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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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