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.
> Is a social contract being broken? Yeah, kind of, but the problems that that contract existed to solve are no longer a thing. Creation is now easy and commodified.
Exactly. The reason why we have rules and laws is because they make society better. Once the law or rule no longer makes society better, it should be repealed or ignored (or perhaps new, updated rules put in its place).
If, in the future, AI can easily create any digital content on par with the best human creators (and I am not talking just about software), then IP laws should be mostly repealed, since information has truly become free. I can imagine some justified, temporary IP restrictions even in such future (altrough enforcement will be very problematic), but current extensive IP laws will not survive.
We are not there yet, but we might get there sooner than many people think...
grumbel · · focus · HN ↗
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.
Marha01 · · focus · HN ↗
Exactly. The reason why we have rules and laws is because they make society better. Once the law or rule no longer makes society better, it should be repealed or ignored (or perhaps new, updated rules put in its place).
If, in the future, AI can easily create any digital content on par with the best human creators (and I am not talking just about software), then IP laws should be mostly repealed, since information has truly become free. I can imagine some justified, temporary IP restrictions even in such future (altrough enforcement will be very problematic), but current extensive IP laws will not survive.
We are not there yet, but we might get there sooner than many people think...