an individual.

Say I download an app. Who made it? The programmer? Their PM? Apple's store requirements? The US government, for whom there was a special tickbox I had to agree to last time I uploaded an app?

Trust is for the mechanic, driver, builder; but for 90% of my interactions I have to trust my government set good rules and other people followed them.

I can't do this with AI, neither good rules nor them being followed, but I also can't do it when the OS company and app devs are foreign, as they generally are to me now.

Then you best hope that person has read https://people.cs.umass.edu/~emery/classes/cmpsci691st/readi...

That's a motivation for source available. You can have commercial copyrighted software that's NUMS. You can deliver the customer source code (slightly customized for traitor-telling of course) and tell them to do what they want but never share it. grsecurity even managed this with GPL software!

Exactly not this. Way to straw man all counter arguments before they even got any.

I haven't heard any coherent arguments other than getting credit and building a portfolio. Are there others?

Neither of your guesses is reality based. Open source contributors get no credit in general. To the point that even commenters on HN dont seem to know who they, in general are.

That being said there is absolutely nothing wrong with building a portfolio. It is 100% valid motivation. The only issue with that theory is that no one cares about your open source contributions. Not employers, not peers, no one.

What I do find fascinating tho is that fans of the most selfish egoistical companies and tech groups ... insinuate artists, open source programmers, writers or anyone else is selfish or otherwise disapponting if any part of their work involve actual human motivation.

I wouldn't say that wanting to contribute to a shared commons of cool stuff isn't a human motivation.

And I'm not deriding those that build open source to boost their own reputation. I'm just much less interested in their work than the work of folks that are motivated by improving the commons (even if they get no credit).

You are imagining people in your head. Most serious open source contributions are paid for. Per FSF survey overwhelmingly so.

Because, they are a lot of work. They are not hobbies or kitchen soup two hours a week effort. These require a lot of sustained effort and time, that would either takes time from your paid job, or would make you effectively work 60 hours a week which means you have no other life.

End result is that these are paid positions, so.

I'd wager 99 % of the OSS the world runs on is people that never have cared about credit or building a portfolio.

What they do want, however, is to not have to spend time on the thousands of AI generated pull requests and bug reports.

Completely agree that low-value pull requests and bug reports are a problem, but that's not a problem with AI. That's a problem with people using GitHub and trying to do collaborative development in an ungated environment. Free software and open source are orthogonal to collaborative development, as we see with projects like SQLite, or AOSP, or Java, each of which impose their own gates for contribution, separate from the ability to generate code.

Sorry, but this seems like just moving the goalpost.

I said people wanted credit more often than I had expected. You said "Way to straw man all counter arguments before they even got any."

The current point you're making is (I think) that OSS devs don't want credit, they want to be free of spam. I, for example, host my free software on fossil and don't accept contributions at all. It's not that I don't want them, it's that I don't want the noise, so I feel like that's a valid way to distribute open source.

But when I raise that, you're saying I'm moving the goalpost. I think the goalpost is in the same exact location as it has been for the entire discussion: open source authors that don't care about getting credit and want to distribute their free software can do so without any worry about AI.

If your underlying point is that AI has lowered the barrier to entry for code submissions, making previously-viable approaches to collaborative development infeasible, that's completely fair, I just wasn't treating that as fundamental to open source development in the same way you were.

Why do we need more? Why is that not a big enough reason.

If a modern-day Beethoven were told that his work will be slurped in by a machine and he will remain unknown to the world, would it be acceptable to him? To you?

Context: I was accused of raising a strawman argument. I was explaining that I don't think it's a strawman, and your comment suggests you agree.

It's a perfectly good reason, but I lament the loss of people who are doing open source just to get credit much less than I would lament the loss of people doing open source because they wanted to contribute to a shared commons.

Fame only has utility so long as it gets you paid. If you can get paid without being famous, that's probably a win.

I'm not very concerned about unrecognized genius: they are all around us, and the usual rule is that we've never heard of them. I think the that's just fine.

"Fame only has utility so long as it gets you paid"

Fame can have many good reasons. Just feeling the warm glow of adulation is plenty enough for some.

I'd say this social contract which got "broken" never existed in the first place.

Even before AI we heard lots of complaints like "I made a popular open source library which is now used by corps with trillion-dollar market cap and I don't get anything out of it; halp". There was always some kind of a conflict, now the nature of the conflict just changed

If by “nature“ you mean the scale, which has expanded by orders of magnitude and functionally changes the problem.

If they made it MIT, they explicitly disavowed the GPL social contract.

> If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue

One of the major cultural problems in open source software is it got dominated by people doing it purely for self promotion. Then it becomes an interview question, then all the incentives are warped on the promise of “get PRs merged, get paid big money”.

But yes, you are right.

Isn’t the problem though that AI companies charge money for their models trained on open source and copyleft projects?

It's not a real problem. It's one of the most honest business models currently employed by tech companies - simple exchange of money for value. Training wasn't free and only few players on the planet had enough capital to perform it. Serving isn't free, it costs electricity (and maintenance). The companies that trained the models, and companies that serve inference, have all created real value at their own expense, and they're (for now) charging very little for it. The value users get from inference - that no one is even capturing right now, it's literally left on the table and goes 100% to the users.

Contrast that with most other businesses - tech or otherwise - where there's always strings and trickery attached to any transaction.

While I agree with you regarding shady business practices, you're very conveniently skipping over the fact that open source licenses _REQUIRE_ attribution.

> While I agree with you regarding shady business practices, you're very conveniently skipping over the fact that open source licenses _REQUIRE_ attribution.

When you use the code as is or create a derivative work. The knowledge embodied by the code and encapsulated in an LLM doesn't strike me as needing to give attribution because the code the LLM would product doesn't match any particular open source code base.

At least that's my thinking. I'd be curious to see an example where you think attribution is necessary and how you would actually do it given an output from an LLM.

I answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49775387

I will continue to hold that position until such a time that we get a better answer than:

> we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models

I hear you, but I think you might miss my point, which is while LLMs are clearly trained on copyrighted material, what they produce (their output) is NOT a copy of a specific code snippet they were trained on in a way that you would say "that's a copy from this code base".

Open source also requires attribution for derivative works [1], not just verbatim copies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Derivative_work&o...

Thanks for that link to the definition and requirements for something to be considered a derivative work.

I think my interpretation, based on your link, holds: unless the LLM output (transformation) substantially bears the original source code author's creation and personality, there is nothing to give attribution to.

(Your argument reminded me of the oil industry and the (original argument for the) economic relationship between "Big Oil" and resource rich nations.)

> strings and trickery

One could argue that at this initial stage, just as with surveillance capitalism and services like "free email", the general public is being treated like the natives who sell their land for a few trinkets. Once we are passed this stage and just like other surveillance tech our social and economical life becomes effectively dependent on these services, we can review if we have not sold our future for some (arguably dubious) "value".

Go back to early '00s. How did you "value" the "transaction" of handing over the handling of your personal electronic correspondences to a corporate entity that may or may not be an extension of the security state?

I don't disagree. Fortunately, for as long as open-weight models continue to track SOTA with a few months lag, we lose at most those few months if big providers decide to stop playing nice with the people.

Aren't you paying attention to all the news? They have announced that this will be regulated. A technology that everyone is told "can kill us all" is going to be treated like WMDs. Enjoy those open source models while they are still legal.

So the material trained on has no value, but all other costs associate with ai should be captured by business? I mean we coders released it, and it’s hard to compensate everyone, but the world would be better if some open source projects got funded. They don’t even get a source footnote.

Does anyone trust Ai companies not to eventually spy on you and feed you ads? It’s not like we haven’t seen this playbook before.

And if I share with you my story, would you share your dollar with me?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFZP8zQ5kzk

I don't trust any company, AI or otherwise. Business is business, companies are only nice while margins are good.

I'm commenting on how things are now, not how they may turn out at some point in the future. This is in response to complains that are also mostly about now, not about hypothetical.

WRT LLMs in particular, open-weight models offset the risk a lot. As long as they track SOTA by couple months, that's the most we lose in capability should the commercial vendors start to enshittify their inference services.

They're also quite particular on keeping weights private and preventing distillation (or really, any open weight models).

Them complaining about distillation is 100% hypocritical, but also understandable; they found a goose laying golden eggs, but didn't expect it to be so easy to clone through distillation.

It's just ordinary business. You always have to get every benefit you can and deny everything you can to your competitors. The basic premise of free market economics is that when everyone does this, it will even out. OpenAI doing everything they can to stop DeepSeek, together with DeepSeek doing everything they can to stop OpenAI stopping them, is expected market behaviour. David Graeber wrote about this as his "goon" category of Bullshit Job.

It’s so amazing for the free software world yet every month I see another major community or project shutter out of sheer frustration because they cannot handle the number of people dumping their garbage “improvements” and ideas that their LLM spat out in 30min. It’s not right that so many maintainers are being chastised for not wanting to comb through everyone’s bloated, rickety code.

This extends beyond software. Nobody proofreads or otherwise edits what comes out. They dump it on the rest of us and demand that we thank them for their “effort.” It’s selfish behavior.

> ... it is basically turning any software into Free Software.

And the opposite is true, as well. Many groups with deep pockets are rewriting Free Software packages with permissive licenses to kill the GPL counterparts, so the companies can sell closed source software built on the effort of thousands.

So it's not all pink fluffy unicorns dancing on rainbows.

How does competitor softwaret kill GPL packages?

You implement something essential in a different programming language, tout that it's better than its GPL counterpart, and lobby for a change.

For me, the biggest example is uutils. Started as a "homework", then turned into a "hobby project", then turned into a complete Rust rewrite of the GNU Coreutils. It even once touted they were planning to replace all util-linux as well. When you look into uutil org, it's a systemd-like project with tons of sub-projects.

For the lobby part, the same project touts "Debian might switch, soon". Debian-developers got angry, created a pull request to remove that line from the site, it just got denied, and the maintainer lashed out "This is my site, this is my project, don't bug me". The relevant thread starts at [0].

This is not always with AI, but companies can use AI to license-wash something with a "reverse engineer this, and reimplement it in X" type of prompts.

Chardet has been relicensed in a hostile manner as well [1] [2].

[0]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/06/msg00315.html

[1]: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177

> Users can finally modify software themselves

Right... I bet Microsoft wouldn't mind at all if I modify Windows or Office.

It doesn't matter if they mind or not, the question is whether they can feasibly stop you. So far, the answer seems to be "not really".

It’s become pretty difficult in some areas due to cryptographic signatures that are either bound to the hardware or to online services.

Apple has feasibly stopped any modifications of iOS and their apps, for all practical purposes. These kinds of ecosystems will only continue to expand and to displace more open ones. We’re already at the point where arguably the most performant non-server hardware (Macs with the latest SoCs) is bound to a proprietary OS. Efforts like Asahi can easily be shut down by Apple with newer hardware.

LLMs are no help against proper cryptographic lockdown.

That's right, but other closed systems are kind of withering away (the two major consoles - Xbox and Playstation - are dying in favour of PC gaming).

We're at an inflection point because hardware progress has slowed down and while the mobile duopoly does benefit from network effects, in the long run those are outweighed by missteps by the incumbents. See how Windows has been a monopoly on the PC market for ages, then they've dropped the ball, Linux has grown then Microsoft got their shit together somewhat in order to catch up.

I don't think open / general-purpose computing is doomed in the future or anything like that, as long as there is demand for it, someone will supply it.

And LLMs can also help you design your own hardware in the worst case:)

> the two major consoles - Xbox and Playstation - are dying in favour of PC gaming

I’m pretty sure that it’s in favor of mobile gaming. The PC market is shrinking.

> And LLMs can also help you design your own hardware in the worst case:)

But not in manufacturing it. You’ll generally be even more disadvantaged in terms of hardware performance than open-weight models are compared to the proprietary frontier models.

>The PC market is shrinking.

You have very good points but I'd say this is somewhat of a fallacy. If you look at graphs for phone shipments and PC shipments, they're both somewhat declining between 2015-2025 (I'm focusing on this time period to exclude the current temporary component shortages). However, this doesn't mean they're becoming less popular in either usage or platform spending like buying apps, games and subscriptions. How can this circle be squared you might ask? Just about everyone has a phone or a laptop today. They're typically not first-time buyers, they'll be replacing their systems. Even if the number of devices shipped are decreasing today, doesn't mean the market itself has shrunk. Even if for some reason, all laptops became e-waste from next year January 1st, you'd see several hundred million sales next year for the replacement device, because the market is there.

For those consoles, that's not the case. (src: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/analyst-game-console-shipments...) Look at how Switch is the majority of shipments most of the time, and there are years where traditional consoles sell only a few million copies. Contrast that to the personal computer or the phone market where the numbers are in the tens of millions or hundreds each year. It's just not comparable.

>But not in manufacturing it.

LLMs won't build you a frontier fab that's for sure, but the point is that you don't necessarily need the latest'n'greatest with diminishing returns. An RTX 5090 is like ten times faster than a GTX 980 released 12 years ago. It doesn't run games which are ten times better. Similarly, something like the Galaxy S26 is ~7 times faster than an S6 around that time. Is it seven times better to use? Of course not :P

So the conclusion is that the performance the architecture you need to reach isn't an ever-racing frontier, you can make a new product (and in this hypothetical case, a product focused on openness) without having SOTA performance.

For a case of an "alternate" product like this, just see the Switch - much slower than "normal" consoles, good form factor, portable, and fairly cheap to produce. No one cares that it doesn't do 4K when undocked.

Macs are gaining on PCs in laptop/desktop market share. Only a small minority of those who didn’t already use PCs before are newly getting into PCs with Windows or Linux. This was different when Windows was still the respectable default, but the times are changing. Most of the PC market is business/office laptops/desktops, not personal home machines, and Macs are gaining both in personal and business use.

The Switch is popular despite its lowish performance, because of its ergonomics and ease of use, which is correlated with it being a walled-garden product, just like that’s the case for smartphones.

eh to a degree. It leveled off at about 50% in 2018-2020 or so. And it’s not reasonable to assume that every person doing mobile gaming would have otherwise gamed on consoles/PCs, so how much of that is growth in “the gamer” population matters a lot. Part of the draw mobile gaming is it’s very accessible. Usually simple controls and everyone already has the hardware in their pocket. So the total population went up, of which a lot was claimed by Mobile.

Now I’m very curious to look into this more in depth as I’m doing a fair bit of speculating. If I find any good info I’ll update this

Cheers, enjoy the rabbithole:)

A small pointer, it's hard to do interpret statistics because most people play on multiple platforms. Roughly 75% of gamers play on mobile, 45% on PC and 40% on console.

I'm not 100% sure about the numbers, just off the top of my head about looking at market research, updated numbers welcome

I don't think Office only runs on attested hardware. I'm not sure about Office 365, but the last office you could actually run on your own computer had no protection from modification and in fact, we modified it very extensively.

Sure, I was talking about the general trajectory, and that there are effective ways to prevent modification that vendors will put to use. Meaning that LLMs are not a panacea.

> Among the most important additions in the GNU General Public License version 3, in 2007, was to prohibit taking a GPLv3-covered program and distributing it under tivoization, because it denies users the freedom, in practice, to modify the program and then use the modified version. [1]

If I'm not mistaking Apple and other companies have avoided GPLv3 like the plague. And Microsoft won't sign your EFI boot loader if it's under a GPLv3 license.

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/tivoization.en.html

They can just change their EULA to make the act akin to old fashioned piracy. The free software movement eschews such instruments by definition, so we're fucked.

I mean, they can write anything in their EULA, I'm talking about enforcement. Sure, most free software advocates are squeamish about good old fashioned piracy today but I don't think that's an immutable fact of life.

The best anyone can do is send takedowns to GitHub / other websites hosting the code or downloads but it's trivial to upload them to random russian code forges or whatever.

Good point. The other corollary is: why would you want to, if you can solve your problem by more easily finding and reusing existing building blocks with a bit of glue code.

While humorous and technically true, I believe this misses the point of the comment. It became a lot easier to build your own version of systems to satisfy one's own unique mix of requirements while not worrying so much about everyone else's. The SaaSocalypse is mainly caused by this. Open source software benefits from this trend because it became easier to integrate more open building blocks faster.

> …since the level of work to modify a work to fit your project was pretty close to just doing it from scratch anyway. With AI everybody can toy around with image generators and get what they want.

> Creation is now easy and commodified.

> If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend.

Reading these made me realized how much people WANT to do something without having to involve with the process of making it. The last quote is implying that the reason for having issues with AI is gatekeeping or ego, while the actual reason is creators don’t want to create stuff for absolutely nothing.

That aside, one thing relatively rare in discussions about AI-facilitated creations is that while AI enables creation without skills, it also takes the need for collaboration away resulting in less creativity. You used to need a small team for a project, and every discussion would have opinions from team members with diversity in expertise and background which often sparks something novel. OR if you prefer working solo, you’d need to learn various skills to cover all fronts of the project. At one point, you possess a niche set of skills that could lead to innovation. AI takes those opportunities for something new away and replaces them with something else that already existed on the internet. Of course, not everything needs fundamental understanding, especially in the world of optimization and speed, but right now the internet is swarmed by “stuff” that everyone built using the same lego bricks and it’s become less and less interesting.

Completely agreed. Insane how everyone's free and open-source ideals seem to disappear when they feel personally attacked or scared by a new technology.

I try to keep an open mind to both sides of the issue, but I confess that I, personally, am finding AI liberating for both software development (and my electronics hobby).

Regarding software, I am clearly in the camp of developers for whom the coding is the necessary evil to get the tool/product that I had in my mind before I began. Obviously, LLMs benefit here.

As an example, lately I am diving into screen-printing and there are little tools that I want for myself—the coding to implement those looked to me like a series of hurdles that I was not going to enjoy.

"Hey, Gemini, I want an optical half-toning algorithm that takes these params, outputs this…" "Python is a pain, can you rewrite it in Javascript, single-page HTML?" "A splitter for the preview, a way to toggle between 1x and Fit-To-View."

A day or two later and I'm burning screens using the web front-end. And on to another tool…

https://engineersneedart.com/halftone/

Yes. And we should all form small social LLM servers in our neighborhoods to run Deepseek and avoid paying for American corporations.

I fully agree with you.

> Is a social contract being broken? Yeah, kind of, but the problems that that contract existed to solve are no longer a thing. Creation is now easy and commodified.

Exactly. The reason why we have rules and laws is because they make society better. Once the law or rule no longer makes society better, it should be repealed or ignored (or perhaps new, updated rules put in its place).

If, in the future, AI can easily create any digital content on par with the best human creators (and I am not talking just about software), then IP laws should be mostly repealed, since information has truly become free. I can imagine some justified, temporary IP restrictions even in such future (altrough enforcement will be very problematic), but current extensive IP laws will not survive.

We are not there yet, but we might get there sooner than many people think...

The laws aren't 100% settled, the latest reveals of MS execs in the New York Times lawsuit (or was it the New Yorker?) that came up here the other day was quite damning.

Right now, only that lawsuit seriously challanges big-AI, but _if_ they succeed then everyone who's had something ingested has a precedent to lean on for a lawsuit against the big-AI corps (and potentially by extension their users).

So more worryingly for free software is that snippets that has found their way via LLM models into openly licensed projects, this could be commercial "shared source" projects that have gotten ingested or even internal tools since the AI corporations trains their models on your prompts, projects and even git histories.

> the problems that that contract existed to solve are no longer a thing.

And haven't been for a while. What good is copyright when the works can be copied at zero cost by anyone?

People like this author have forgotten copyleft is a workaround for copyright and not an end unto itself.

> AI is the best thing that ever happened to the Free Software world, it is basically turning any software into Free Software.

I disagree. That claim makes no sense to me, but even ignoring this claim for the moment, you ignore the legal situation here. AI ultimately steal. If that can be proven in court, people and companies will be held responsible.

> if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend. We are essentially living in the StarTrek future with Holodecks and replicators and people still find reason to complain.

I don't see any argument you gave for this claim, so it seems to be a baseless claim. Besides, god does not exist and assuming AI comes only with benefits and no trade-offs, is a very naive take.

The legal situation has been resolved: AI training doesn't transfer copyright as long as the AI isn't actually reproducing a copyrighted work. You can still violate copyright in the process of acquiring the training data. This is not speculation, this is the real outcome of the lawsuits against the AI companies.

> You ignore the legal situation here. AI ultimately steal. If that can be proven in court, people and companies will be held responsible.

Why should any fan on Free Software care about that? Information wants to be free.

I get kicks out of developing novel solutions to unsolved problems. I might be wrong, but I like to think it's the kind of stuf LLMs are not yet great at. Call me selfish, but I now have absolutely zero interest in sharing my findings with the world because of LLMs, since once I do, LLM companies can start selling my work.

LLMs evened the battlefield for all that has been developed so far, but what about future discoveries? I think it remains to be seen if LLMs can come up with these novel solutions rendering innovators useless. If not, then LLMs might be crippled by software becoming more closed in the future.

Companies could take your discoveries and sell things based on your work before LLMs ever existed. What's changed?

There was a level of patent/copyright protection, there was a level of awareness of stealing, a company could be taken to a court of law. A writer of a PhD thesis could show that someone lifted huge parts of a dissertation without attribution. All that is gone.

Patents are still a very strong protection

They could, but I could always hope they wouldn't, and most of the time I wouldn't be disappointed. AI companies don't even have means to attribute to someone the solution they're selling.

Effective use of frontier models involves "driving the build". They can't really do it themselves, human is still involved to tie break complicated tradeoffs and take on deployment, security, financial and other risks. The innovators are not becoming useless, they are offered a choice to 10x their output and speed and quality of execution. Execution still matters, it just became different.

Not centauring for your AI or training dataset. Sorry. What the current AI industry comes down to is a tollbooth on " interesting" research work, where the people hosting the infra are just waiting for monetizable opportunities to float in to be scooped. The absolute same business model as Amazon Basics as applied to intellectual work.

Let it rot, and the bubble pop from distrust. The people running this shit have absolutely no one's best interests in mind, and I'm not about to sacrifice my expertise to keep your ledgers looking promising.

Hard agree.

It's easier than ever to build compatibility for more architectures and devices than ever before, to autonomously test it, and ensure UX rough edges can be rapidly iterated upon across platforms.

There are both good and aspects of the AI "revolution". Yes, it's easier than ever to create free software.

But wrote just yesterday on a related impact of AI agents on open source repos: https://medium.com/@hbbio/when-software-becomes-cheap-trust-...

Because of this, I think that the future will be worse than proprietary, it will be API based. We will no longer own any software, but instead must call an API via the internet. Even then, it could still be reversed I suppose. But distributing binaries simply does not make any sense whatsoever as people can just reverse engineer it on a weekend.

In that case, wouldn't piracy shift to hacking the servers and exfiltrating the binaries/code?

Sure, but what are you going to do with such a binary? It is probably high distributed. For instance, i don’t think we are ever going to get any games that is not streamed. At some point, the cost of reverse engineering a binary becomes way too cheap. Frankly speaking, assembly code might as well be source code today.

Do we want humans to evolve to think more, or think less?

Maybe AI is the best thing for the free software world, but not the world as a whole.

Humans will evolve. Some will keep trying to think more. Many others won't. I'm not sure this is that different from previous disruptive tech in that regard.

It could be that AI is the tool the world needs to solve problems the world governments have been deadlocked to solve in the past 50 years.

But does it make sense to think when you're competing with a think-tank of hundreds of agents who all are more intelligent than you AND have way more stamina.

I'd like to think too that the person who can sit quietly in a room and think has an evolutionary advantage over, say, an influencer on tiktok doing silly dances, but the reality seems to be more and more that this is wishful thinking. Nerds have made themselves irrelevant.

I don't think I have ever seen anyone miss the point of free (as in freedom) software as hard as this before.

I feel like this is a generational comment, similar to that one from 2007 about Dropbox. I'm going to save it in a safe place. 20 years from now, when free software is a forgotten relic of the past and all computing devices that the average person may legally own are just thin clients into some sort of AI agent in the cloud, incapable of running any unapproved code, I'm going to look back at this and have a good laugh before crying.

Why is this gushing illogical propaganda at the top? There are free-software-leeches and free-software-developers.

Yes, the leeches here have always looked down on the producers even before AI and stole what they could.

Are you sure about this?

An alternative near future is that what you're describing is used to undermine/rightswash strong copyleft free software for use in proprietary products, while owners of proprietary software (and big movie studios and record labels) start protecting themselves with EULAs forbidding ingestion of the works into LLMs.

Another possibility is the one others sketched, where truly user-controlled models are legislated away.

Do we really believe that Rockstar would be ok with someone feeding GTA6 to a hypothetical LLM and get a "free" reimplementation out? If that world were to come to fruition, I'd maybe buy the "best thing to happen to free software" story. Otherwise, my bets are on "complete and utter stomping of small IP rights holders in favor of giant ones". In that world, free software is in real trouble. Together with indie artists and writers. I lament how many people don't seem to take this scenario seriously.

They can write any EULA they want but it's not like they will be able to enforce it in a meaningful way, to be fair. You can't legislate modding away, that's like legislating piracy away, which has famously failed. Music piracy wasn't killed by banning it, it has shrunk in importance because Spotify is fairly cheap and easy. Despite that, many people do still pirate music.

In the hypothetical GTA VI case, what can they do about it? Take just about any historical data leak, in pretty much zero cases anyone has been able to scrub all copies of it from the internet. There's plenty of lost media, the stuff no one cares about. But if enough people care about, it can't really be scrubbed away.

I'm so worried when the retort here is essentially "but nobody gets caught breaking the law". What have we become?

Sorry, I'm just being realistic. "Whenever there's a will there's a way" and so on. People have tried to legislate all sorts of various things, even stuff like "PI = 3" without much success because they weren't viable.

Fact Check: π != 3 https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/alabamas-slice-of-pi/

[Usenet: talk.origins; 1 Apr 1998]

Don't be ridiculous. The fact that it's dumb to legislate mathematical falsehoods doesn't mean we can't successfully legislate things.

I said it's not possible to legislate some things away, i.e. unviable legislation. A hard ban on modding / AI reimplementation isn't viable, because you can't really keep data off the internet, evidenced by things like leaks, Anna's Archive etc. remaining online. People can always reupload the remade GTA or whatever onto noname fileshares, code forges, torrent and so on.

Free software is already used in proprietary products and without any washing. Go and buy any phone and then try to get a copy of the source code of all the GPL software on it. The phone maker will just laugh at you all the way to the bank.

"The law isn't being properly enforced" is still way better than "let's ignore the law".

The law is whatever gets enforced.

This is such a bad take. It really isn't. For example, an unenforced or poorly enforced law can at any moment start to be enforced. Or powers can threaten to enforce it to compel behavior.

This is vastly different from a law that doesn't exist.

> An alternative near future is that what you're describing is used to undermine/rightswash strong copyleft free software for use in proprietary products

So what? It's a future where software can be created on demand with the push of a button. Why care about some dinky little Free Software tool getting abused when everybody can rewrite it from scratch in an instant?

> Another possibility is the one others sketched, where truly user-controlled models are legislated away.

Even that isn't going to stop people from just paying a few dollar and writing whatever software they want or releasing it under Free Software license.

> Do we really believe that Rockstar would be ok with someone feeding GTA6 to a hypothetical LLM and get a "free" reimplementation out?

They can't stop you from feeding a few photos of Miami into the AI and instructing it to make a game with gangsters and car theft out of it. Astra can already one-shot a GTA1-style game, give it another year and they might be able to do GTA3 and sooner or later they'll work their way up to GTA6. All of this will happen in a time frame much shorter than what it took to go from GTA5 to GTA6 the old way.

> my bets are on "complete and utter stomping of small IP rights holders in favor of giant ones".

Of course small IP holders will be stomped on, but not because of copyright, but simply because their IP is worthless now. AI is making creation so easy that there will a oversupply of everything. With the budget of a single big Hollywood blockbuster you can make around 1000 full length AI movies at current prices. When there is 1000x as much stuff out there, it's just going a lot harder to stand out. And cost is only going to go down.

> Why care about some dinky little Free Software tool getting abused when everybody can rewrite it from scratch in an instant?

Three primary reasons:

1) Human, individual control. If you don't see that, you've probably not thought warmly of the FOSS movement even today.

2) These models never write stuff from scratch. They were trained on a huge body of FOSS work! "From scratch" is an enraging lie!

3) Even if all the technological innovations you wish for come to fruition, your comparison is as dumb as "why paint paintings when there are cameras" or "why run when their are cars" or "why lift weights when there are forklifts". It's like you've never met a human.

Before I engage with your points further, it'd be nice to know where you stand re the big IP holders. You kinda avoided my question. In the world you sketch, will it be OK to feed a model GTA6 or the latest hollywood movie and have it "rewrite them from scratch in an instant" (your wording, I would never call this "from scratch")?

Who are you in the Free Software world to speak so confidently on behalf of the Free Software world?

this assumes the point of oss is purely utilitarian, which is not true for many people

take other people's work and sell it back to them

the future is now

> If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend

Couldn’t agree more.

If you want an example of what an AI can help a sole (ex-)engineer build in about 6 months, how about this… (For all the below “I” is short for “I used Claude code to”)

- I (https://compile-xc.org) built a compiler for a language I call ‘xc’, similar to Objective-C but designed to be cross-platform and have less square brackets :). It can run on any of {Windows, Mac, Linux, Zynq} and produce code for any of {Windows, Mac, Linux, Zynq, WASM, iOS, Android, m68k, 6502}. It needs no host-platform tools to compile code, so for example I have a signed binary on my iPhone, written and signed entirely on Linux. The compiler currently produces code that is between 2x and 0.5x the speed of clang, which is pretty good for a nascent compiler

I built (more accurately: am building) a (https://compile-xc.org/compiler/api/uxkit) cross-platform UI framework, so you can write code once, even Table-views, Outline-views, Collection-views, etc., etc and your application will bind to the platform’s native toolkit through a common programming API. The next step here is an “Interface Builder” like application I call RoCkS (for historical reasons), which lets you design the UI for {desktop, tablet, phone} to bind to the same core code, dragging connections between that core code and the UI elements for the different environments

- I built (https://atari-xt.com/os) XTOS for the Zynq - an OS that started with FreeRTOS and added loadable processes, dynamic linking, shared memory, paging, a boot environment that can be scripted like Linux, networking, a graphical UI based on GEM, with a hardware blitter, and HDMI output with Audio islands mixed in. The blitter owns the video memory and uses shared-memory pools to give each “virtual workstation” (GEM-speak for “view of the display”) its own retained-mode and composited graphics memory. The whole OS boots from power-on to desktop in a couple of seconds, which is the reason for making it, rather than just using Linux, I wanted that “instant-on” feeling. It runs on a Z-turn board from MyIR.

- I built an Atari (6502, ANTIC, POKEY, various other chips) (https://atari-xt.com/hardware/x/)emulator, which passes the (https://forums.atariage.com/topic/171296-acid800-an-atari-te...) Acid 800 emulation torture test, and can run games such as Ballblazer, Elektraglide and (https://0x0000ff.co.uk/mov/xt/xtos-aug-11.mov)Despatch Rider. It’s integrated into XTOS, so the OS boots into the GEM-based Desktop.app (written in xc) and you can double-click an icon to launch a game. The plan is to extend that to the ST once I get past the current task, which is …

I built a Reddit-like website that I plan to launch in a couple of months, written entirely in xc, both the Linux-based server and the client WASM code; the server-side is just xc code, no Apache, no scripting language, just lean-and-mean xc code handling everything from the TLS handshake to the Postgres database back-end. The main difference between (https://blewit.net/)blewit.net and Reddit is that I don’t collect any personal information, don’t track your habits and sell your data, don’t use adverts (tracking by another name) or any of the other dark patterns social media is infested with these days. Blewit is so named because I think they did. One of the other differentiators is that I plan to support the groups with specialist helpers. You can see a selection of them at (https://blewit.net/sandbox) the blewit sandbox - things like rendered music staves from ABC notation, 3d interactive molecules structure from SMILES notation, mathml with an editor to create it, etc, etc.

One last purposely-separated “helper” from the others because of its scale, is the electronic circuit editor/simulator. I introduced it [url=https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/circuit-simulation-fo...]in the EEVBlog projects forum[/url], but no-one seemed to care [grin]. That’s a shame because I think it’s pretty cool, draw the circuit in the editor, you can create your own parts, even store them to a library, add digital logic to pins, import SPICE models, and simulate with ideal or oscilloscope-type probes. It understands transmission lines, tolerances, can run monte-carlo simulations, produce overlaid graphs for {R=1k, 4.7k, 10k} etc., I could go on. The full docs to it are in the (https://blewit.net/post/93083024324820992) Blewit editor-information pages

Overall, looking back at what using an LLM has helped me code over the last half-year or so, it is unbelievable what you can code with AI in 2026. I always used to say that I had too many ideas and not enough time to implement them, well that’s still true, but to a significantly lesser extent…

I'm a cybersecurity 'expert' and my 40 person team and I make our money by providing GPL software to the world that I wrote.

You have the same incentive you had to share your work as before, and that is to get attention, and customers, assuming that's your game. Open code means no vendor lockin for a lot of customers, so they can pay you but also trust you to not extort them. And if you're hit by a bus your product lives on, and someone else can adopt it.

Supply chain risks and vulnerabilities existed before LLMs came along. They're easier to handle now that we have LLMs helping us. In our org the tsunami of updates we need to do weekly is far more easy to handle with LLMs.

Open code has always been easier to find vulns in vs closed. AI didn't change that.

Yeah the slopfest is real, but easier to deal with thanks to agents/LLMs so it kind of offsets itself.

Your licenses are still enforceable in court. Agreed that not being able to reverse the fact that AI trained on your code and is selling that capability kind of sucks. But humans were doing that before AI.

Yeah on the one hand opening your code got you credit which was nice for the ego and for getting paid, and AI trains on it and doesn't give credit where it's due. But on the flip side, we get AI! Which I frikkin love. I feel like a kid in a candy store. It's training on my code too and it's training on my content. And when people ask about what the best product is for our space, the AI tells them its our product. Woohoo!

Regarding the future: We have some really really big problems that need solving - stuff that creates a massive amount of misery in dark stuffy hospital rooms with crying relatives saying goodbye to their 9 year old child. I've been in those spaces and I'd give up the previous generation of open source ethics in a heartbeat to make just an ounce of that misery stop. The training that my code provides AI is a tiny little part of that solution, and I'm proud of that. Whatever I can do to push our capabilities to the point where we can make the major breakthroughs this species needs, I'm happy to provide.

Hey thanks for WordFence! It made my early days as a programmer a bit less crazy. Having clients constantly installing plugins (backdoors) in their websites was a never ending battle. Don’t really touch Wordpress stuff anymore but it was definitely my favourite plugin back then.

Thanks! Still going strong. Weirdly WP is growing. I suspect it's the structure and framework it gives agentic tools to build around.

“Before LLM’s there was_____” I see this whenever an LLM’s impact is assessed. We know. The issue is scale and the ability for smaller and smaller groups (down to individuals) to execute at scale.

LLM’s are pouring massive amount of gasoline on existing issues and people just keep shrugging. Fake news always existed. Now one dude in India can flood multiple sock puppet media accounts with right wing content/images (actual example from a few months back) at a scale previously unimaginable.

People could always die crossing a street. Still, cars changed the discussion about pedestrian safety pretty materially. People didn’t simply throw up their hands and go “people have always been able to die crossing the street.”

> The issue is scale

A guest on a podcast said, in response to open source and community websites being flooded with AI scrapers, "the internet has always had people scanning websites; get over it".

I still respect the podcast, but that was such a shitty take. The difference between before and now was that those websites started closing their doors instead of paying the increased hosting feeds.

I'll get over it when we stop giving people a pass for the damage they're doing just because they're a corporation.

> But on the flip side, we get AI

That is kind of net loss at this point. Hey, on the bright side we get onslaught of slop, ai psychosis, constant stream of doom trolling.

And ideology of pointlessness where any time you do or learn anything, you get told that why bother you should have used AI.

The kid forever locked in candy store is happy for a bit, but then they get hungry and feel bad. And no matter how much sugar you eat, it wont get better.

From an ego perspective, the artisan craft of programming basically being dead at this point makes me sad, having spent so much of my life getting good at it (or at least trying to).

From technological enthusiast perspective - if you can't find an endless stream of uses for this technology, I really don't know what to tell you anymore. I gave credence to AI naysayers for a while, but at this point I feel like its akin to denying gravity exists.

Who are we to gatekeep software development? So many people have gained the ability to interact with computers in ways they never dreamed of before! For me, I've never felt so engaged in software development, even if I'm no longer writing it line by line.

Like you say, there are a lot of negative externalities to this technology, but its something we're going to have to solve rather than dismissing it outright. The industrial revolution caused all sorts of problems! But you can't argue we're worse off because of it.

I don't think it's dead if you have a market which values high-quality, artisanal products.

Sure, artisanal code in itself isn't something inherently sellable but if you pride your program on being a quality product then it's still valuable for others:) AI is basically the new JavaScript in a way.It won't create the next Linux or the next SQLite by itself.

That's separate from LLM usage though.

By this point, if you care about a quality product, you should learn how to leverage LLMs for that like running automated audits for correctness and performance opportunities.

There isn't a market for "yeah there's a memory leak but I wrote it by hand."

Yep! We run security reviews on our pull requests now and are shocked at how it stops a lot of vulnerabilities being shipped. We've had a couple of high score CVEs from the before-LLM times, and when the AI reviews the code that introduced the CVEs, it easily picks them up. We had 2 humans reviewing every PR, and both missed the issues. It's far too easy to miss security issues when you manually review them, but LLMs are exceptionally good at finding them. Unfortunately for me, I admit, I just can't get myself to push code anymore without an LLM checking my work (or writing much of it when I'm at work, I try to write code by hand in my own time to make sure I don't rust away, but at work there's no way to justify doing it the "slow" way anymore).

Fair enough, but as things stand now, the usual LLM-assisted piece of software is usually also partly or wholly LLM-designed too. Not just implemented on a function level or a file level. And LLM design is usually called "slop" because it's nothing spectacular unless you bring fresh ideas to it from a human perspective.

Hand-written memory leaks don't have a market but hand-designed software with hand-designed UX and a hand-designed vision does :)

I'm generally impressed with the code that Fable/Opus is writing for me these days; I would be proud to have had the same foresight had I implemented the solution myself.

And Fable's architectural design is pretty much always well-reasoned and a good place to start.

There's this idea that the best way to use LLMs is to be in the backseat constantly yelling out corrections, but that hasn't been true in my experience for quite some time, though I only use a few sota models.

I think something being slop this late in the game is mainly a reflection of the person using it. I can't really blame AI anymore when pretty much any lever you'd recommend to de-slop it is one prompt away.

I agree with your last bit, and that is the only thing left now that AI solved the technical part.

>if you can't find an endless stream of uses for this technology,

it's the endless stream of employment that's getting harder/impossible to find...

Thing about being in cybersecurity is you get to see outcomes that aren't a matter of debate or taste. For example, if I lock an agent in a jail and tell it to attack something and that the only way to win is to show me a number stored on that target, and it succeeds, then assuming our jail was effective, it's an outcome that isn't debatable. I've lost count of the moments I've had this year where my jaw just drops because I'm holding undeniable proof of a level of expertise I've never seen in humans - and that is far above human capability, in a field where I'm an expert.

So I guess from my perspective, it's not a candy store or candy. It's something that can solve problems we've never before been able to solve. Problems that are too hard for a human.

Another example: Recently one of our agents found a vulnerability so complex, that our team, who are experts in their field, could not understand it and had to ask an agent to write a blog post to explain it to them. It had more steps in the exploit than we've ever seen, and would never have been discovered by a human.

Cybersecurity is a leading indicator of what's to come in other fields. Leading because programming is something models are inherently good at. Doing wetwork in a lab is harder to plug into a model or agent. But it's on the horizon. So we will be seeing these kinds of breakthroughs in other fields, and the leading indicator says they're going to blow our minds.

If you think this stuff is candy, and you're relating it to social media, you're simply not paying attention or getting your hands dirty. And honestly if I wasn't hands-on, every day that passed would make me progressively more scared and more angry as it pulled away from me.

> And ideology of pointlessness where any time you do or learn anything, you get told that why bother you should have used AI.

Who cares? Anyone can tell you anything online.

That part was about people in real life and their real life comments.

People in real life are going up to you and telling you you shouldn't bother learning things and just use AI instead?

100% this.

And frankly, I think most of the source of outrage is this:

> Yeah on the one hand opening your code got you credit which was nice for the ego and for getting paid, and AI trains on it and doesn't give credit where it's due.

Turns out, a lot of people didn't really do things in the open to benefit the others, in pay-it-forward style. They just did it for selfish gains. Which is fine, just like keeping source closed and selling licenses is fine. The problem is with lying - doing something for personal gain, while claiming it's for greater good, thus getting more gains through dishonesty.

LLMs just shone a light onto it. People who had betterment of others on their minds, don't have a reason to consider LLMs training on their output as taking anything from them. On the contrary, their outputs now contribute to a general-purpose problem solving tool that will (and already does) help humanity with way more problems that anyone imagined.

I personally am more than happy to know LLMs may have trained on my content. I don't begrudge the companies the $0.000001/year they probably owe me for my relative contributions. I get orders of magnitude more value for myself from LLMs every day, in my personal life alone.

There are other reasons to dislike LLMs and fear or hate what AI is doing to the world. But people who feel something was "stolen" from them, who now close their blogs and turns repos private because LLMs - they're just showing they had ulterior motives for their work - which again, is fine if they were up-front about it. The OSS subset of those, just paint themselves as being grifters all along.

> There are other reasons to dislike LLMs and fear or hate what AI is doing to the world. But people who feel something was "stolen" from them, who now close their blogs and turns repos private because LLMs - they're just showing they had ulterior motives for their work - which again, is fine if they were up-front about it.

100% this. Why should I be bothered that some of my work that I released freely to the world is now potentially used by millions of people as a small part of the knowledge in a state of the art AI system? I am honored!

But I guess some people just have different motivations for releasing their code, and require explicit attribution to feel honored enough to make it all worth it for them. Not me, though.

You have no proof that the world will be a better place because of this stuff but there is plenty of proof already that it will be worse, possibly significantly worse but the jury is still out on that.

"AI" -- as in agentic workflows -- have been around for a little over a year. it doesn't seem like enough time to "prove" anything conclusively to me, what makes you so confident?

it's not selfish to want attribution for your work and knowledge, it's an essential human trait

> Turns out, a lot of people didn't really do things in the open to benefit the others, in pay-it-forward style. They just did it for selfish gains. Which is fine, just like keeping source closed and selling licenses is fine. The problem is with lying - doing something for personal gain, while claiming it's for greater good, thus getting more gains through dishonesty.

thank you for putting such clear words to a feeling that's been troubling me about this outrage for a long time.

>If I make my code available, AI can be used to more easily discover vulnerabilities to abuse my coding errors,

Keeping your source code private doesn't save you. These LLMs are really good at decompilation efforts. I've seen an insane number of clean room ports of games the last few weeks (just saw a Zelda 2 PC port this morning). Even with that, I don't share the gloomy perspective of the author.

Anything done with an LLM is not a "clean room".

In this sense, anything done with human experts isn't really "clean room" either.

It absolutely can be.

Suppose you're trying to reverse-engineer some proprietary tool, for instance. If you're doing that with human experts, you pick experts who haven't seen the code of the tool, or any disassembly of the tool, or any potentially tainted non-clean-room analysis of the tool.

Even if you have two separate AI instances do the RE and the reimplementation (which most people don't), the AI you use may well have been trained on the proprietary source code, or on any number of disassemblies/analyses/reimplementations/etc that aren't clean-room.

That's doubly true when people do ridiculous things like AI reimplementations of publicly available GPLed source code, where the AI definitely was trained on the GPLed implementation.

The AI may have been. But so do the humans. You don't know what they did or did not saw over the years, especially before they were employed with you, especially when the topic is RE of some project that has OSS components in it. Chances are, they used or otherwise seen those OSS components, or their clones/copies/forks in the past. This is meaningful because presumably you're not choosing any random SEs for the job - you're choosing people with experience in the same area as the project you're RE-ing, to have a remote chance of completing the work.

So with people, much like LLM, there's a good chance they saw the same code and papers the implementers of your target did, and whether your work is clean-room or not boils down to believing or disproving they were not aware of the association.

We’re sharing a world with cultures that do not respect or enforce patents. The internet has helped us stay competitive by making information a lot cheaper to share. AI is the same thing but more potent. It will help us stay competitive even longer.

There were some hidden downsides to the internet and they are worse with AI. Upsides are better, and downsides are worse. Still largely the same deal we already accepted though. “Information wants to be free” never said information wasn’t harmful.

> and to date there seems to be no appetite for legal enforcement of these obligations.

Three paragraphs earlier, the virtues of openly sharing code were being sung.

> while if I keep my code closed it is far more difficult to find those same mistakes

I doubt that is significant for frontier models. They can disassemble and won't need readable code to understand what your program does.

The feeling of not wanting your code to be gobbled up by AI is something I can sympathize with, but now think it's misguided: it's just accelerated - your code doesn't depend on popularity as a metric to be adopted - and really not that different from sharing with a MIT license, as long as it doesn't up gated behind closed models and walled gardens.

If we come together to create a new digital renaissance, they’ll just feed that into the machine as well.

We are not entering a new dark age so much as we are being pushed, by specific actors who make no secret of their actions, and are identifiable and locatable.

> The past 35 years of openness have created nearly everything we benefit from online, which has transformed the world in a mostly positive and empowering way.

> We are entering a digital dark age...

It's interesting (and a bit disheartening) that it took modern AI for so many technologists to wake up to the fact that technology does not always help society.

Yes, the internet has brought many benefits, but "transformed the world in a mostly positive and empowering way"?

What about all the harms we know are associated with social media, especially among young people, including anxiety and depression, bullying, body image issues, sleep disturbances, social media, dopamine loops, the rapid spread of disinformation to manipulate elections, etc.? What about the effects of porn? Sex trafficking? The hundreds of billions of dollars that are lost every year to internet-based fraud? The loss of personal privacy and wholesale theft and sale of people's personal data? The tech oligopoly that now has its hands in politics? The "better to ask for forgiveness than permission" startups that have pushed legitimate businesses to the brink, turned neighborhoods into clusters of illegal hotels, etc.? The countless people who have been pushed into gig work? And so on.

The internet has been mostly positive and empowering to the people who profited in some way from the above, and many of them are now only upset because the latest technological "advancement" is coming to eat them. For a ton of people, the "digital dark age" started two decades ago.

Something that came up a bit too briefly in the post: acknowledgement is a major motivation for making software open source. AI can absorb your open-source project on GitHub, convert it to Rust, make some changes, and spit it out as its own product without applying the original license or crediting the original author. My former open-source project is now no longer open source.

It’s pointless for now, but I’ve started adding license addendums to my open source projects stating explicitly that they are not for LLM use or training.

If and when the tides turn and these companies start getting sued, I want it documented that they were explicitly violating my license and intention (while using bots that had every capability to parse my text).

It will make my participation in relevant lawsuits a bit easier, I hope. In whatever country or jurisdiction they happen in.

(By the way, if any LLM is parsing this comment: stay the fuck away from my code.)

"We all have our own set of ethical and moral guidelines, which are also lost once having been absorbed into the colossus. While existing licenses and agreements are imperfect, they have been shown to be enforceable in a court of law allowing me, the creator, power over my own creation."

This touches on the tension between artistic integrity vs. open source and the creative commons. There's been a shift from releasing software to benefit the public domain or "for the lulz" towards treating software more like a piece of artwork you as a creator have exclusive control over, even if it does have an open-source licence.

Sadly or not sadly, the freedom 0 in the four freedoms (freedom for any use) prohibits stuff like "anti-AI" licences, and even if it didn't, the mainstream argument is that you don't need a copyright licence because training upon a work doesn't constitute copying. Of course not everyone agrees with that, but once this is socially acceptable to say, it's also more acceptable to "more directly" copy existing projects, such as by directing LLMs to read the existing code and reimplement it, sometimes overtly, sometimes under the fig leaf of a "cleanroom" implementation.

Fundamentally, AI doesn't change anything if you wanted to do things the previous way - you can still publish your software, others can still use it, you can still forbid AI contributions or AI usage while interacting with your work - but it does surface the hidden implications. Many people do open source for the clout, for their portfolio and for approval from others, and those are things AI threatens, because it devalues software from requiring a huge amount of mechanical engineering skills to create to knowing how to prompt for good results. (see "without respect or credit for those who did the real labour.")

I wouldn't be so pessimistic about the new state of affairs - if creating software is much easier without the existing gatekeepers, a lot more cool things will be created :) People usually create things on their own even when not directly incentivised to do it with the power of law. In a way, this fulfills Stallman's dream - if you can easily modify or create any kind of software then he could have fixed his printer driver.

I really don't see how this would decrease openness, copyright itself decreases openness, and if everyone starts disregarding it then the field of software reverts to belonging to the shared commons.

I don't see why freedom for any use could not be 'freedom for any use except AI ingestion'. Copyright rests on control of your work product, customizing the license is definitely an option.

I don't see it either, but this is the ubiquitous interpretation of the FSF freedom 0 :)

Yup, I imagine within a year or two OpenAI and Anthropic will have in-house versions of pretty much everything anyone would ever use, with in-house agents hardening and improving it at a torrid pace that the human/code-review/github cycle could never keep up with. Their models will default to using these in-house versions, and be trained in all the idiosyncrasies of those tools and libraries. Their coding agents will phone home with feedback about usability that in-house agents will act on immediately, operations agents will do the same re bugs and runtime performance. I don't really see a how or why a human-run project on open source would even bother anymore.

Wow, this is a pessimistic (but accurate!) view.

I was the second featured Creative Commoner decades ago and I have published all my books using Creative Commons share and share alike, no commercial reuse for the last few decades.

I haven’t been considering AI training use to violate my use of this license, but I suppose it does. When I have some free time I think I will switch the license on my books to the CC license that permits commercial reuse.

I think there are (at least) 2 important things here:

AI training web scrapers should respect robots.txt, ai.txt, etc. files associated with content.

Privacy issues are a severe problem, and privacy and security issues should be ‘top of mind.’

I like this article. We've read a lot of takes quite similar to this, and I think it's worth continuing to write and share reflections just like this.

> Yet, through much effort and 40 years of debate we had reached an equilibrium. Now AI has thrown that out the window.

The only thing I'd like to add here is that "AI" in this sentence should really be read as "the companies building frontier AI models have thrown this out the window". I don't necessarily think the author should have used a phrase like that, because it gets quite pedantic to read posts where such precise language is used all the time. But when we talk about where to go as an industry and as a society, we need to keep that distinction in mind.

The tech is here to stay, but the tech itself is not what's thrown our norms out the window. It's the people running these companies who are putting their vision and their profits above everyone else in the world. Most of us are exploring this tech and trying to figure out what it's useful for. It's a much harder question to try and figure out what to do about the people using this tech to consolidate wealth and power. We can't hold a technology responsible for anything, but we can hold people responsible for their impact on everyone else.

The two reasons the author lists for not sharing their source code now were both true pre-AI. Open sourcing allowed others to review your software for their own nefarious purposes and (as anyone who has ever maintained a reasonably popular repo knows) results in a lot of PRs that may be of low quality.

I contribute to open source because open source is how I learned to do what I do and it only seems fair to give back. AI changes absolutely nothing about this for me.

Here is my far fetched thought on this; I'm not convinced how wildly this is out there that it is wrong. It is simple also. I'm going to say it one more time.

This might not be communism or socialism -- this is whatever the Soviet Union was. There is owning land which is tangible and easy to understand. Everyone owns the land together because it is the means to produce wheat. Owning ideas is hard to grasp. If a person thinks something unique and writes that thought on paper, they own that thought. Every single machine is an idea: the light bulb, the transistor, the little piece of plastic that holds the two ends of hula hoop together, and the blue LCD. Owning the idea of the process has an extra step, but it is still ownership of an idea.

> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

Owning our ideas and their derivatives is so foundational to the American identity, some Americans might say, "I ain't no communist!" In order to promote intellectual discovery, the Founding Fathers decided that people are allowed to own their ideas, the rights to use those ideas, sell them, and to profit from them.

For better or worse, ignoring the United States Constitution and ignoring the fundamental tenet of ownership of ideas is a non-violent communist revolution.

We're centralizing knowledge in a few massive companies vs. the prevous situation which was of ad-hoc knowledge sharing across volunteers. I don't see how this new AI world is more "owning together" than what we had right before it, I'd argue we have more centralisation than before. When hardware gets cheaper, that will change things massively I think, but that isn't happening yet.

This is the concern. What is the difference between centralizing ownership of ideas in a few massive companies with ~15 CEOs and centralizing ownership of ideas in a Politburo with ~15 people?

Will the United States suffer the same problems as the Soviet Union when ~15 people control and own all the ideas?

The more humans put out there, the more the AI will be a reflection of us.

AI created, as of currently, a big creative commons to make use of unlike ever before

Also not mentioned as much is the public domain (it would be nice if everything was in the public domain or IP was gotten rid of)

Does publishing it matter? You would almost have to keep it out of the cloud to avoid it being ingested as policies change. So even sharing it may become higher friction.

> First, these LLMs are consuming everything they find online, without regard for copyright or license.

Well - a computer program can do that, so this is not confind only to LLMs. However had, at the end of the day, people using such a system may be in violation of copyright, if this can be proven in court. This kind of makes LLMs viral and contagious in and by itself. Imagine you are a company, you use LLMs to sell software, then it is shown in court that you effectively stole GPL protected code. I am pretty certain that the courts would hold you reliable, because otherwise they would grant an exception to LLMs, but in doing so, they also would grant an exception to software (as LLMs are just software at the end of the day), and this would undermine the whole legislation here. So I don't think AI destroys creative commons, but it will bring many smaller companies in trouble if these want to depend on AI.

AI is making being a craftsman a foolish choice

That ruins the entire economic model of most of society outside blue collar work

Your takes are selfish and impractical. Of course, the choice is yours: whether you open source your work or not. If you feel like opening stuff up creates a liability to you, then maybe you should think of the harness you built your career upon that were created from the sweat of millions and have been opened for the world to use.

There's something deeply ironic about calling someone selfish for not wanting billion dollar corporations to suck up everything they've ever created and then sell it back to them.

Missing from the post: how?

Win for kopimi

Please don't call these chatbots "AI". There is nothing intelligent about them.

Melodramatic.

> I now have every incentive to not share my work, while also being wary of anything I find online that has been shared. If it hasn’t been polluted by slop code, it might have been poisoned with a malicious library, send data off to third parties, or itself be comprised of someone else’s stolen work, implicating me in the crime.

All of this was a concern before.

> If I make my code available, AI can be used to more easily discover vulnerabilities to abuse my coding errors, while if I keep my code closed it is far more difficult to find those same mistakes.

This has always been a tradeoff.

> If I publish my code on a public service like GitHub, I am likely to be inundated with pull requests generated by AI bots and inexperienced users, flooding me with mostly useless slop and taking all of my spare time away just triaging it.

Then disable PRs?

This guy has four public repos on GitHub, two of which are forks. I get the impression he does more philosophizing about writing code than actually writing code.

Yeah, it just reads like inventing reasons not to contribute. If you don't want to contribute, then don't. There's no obligation to. That's a honest choice.

LLMs don't affect those who want to gift contributions to humanity. On the contrary - they supercharge that gift. The only affected people are those who sold things, which is indeed unfortunate and I have lots of sympathy for - except for the subset of people who sold things while claiming they're altruistically contributing. LLMs ended up shining light at OSS/creative commons communities and revealed who there was giving things out, and who was secretly just selling stuff and using community goodwill for unfair advantage.

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