Post by Martin Seeger

AI and the Subscription Trap: Karma Is a Bitch

AI is making software cheaper to create. One does not have to love AI to appreciate the irony of how the software industry's own business decisions are now coming back to bite it.

A Photoshop Clone and a Much Bigger Question

A recent commentary on Heise Online, titled "Photoshop Recreated with AI: Copying Is Cheap, Deciding Isn't", discusses the implications of recreating commercial software using AI. The title makes a distinction: Reproducing functionality is one thing. Deciding what to build, how to build it, and whether the result is useful is quite another.

A friend of mine responded with a more fundamental question. He argued that discussions about cheap, AI-generated clones of expensive software stop thinking far too early. What if the implications go beyond software pricing and competition? What if, as we approach the end of an industrial era dominated by human labor, we also need to renegotiate our understanding of ownership?

After all, the familiar cry of "Keep your hands off, this belongs to me!" is not merely a legal statement. It is an expression of economic power. What happens when the scarcity that made those arrangements valuable begins to disappear?

This reminded me of @cstross 2003 science fiction novel Singularity Sky. In the novel, the Festival, an alien civilization, arrives at a planet governed by an authoritarian regime. It introduces technology capable of producing practically anything people ask for. The resulting abundance undermines an economic and political order built on controlling access to scarce resources. The authorities respond as authorities tend to do when their power is threatened: They try to preserve the existing order, with increasingly absurd consequences.

Stross explores what happens when technology destroys the economic assumptions on which a society is built. We are not quite at the point of having cornucopia machines, but AI is beginning to do something similar to software.

And the implications may go considerably further than the question of who owns Photoshop.