Dave W Plummer: "AI Cloning should be illegal"
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1) First, AI models will eventually be able to do clean-room reverse engineering by just looking at how the program works at the user level ("Oh, if I click on X menu, it's supposed to happen", writing documentation, etc.).
2) From a practical point, the whole "you can't reverse engineer by looking at the code" was only held in court because back in the day, reverse engineering wasn't as easy or cheap as it is nowadays. You literally could prevent people (large companies) from doing it because it was expensive and hard, and companies that could do it were afraid of lawsuits. This is not the case anymore. So the sheer numbers and the scale will make any law preventing reverse engineering by looking at the source code meaningless from all practical standpoints; it was never so cheap to reverse enginer and to "launder" the code you decompiled from such proprietary software binaries.
That would be about the opposite of the way Plummer was shocked:
>"AI Cloning should be illegal"
I also say au contraire, instead the things about copyright and software that make people feel this way are what needs to be changed.
And never should have been allowed to stand in the first place. Otherwise I estimate we would have had AI decades earlier. And by now AI would be doing something much more worthwhile than cloning software that should have been open-source since computers got personal. I really really wanted AI since the early 1980's but that was way before Microsoft took over home & office "machines", plus wealth inequality skyrocketed, which things like that now make me wonder how much more crushing an unfortunate event could amount to at scales so far beyond compare.
It would have probably been better to have started earlier when there was less computational disparity between the most high-dollar datacenter versus one person's home or office computer. Now the force is so great that personal computers are yielding to overwhelming pressure to become less powerful, plus way less powerful than they would have been per dollar by now if things would have gone better.
For many definitions of "better."
And that's hardware, you want me to worry about software?
Naturally I have undying respect for Plummer's outstanding programming ability regardless, as well as Bill Gates.
However if Gates had not put in undying persuasive effort at the very beginning, software would not have gained the legal status akin to Disney where they were always bent on having nobody outlive their mainly-fictional stories no matter how young the enthusiast starts out.
With long-term hindsight it looks like things would be very different now, but Gates and Plummer would still have done fine either way.
Microsoft would have been way different too, much better I would imagine, I know there are tonnes of brilliant engineers still there plus new ones coming in, and I get the idea that their ability to flourish is hampered worse than it would be under many alternative structures.
This.
People are going to find ways using AI to create functionally equivalent clones where the methods, flows and structures are so radically different from the original, that it can't reasonably be called a derivative work in the copyright sense.
Stop trying to police software.
> It's not even vibe coding.
> It is piracy.
I'm honestly impressed that a professional software developer only managed to discover the world of decomps a full thirty five years after Interactive Disassembler's initial release.