Sloppy Copies
44 points by mdr
44 points by mdr
I still think we should just view AI as a tool; It’s the intent of the person driving it that matters, I think. And sadly, it appears that there are a lot of complete dickheads out there.
I see this argument everywhere: that technology is morally neutral and the consequences of it are entirely caused by the people who use it.
The deep flaw in that argument is that human behavior is highly sensitive to environment, incentive, and opportunity. Essentialism is a pervasive belief in our culture today. The idea is that some people have some deep immutable core that is good or bad. An "actually" bad person who consistently does good things is merely a wolf in sheep's clothing waiting for the moment to pounce, and a good person who does bad things is simply a helpless victim of circumstances or systemic flaws in society. (How a person gets the good or bad essence isn't specified, but it tends to boil down to "do they seem like a member of my in-group?)
This belief is toxic and wrong. It is of course true that people have relatively consistent personalities over time and that there are a small number of deeply hurtful people that have a repeated pattern of doing harm while trying to hide it. But we aren't born picking a square on the D&D alignment chart. People just do a mixture of good and bad things.
We'd like to believe that our actions always spawn from our essence because that centers our lives in our own agency. But in reality, we're all just trying to make the best choices bases on the menu that the world offers us in that moment and that menu has more influence on who we are than we'd like to admit.
When you give people a new technology, you change that menu and the result is going to be different behavior. Incentives incentivize, temptations tempt, and lowering barriers increases the number of people who will hop over it. If a technology makes it dramatically easier to kill people (weapons), over-eat (agriculture), scream at each other (social media), or copy the work of others (AI), then at scale, the number of people doing that thing is going to go up.
Put more simply: what we do is a combination of human nature and the technology we have access to. If you see people using technology to do a bad thing, do you think it's easier to change human nature, or the technology?
Problem is, the genie is out of the bottle. I don't think the technology can be changed or regulated or controlled anymore.
I just dunno anymore, and what I find myself doing sadly is retreating and disconnecting from modern technology and culture more and more. Which pains me somewhat; since I first discovered computers as a child in the 80s, they've been inter-woven with my life and been a great source of comfort, intellectual satisfaction and downright fun. Throughout my teens in particular, the various underground sub-cultures I found refuge in formed a large part of my identity.
It's also a problem given my chosen career. I still hold onto that early feeling and try to remain positive, but I'm slowly coming round I think to your way of viewing things and it seems like more and more everything is just becoming poisoned and I'm starting to fear and hate the things I used to find joy in.
I hate that this is exactly how I feel too :(.
(except the regulation part, I don't see a fundamental reason why the technology couldn't be regulated)
Problem is, the genie is out of the bottle. I don't think the technology can be changed or regulated or controlled anymore.
We will certainly not go back to a world without AI. There are too many actual upsides to it, regardless of the externalities. But I always try to be optimistic that we can continue to move forward in ways that address some of the problems with any new technology.
Progress is often a two steps forward one step back thing. We introduce a new technology that solves some problems but then has knock-on consequences. We find some new technology or policy for some of those, but then that causes it's own downstream stuff. We just keep moving forward.
It's certainly difficult these days, but I'm still trying to be optimistic and non-cynical. Cynicism is like drinking a poison and hoping your enemy will die.
Incentives are a far more powerful tool than the technology. People react to incentives far more readily than an improved menu of choices. In fact most people are bad at seeing the choices in front of them: what percentage of people with a web browser installed ever learn to write a line of JavaScript when the tool to use it is Right There? But tell them they can get money if they learn, suddenly we have people learning to code for the money's sake.
It's easier to change incentives than to control technology.
So now we have Meta-MALUSes (not linking to that shite) running wild on the internet. Let's hope this works badly enough and gets boring soon for whoever pays for that.
What does MALUS stand for in this context? It's not apples, and the only things computer related I find are VPN providers or game accelerators. I guess my Google-fu is weak.
I mean, copying has been around forever. When flappy bird hit its unexpected success, there was ton of clone to be found. Any simple product on Amazon has bajillion of cheap knockoff available.
I guess if you have a business idea, you need to think about what moat protect you. If anybody can out execute you, you are done for. This was already mentioned in the Lean Startup book decades before LLM existed.
Looking at this sideways, maybe it also means anybody can now create his own software copy that work exactly the way he wants to? Which may be a good defence against enshittification? A world of self owned software is not something I spit at.
It’s not all black, IMO, even though I understand the frustration of seeing your business idea stolen.
Creating your own bespoke software is a cool thing, and while I think it's sad there's an apparent instant drive to try and commercialise everything (including very low-effort slop), I also don't begrudge anyone giving that a shot.
I'm more concerned about the apparent malicious nature of some of these cloning operations, the spamming, and the stealing of identities/personas to publish them. I'm not even sure what the incentive is in some of these cases, and I find that even more unsettling.
In my case, this wasn't a commercial idea, it was just something done for fun and my own entertainment / learning. But it does make me wonder - in this new world, if anything you can create now will just be cloned in a drive-by operation, what even is the incentive for any future entrepreneur to come up with any new idea now ?
Yeah, the suspect nature of these scams is indeed concerning. Fully agree with you here.
I think there is still place for the entrepreneurial spirit. LLM have removed (or at least reduced) the bottleneck of coding. There are many others still remaining. Your ability to execute well and the quality of what you produce still matter. It just operate in a new world with different rules than before.
LLM still produce a lot of bad code and do stupid things. A few weeks ago, I asked Claude to resolve a rebase. He did it by trying to delete the .git directory. Thankfully, built-in protection triggered to stop it. If Claude Mythos is half as much a bad boy as Anthropic marketing pretend it is, vibe coded bullshit like these clone you spotted will likely be the first casualty. No way those are well protected against intrusion.
But really, there are still other moat effect than the shear amount of coded features. Content on a platform. Legal Hurdle. Access to industrial secrets. Reputation. Human touch. Marketing ability. The bother of migrating your data out of a platform. Anything that involves moving or transforming physical matter in the real world. Security Audit Compliance. Knowing how to win A RFP with a corporation or government (that’s a business model in itself, I learned).
If all else fails, and I can’t believe I’m gonna say this, but… patents. It’s rather trivial to clone a molecule, but we prevent it legally for some years to give incentive to do research. That system is full of hole, let’s be honest here, but it sorta work. Maybe software patent will start to be used for more than to just troll