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Yeah, I was thinking of starting a post about all this, but couldn't quite muster the motivation to collect all the links, so thanks! I don't recall how it was phrased, but I remember someone saying "Everybody is using AI, and everybody's saying how capable it is, so howcome nobody has done anything with it", at the time I agreed and decided that was going to be my personal benchmark / canary. Well gents, I think we're here, even if you're skeptical of these examples, those clones of the Microsoft/Adobe suite are insane. If you're calling that canary alive, I'm going to say you're re-enacting Monthy Python's dead parrot sketch.
I think we're going to to see a lot of disruption, but despite my pessimistic nature, I somehow don't feel like "the economy of the first world is ending". Somehow this feels more like the Industrial Revolution, or how Photoshop wrecked the world of hand-drawn art, but we're still in the early stages so it's hard to tell how things will develop. I'm also pleasantly surprised by centralization not immediately elevating Big Tech to all-knowing dictators. Even though technology favors centralized control, it seems like the pressure from open source / open weight models is real, and puts a hard limit on how hard the Silicon Valley creeps can cuck us.
I can't make sense of the Culture War angle though. When @DaseindustriesLtd said that AI is going to be the next big Culture War issue, I thought he was nuts. I still think he's nuts, he has no right to be right about this! This is the dumbest culture war issue I've ever seen, and yet... Not that I'm complaining, watching the same people who have been meticulously taking over institution after institution, and purging all dissidents, self-quarantine themselves from tech that can 10x your productivity, and thus leaving themselves and their institutions in the dust, is quite satisfying. On the other hand, I might need to intensify Aldeaposting. Even the innovations of the digital / social media age had a tangible negative impact on me, that I haven't figured out how to fully mitigate yet, and with AI the temptation to outsource my thinking to the quartz god is real.
The problem with most of these examples is that they boil down to plagiarism in one form or another. The AI are not being used to create new stuff, they're being used to automatically reconfigure existing stuff either for the purposes of IP evasion (the Photoshop clone stuff) or for cheap gimmicks (juxtaposing consumer icons together in video games). Chomsky had dubbed chatbots plagiarism machines all the way back in 2023, so yes, I'd make the claim that in a sense nothing's really changed since then. They're still just prediction software recreating what they're trained on with increasing fidelity, which isn't the same thing as designing or engineering things that are new. The utility of this is overstated. If something already exists, why would you need an AI to create clones of it? It circles back to IP evasion and gimmickry.
Automatically reconfiguring existing stuff is an incredible demonstration of capability. Smashing Counter Strike and Warcraft 3 together would never have been done before this because it's really difficult. Decompilations had been done before this, but they took years of effort. That Diablo 1 decompile was done by one guy, who said it took him over 1000 hours. This isn't something you can wave away as "gimmickry" and "plagiarism". If it can do these really difficult things, it can certainly create really good new things, too.
Also how many genuine original ideas exist? People stand on the shoulders of giants doing their best to jam together information that exists previously, for the most part, if AI can just do that at scale then it kinda wins.
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A bulldozer can do really difficult feats of moving vast masses of earth about, too, but its potentials are still limited.
If all AI ever is is a digital bulldozer, then, not unlike real bulldozers, it's still going to reshape the whole world.
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How is that a problem? All software that competes with other software boils down to "plagiarism" under that criterion. We've been doing that artisenally for ages.
What's changed since then is that back then you couldn't use it to compete with mainstream industry. Now you can.
This is absurd. The reason you would want a clone is because you want something similar, but changed in some key ways to better fit your use case. Or because you want an older version of something that you were very happy with, but the provider refuses to support it anymore, or because you want to increase it's performance, or use it on hardware that was not intended by the original creator, or, or, or...
What if it's a clone of a an open source program, where's the IP evasion then? How does the entire entertainment industry not fall under your definition of "gimmickry"
Photoshop was a triumph of compounded design inputs over the course of its existence, which were very costly to work out and optimize. The purpose of IP law at least ideally is to encourage creative design by allowing designers to monopolize their abstract goods for some period of years and thus secure remuneration for their efforts. It is not equivalent to have prediction software clone a finished design-based good in order to avoid paying a fee or to alter minor aspects of it. It is not equivalent because it does not create the same utility as encouraging people to pour large amounts of creative effort into designing new products in the first place. What you are doing is trying to build a false equivalency between using know-how and techniques to build something from a principled standpoint of design and using predictive software to perform something more akin to a copy-paste function. AI does not put very good design thought into its outputs, that much is observable from said outputs (however opaque its internal workings may be).
You can't copyright an idea, this is basic fundamental IP law. You can protect designs yes, but only for a few years. Copyright over software only covers the exact source code itself and as the claimant you must prove the defendant copied from your source code to hold them liable. If they take 100% of the functionality of your code and make their own copy from observing just the functionality itself that's completely fine and you can't do a single iota of stuff about it.
From Pumfrey J back in the day:
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IP protection was never as broad as you're claiming it to be. If it was, all the Open Source clones of mainstream software would be illegal, and yet we have Gimp, Libre Office, and 7 zillion open source browsers that actually outcompeted their proprietary counterparts. What you are calling for is a complete abolition of all competition. Also, I will note, you never answered where is the "IP evasion" is taking place when the program being clones is open source to begin with.
I'm doing no such thing. First of all, I made no claim about whether AI is "building something from a principled standpoint", the only argument was about whether it can be used quickly and cheaply to catch up to the industry standard. Even if the underlying mechanism is akin to copy-pasting, the technology will have a massive disruptive impact on the industry.
Secondly, if you read my "Aldea" link, you'd see that I actually share many of your concerns about AI and the effects it will have on innovative thinking, or even thinking in general. It's definitely something I believe we'll need to address and mitigate, but the one thing that will do worse than nothing to address this problem is pretending that nothing changed since 2023.
I can agree with the former, I don't think it's putting thoughts into it at all. But if your argument was correct "not putting good thoughts into outputs" would mean that the outputs are of inferior quality, which in turn would mean they are of no threat the artisenally created software. Since they are, something in the logical chain between the first and second part of your sentence is broken.
Software is protected by copyright, not patent, which means that while the term is longer, the protections aren't as strong. Copyright doesn't cover the software itself but the source code, which means you could develop a program with identical functionality to an existing program as long as you use different code. What this means in practice, however, is that you have to develop the product independent of the existing product, i.e. you can't just take the existing code base and make superficial changes. Courts generally require that the code itself be developed entirely independently. All the programs you listed (Gimp especially) aren't even clones of existing products, just products with similar functionality. Gimp wasn't developed by someone taking Photoshop's code base and modifying it. If what the AI is doing is taking the existing product and reverse-engineering or reverse-compiling or whatever it is to figure out what the code is, then as far as the law is concerned it's no different than if they copied and pasted the executable file. And no, it's not a strong defense that their versions don't have the account control features that verify that the user is a paying customer.
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Yeah, seriously, it's not really even a debate at this point, is it? I even forgot an example, Modern Warfare 2, and in the last hour my attention was brought to Diablo 2 that was uploaded... yesterday. Someone needs to tell the years-overdue Kickstarter scam developers that the jig is up.
Wow, I'm glad I found Emdless Sky and Naev when I wanted an updated EV style game. They may not be perfect, but at least they're free and playable.
Endless Sky was great! I really liked EV Nova but I don't want to start up Sheepshaver just to play EV Override, I want a real port. It hopefully happens soon. You can already play it in your web browser, but it's not been reverse engineered yet. This site just plays the compiled binary in the browser.
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I think one big issue is having a project without raising enough money to work on it full time. If that's the case, it's still just a hobby project, with the money raised versus not. People like this should just keep working on their hobby and release it when it's done.
Honestly scamstarter should set a minimum of like 200k or something just to raise money, as anything less isn't enough to actually fund the development of a new product. And if they want to raise less just to do a production run at a factory for a product that's ready to make, they'd better have a final quote from the factory before raising the money.
It's okay, at least the remaining developer is still getting $376 per month on Patreon to do, uh, nothing.
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An example I've been meaning to list is a youtuber randomly deciding to make his own Linux distro. I thought it's a meme, but apparently it's halfway decent.
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