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.
> The barriers were knowledge, understanding, expertise, and hard work, none of which AI fixes for you.
The biggest barrier was time, there are only 24 hours in the day and no amount of hard work or knowledge is going to change that. There are just some fundamental limits of what you can accomplish as a single person in that time. And good luck trying to find contributors who want to work for free, when they already are busy with their own projects.
AI just fundamentally turns that around and gives you a whole bunch of extremely capable co-workers that you can let deal with all the problems you do not want to waste your time on and they let you focus on the stuff that actually matters to you.
I am going to agree, albeit from an entirely different perspective.
My job has nothing to do with programming. Aside from administrative tasks, my job has nothing to do with computers. Yet I know how to program and I realize that automating those administrative tasks will have huge benefits for me. The problem is my employer doesn't pay me to write code, so I never got around to that automation.
Realistically speaking, writing that code without AI would not offer much in the way of understanding or expertise. Most of it is: "look up X, if A then B, else C, iterate" type tasks. There is a barrier in knowledge with respect to library calls, but that's pretty close to junk knowledge (it's rapidly obsoleted, and useless if I need to interface with different software).
So the choice is between doing without, or spending a lot of time picking up tasks that are of no value to me. Time was the barrier.
These arguments also remind me a lot of the microcomputer revolution: a heck of a lot of mainframe COBOL and FORTRAN developers were critical of underpowered computers and toy programming languages. The reality is that it opened up opportunities for a new generation of developers, and new types of software was created because the problem solvers were closer to the problem.
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.
geraneum · · focus · HN ↗
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.
grumbel · · focus · HN ↗
The biggest barrier was time, there are only 24 hours in the day and no amount of hard work or knowledge is going to change that. There are just some fundamental limits of what you can accomplish as a single person in that time. And good luck trying to find contributors who want to work for free, when they already are busy with their own projects.
AI just fundamentally turns that around and gives you a whole bunch of extremely capable co-workers that you can let deal with all the problems you do not want to waste your time on and they let you focus on the stuff that actually matters to you.
II2II · · focus · HN ↗
I am going to agree, albeit from an entirely different perspective.
My job has nothing to do with programming. Aside from administrative tasks, my job has nothing to do with computers. Yet I know how to program and I realize that automating those administrative tasks will have huge benefits for me. The problem is my employer doesn't pay me to write code, so I never got around to that automation.
Realistically speaking, writing that code without AI would not offer much in the way of understanding or expertise. Most of it is: "look up X, if A then B, else C, iterate" type tasks. There is a barrier in knowledge with respect to library calls, but that's pretty close to junk knowledge (it's rapidly obsoleted, and useless if I need to interface with different software).
So the choice is between doing without, or spending a lot of time picking up tasks that are of no value to me. Time was the barrier.
These arguments also remind me a lot of the microcomputer revolution: a heck of a lot of mainframe COBOL and FORTRAN developers were critical of underpowered computers and toy programming languages. The reality is that it opened up opportunities for a new generation of developers, and new types of software was created because the problem solvers were closer to the problem.