propietary software oligarchs looking their new tool to break copyright and promoting layoffs being used against their copyright and taking them out of business

propietary software oligarchs looking their new tool to break copyright and promoting layoffs being used against their copyright and taking them out of business

Hm, is this the rope that will be sold?
There is a grand irony that in order to create these large language models, capital needed to disregard its own IP laws, and in doing so, created a machine capable of undermining its own IP laws. I remember years ago, as all this stuff was just starting to come online, I was telling someone I knew that IP law sits at the center of AI. I had mentioned that legal battles will be fought over who has the right to ignore IP law and that it would ultimately lead to the downfall of IP as a concept. I am not convinced that is where this is going now, but it sure is widening the gray zone by a large margin.
IP and patents are frankly a hinderance to progress anyway. You would think that would be a pro-capitalist argument, but capital weaponizes IP and patents to solidify monopolies all the time, ensuring they never have to actually innovate in the market at all. International IP law, for example, is one of the primary levers capital has in maintaining control over global south countries and ensuring they stay underdeveloped and reliant on western capital. A primary example would be medical treatments. The pharma industry has a history of bullying even other capitalist ventures that had inovated outside the borders of the national IP regime; it's one of the primary reasons international IP law is as powerful as it is. TRIPS is low-key one of the most destructive global trade agreements when assessed through the lens of the pharam industry. The amount of delayed delivery of treatments for global south nations amounts to a continuous and mass disabling event, keeping the world in a delayed state of unhealth (for lack of a better word) well behind the global north. Even still, that delay can be real for people in the global north as well, if you happen to be part of the margins, such as monopolizing and delaying advanced treatments for things like HIV/AIDS.
All this to say, 
I think AI will eventually render proprietary software useless. Whatever program or app you create will be able to be copied by an AI, at some point, instantly. I think this will also allow for Linux to finally take off. Imagine all Windows only software, being cloned in seconds and becoming Linux compatible.
AI-powered, cloned software often has bugs that the person using the AI doesn’t understand or know how to fix, and people are doing it anyway, using the software anyway, and unleashing it on the world and on these communities at a speed with which it cannot be vetted or moderated.
I've been wanting to ask if you have any commentary on this notion of a flood of "cheap" code (cheap as in low-effort, not maintained) that will overwhelm systems of quality control. For me it's the most materialist critique of AI proliferation that I've seen so far, how would moderation or QA work without banning it wholesale?
As a sidenote, the debate about usage of AI kinda reminds me of usage of plastics:
Proliferation of low quality software has always been the case and it's just a new thing people have latched onto now. And there are plenty of economic drivers like the whole enshitifaction phenomenon Doctorow loves to harp about that lead companies to produce garbage software. Similarly, we have stuff like the NPM ecosystem that's become a meme now. All of that was happening long before LLMs were a thing.
So, how did we figure out what projects to use? People looked at who works on the project and what their track record is, how long it's been developed, how many users it has, and so on. All of that applies to the world where we have software produced using LLMs as well. Projects that are well built and well maintained will rise to prominence, and that's where people will gravitate.
But I think there's a second aspect here as well that's even more interesting. Building software that's general purpose is a lot harder than building software for yourself that solves your own problem. Any developer knows that it's pretty easy to hack up a script or a problem to scratch your own itch, but making it public and usable for others is a ton of work on top of that. Conversely, users tend to develop their own workflows with a program and they don't actually use all the features in it.
With LLMs we're now getting to a point where people will be able to just make their own software stack to support the things they need to do with their computer. It doesn't need to be perfect or general purpose. It just needs to do what the person using the computer wants to do. I expect that's the world we might end up in. What's gonna matter are common protocols, and file formats so that people can send files to each other and communicate, but everybody will be able to have their own unique computing experience based on the way they want to use their computer.
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