AI and the Destruction of the Creative Commons

For four decades, software copyright and openness coexisted in a fragile but workable equilibrium. In an essay published on his personal blog on September 13, technologist Chester Wisniewski argues that generative AI has thrown that balance out the window.

Writing from his own experience — typing BASIC programs from magazines into a Commodore 64 and later teaching himself REXX to write games for a BBS he ran — Wisniewski recalls that openly shared examples were what made it possible for him to learn programming at all.

From shareware to copyleft

The first attempts at open distribution were still closed source. Shareware worked like trial software: try it, pay a modest fee, unlock the full version. Doom, famously, spread as shareware and built a huge market through word-of-mouth copying.

Advocates of openness eventually turned copyright against itself, coining "copyleft" and creating licenses such as the GPL, MPL and CC-SA, which force anyone building on free-as-in-freedom software to pass those rights on to derivative works. Without that openness, the essay argues, the modern internet and cloud could not exist: every cloud service and the backbone of the network itself are derivative works standing on the shoulders of the previous generation.

"The social contract has been broken"

Wisniewski notes that the environmental costs, cybersecurity risks and misinformation produced by large language models get plenty of attention, while the erosion of foundational openness gets very little. LLMs consume everything they find online, he writes, without regard for copyright or license, and there is no appetite for enforcing the obligations those licenses impose on derivative works.

The result turns sharing into a liability. On GitHub, he expects to be flooded with AI-generated pull requests and slop from inexperienced users, with triage eating the spare time he would otherwise spend writing software. Anything found online, meanwhile, has to be treated with suspicion — it may be slop, a malicious library, a data exfiltration tool, or someone else's stolen work.

Toward a new digital Renaissance

Existing licenses are imperfect, Wisniewski concedes, but they have proven enforceable in court, giving creators real power over their own work. Absorbed into the "colossus" of AI, his ethical guidelines are lost, and the act of openness is twisted into consolidating wealth and power without credit for the people who did the labour.

The past 35 years of openness produced nearly everything people value online, he writes. Losing it points to what he calls a digital dark age, and he calls on authors, coders, technologists and artists to build a new digital Renaissance before too much is lost — or risk a "bizarrely twisted version of Fahrenheit 451."