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.

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

>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.

> 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

"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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI is making being a craftsman a foolish choice

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

> 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"?

> 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.

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.

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).

Luddites also complain about disruption, you know

> 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.

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.”

> 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.

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.