AI and the Destruction of the Creative Commons

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.

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.)

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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 and the United States Constitution and a fundamental tenet of ownership of ideas is a non-violent communist revolution.

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

Win for kopimi

Missing from the post: how?

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.

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.