I read Cory Doctorow’s copyright thread and it’s got some great points, but I find myself thinking, “Gosh, wouldn’t that be nice if copyright remained relevant?” And honestly in the battle between AI and copyright, I expected AI to lose just due to the enormity of entrenched copyright interests (think Disney), but copyright lost that fight. Copyright and licenses in software development were once paramount but now it’s choose your own license via LLM.
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3/ But here’s the rub: Then the Congress or Supreme Court will come in and offer a correction of their own that will save the software industry from its own recklessness—not by ensuring it behaves differently (use humans for copyright protection) but by enshrining its current practices (use AI for everything).
@shanecelis Yep. I keep being told I'm "an extremist" offering "personal opinions on copyright" when I say the absolute most pedestrian thing about how LLMs are an industrial copyright shredder if we allow any of their output to remain. Feels like several of the well rounded people I'm talking to have already decided this battle is completely lost and we're just waiting for the new laws to be lobbied into existence to further cement the benefits only to the major corps (not to human creators).
2/ And despite @pluralistic being correct on the merits, what’s going to happen when the software industry as a whole has shred their copyrights via aggressive LLM usage and software lacks all copyright protection? There will be a negative consequence for one company and an uproar at the obvious outcome. “Who could have known we destroyed our own protection?!” AI doomers will rejoice—finally a correction!