AI and the Destruction of the Creative Commons

Copyright laws and the openness of software have been a subject of meticulous debate for decades. However, the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) has radically disrupted this equilibrium. When the reporter was growing up, they spent countless hours typing BASIC programs into their Commodore 64, and later teaching themselves REXX to create games for their BBS. This era of open-source examples was instrumental in teaching the fundamentals of programming.

In this age, software could be either shareware or freeware. Shareware was similar to trial-ware; users could try the software and pay a small fee to register and unlock the full version. Freeware, on the other hand, was completely free, similar to "beer," but the source code was not publicly available. Doom, for instance, was made available as shareware, which expanded its market through word-of-mouth.

The forces advocating for openness then turned copyright on itself, coining the term "copyleft." This led to the creation of licenses such as GPL, MPL, and CC-SA. These licenses compel users who want to leverage software that is both free and free in terms of freedom to pass on these rights to any derivative works they create. In the modern digital age, the internet and cloud services would not exist without such open and free software.

They are the derivative works built upon the foundations laid by their predecessors. The absence of openness would likely result in an online environment similar to AOL and CompuServe, being far more expensive and more oligarchic.

However, the focus on the environmental effects, cybersecurity implications, and misinformation caused by AI-powered large language models has overshadowed another significant issue — the destruction of our foundational openness. AI models consume everything they find online without regard for copyright or license. The derivative works they create may or may not reflect the licenses of their original creators, and there appears to be no legal enforcement of these obligations at this time.

This creates an incentive for creators to withhold their work, while also being cautious about the online content they consume. If this content has not been tainted by 'slop code,' it might have been polluted with malicious libraries, may send data to third parties, or could be composed of stolen work, implicating the creator in a crime.

If creators make their code available, AI can easily discover vulnerabilities, leading to potential exploitation of their coding errors. Conversely, keeping code closed makes it difficult to find these mistakes.

Furthermore, if creators publish their code on public services like GitHub, they will likely be flooded with pull requests generated by AI bots and inexperienced users. This inundation with mostly useless information will consume their time, as they try to triage the requests. The ethical and moral guidelines that creators uphold are also lost once they are absorbed by the AI colossus.

The licenses and agreements, though imperfect, have been enforceable in a court of law, providing creators with power over their creations. However, AI has turned the act of sharing knowledge from a gift to the world into a liability for the author. The process of sharing information is being twisted and abused to consolidate wealth and power, without respect or credit for those who have done the real labor.

This will have devastating consequences for the future. The past 35 years of openness have created nearly everything we benefit from online, transforming the world in a mostly positive and empowering manner. We are entering a digital dark age. Authors, coders, technologists, and artists must come together to introduce a new digital Renaissance before too much is lost. Otherwise, we might find ourselves in a dystopian version of Fahrenheit 451.