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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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 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”.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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?
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.
>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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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 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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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 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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
this assumes the point of oss is purely utilitarian, which is not true for many people
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 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 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.
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?
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?
> 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.
Linus [and the skilled and unpaid labour of tens of thousands of people, working together towards a shared goal and a common good]**
>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.
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.
> 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"?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
“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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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 more humans put out there, the more the AI will be a reflection of us.
"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 :)
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 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.
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.
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.