Nesbitt: Protestware for coding agents

Well put.

Remember the movie WarGames where a child comes close to starting world war III. 100% "childish". Then what: you only admonish the child and move on, that's it? Ridiculous.

Let's please talk less about AI itself and a bit more about the permissions some people seem to grant to agents which are non-deterministic _by design_! AI is turning everything upside down but so far it has not obsoleted core security principles like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege .

Play with fire, get burned and don't come whining.

Just a personal nitpick, but 'decimated' ("Reduce by 1/10") would be a wildly optimistic scenario. 'Obliterated' is probably more accurate.

Actually, the interesting thing about art is that humans will produce it even if they don't get paid for it. This is one of the points of Chokepoint Capitalism: that mega-corporations are driving the compensation for artists to zero because artists are going to produce art anyway, even if it costs them money. There are people out there still producing stylised swords even though there is absolutely no demand for them.

We live in a period where an artist can actually make a living just by producing art, it wasn't always so. That this is ending may be inevitable, but the problem is not that the market for art collapses. The problem is that our economic system is setup such that people need to doing stupid jobs (e.g. telephone sanitisers) to get money for basic necessities. We produce more than enough to give everyone a comfortable lifestyle. If we made a serious effort to make sure people didn't have to do stupid jobs to survive (eg UBI) then there will be many people who will sit down and write books all day for free. Because people produce art, it's in their nature. We just don't give people the time to do it.

> it has had a large corpus of human creations to steal.

I certainly have to roll my eyes at companies trying to justify torrenting Anna's Archive, and reprocessing of current material into functionally equivalent material is problematic. But reading a bunch of stuff written on a topic and producing a new synthesis is what humans do all the time.

> Once humans are priced out of the market and stop producing works, what's AI going to be trained on?

An existing AI doesn't need training; a translation AI or image-producing AI could go years without updating without issues. I'm sure that work is being done right now on producing results from smaller corpuses and producing more refined corpuses.

> Nobody's expecting everyone to spend hours to learn to draw.

>> "Everybody can do it; but not everybody wants to do put in the effort, the practicing time and the soul."

is the quote I was responding to.

> We have divisions of labor; some people like making art, some people like making software

Note that we've usurped these divisions before, repeatedly. The camera stole jobs from portrait artists. The history of making software, particularly the first half-century, is a history going from people who rearrange physical computing units, to those writing machine language, to assembly, to FORTRAN and COBOL, to BASIC and Java, for many users to RPGMaker and Excel. They're letting people who have never heard of de Morgan's laws program nowadays.

> But society is not prepared, IMO, for the massive social upheaval caused by creators' livelihoods being decimated by AI.

As I said, we've been here since the Jacquard loom. I'm not blasé about the future, but we're rolling forward. To most adequately respond to it, prepare for it, or direct it, it's important to be honest about what AI can and can't do, and what it will and won't be able to do in the future.

That's how human creativity works, too.
All inventions (technical, nontechnical, philosophical) work that way.

There is no fundamental difference between a human brain that learnt from existing works (school, university, life) and produces (extrapolates) new things and an AI doing exactly the same thing.
Currently AIs are not very good at extrapolating and therefore not very good at inventing, but I don't see this as a fundamental limitation.

I have heard this argument before, and I've thought very carefully about it.[0] Regardless of your feelings on the morality, I think the law as it is currently structured is unprepared to recognize this as "theft" (or infringement, or whatever you want to call it).

To understand why, we need to go back to the 17th century. Copyright law is a brand-new idea, and we need to codify how it works. You *could* write something like "don't rip off other people's books etc. using a movable type printing press." But then you'd have to update the law every time a new printing technology is invented, and that'd leave a lot of authors (and other artists) unprotected in the meantime.

Instead, they wrote something more like "don't rip off other people's books etc. using any technology that exists or will ever exist." In modern terms, the law is technology neutral.[1] For the last ~300 years, this has worked out pretty well in practice. Technologies come and go, and the law adapts. But we don't get this flexibility for free. Judges and lawyers have to figure it out on a case-by-case basis, and they need a coherent theory of how that works. That theory is now the problem.

Broadly and informally speaking, most analysis of infringement uses a black-box model. That is, instead of focusing on the specifics of how the technology works, it focuses on the inputs and outputs to the process. For example, when file sharing gets invented, and pirates argue in court that e.g. "BitTorrent only shares small pieces of the work at any one time," judges can make short shrift of that argument. The overall effect is to make and distribute copies of the work, so it's infringing. We don't need to care about the details of the BitTorrent protocol (nor any of the other file sharing apps). We just look at inputs and outputs, and in that view, the file sharing app looks functionally identical to a copying machine.

But AI opens a can of worms, because its inputs and outputs do not look much like classic infringement, at least in some cases. Sure, there are situations where the AI produces an output that looks like Mickey Mouse or another copyrighted character. Those are easily litigated and somebody probably loses (the main open question is whether that "somebody" should be the AI company or the end user who generated the image). But there are also situations where the AI's output is not substantially similar[2] to any individual training image. The law has seen that fact pattern before. It looks very much like the inputs and outputs you get from a student learning to draw or write.

Obviously, the learning process of an AI is quite different to the learning process of a human. But if you're black-boxing that process away, then you don't care. You look at the inputs and outputs, conclude that the AI's training is broadly similar to something that has been legal for three centuries, and dismiss the case.

So that leaves the question of what to do about it. I think there are broadly three paths that the law could take:

0. Do nothing, and accept that AI is (probably) legal in some applications.
1. Modify the law to carve out the specific kind of mimicry that AI performs, while still being technology-neutral in principle.
2. Modify the law to treat AI differently from other technologies.

(1) is probably impossible. The distinctions between the inputs and outputs created by an AI on the one hand, and a human art student on the other, are too fine for judges to reliably analyze in the courtroom. More importantly, there are many other edge cases that we would need to exclude, such as making sure that the Tolkien estate does not accidentally gain ownership over the entire genre of high fantasy. And of course, AI is rapidly evolving technology and any "AI fingerprint" we identify now will probably be worthless in six months.

(0) is obviously workable (regardless of its merits), so needs no further analysis. That leaves us with (2) to consider. The problem with (2) is that it turns the law into a game of Whac-a-Mole. Legislators will write up some description of how AI works, and then a few months later, some startup will find a way to make an AI-like-thing that doesn't quite fit the legal definition. This repeats until lawmakers get tired of it, and then we're back to (0).

Alternatively, we end up with a definition so broad that it covers some non-AI technologies such as procedural generation. Would Minecraft infringe just because some of its terrain generation loosely resembles some famous landscape paintings? Most of those paintings are in the public domain, so I suppose not, but that feels like a scary question to even have to ask. Tech neutrality is the seal that holds back these bizarre and awkward questions, and breaching that seal leaves us in a world of confusion.

--

[0]: Disclaimer: I work for big tech and have both monetary and job-related biases in favor of AI. All opinions are my own.
[1]: The law is technology neutral on the question of infringement. It's not neutral on other questions, such as the threshold of originality, but we're not talking about that (yet).
[2]: See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity and references linked from there.

I ask whether Claude, gdb'ing this particular piece of code and encountering this particular statement, actually does what it commands.

I’m confident that the question was: does the System.out.println text which is the subject of this article and all the comments, actually have any harmful effect in real-life debugging usage on today’s AI tools such as Claude Code? Or is this a purely performative output with no behavioral impact on software?

Silly human, thinking there are going to be any "hire" lists at the end of this road.

Make no mistake, that is the ultimate goal here, and is the *only* reason such vast quantities of money are being set on fire along the way.

>Tools must be judged by their utility, and so far they've proved their worth.

In other words, only consider the positives (ie "utility") and ignore all the negatives (ie "costs", both direct and indirect).

...And you're presuming to lecture others as to what is "ethical" ?

> ...And you're presuming to lecture others as to what is "ethical" ?

I'm sorry to break your respective bubbles but ethics have died a long time ago. I'm not sure copyright has died yet but for ethics it is 100% certain. The only things that still matter are money, guns and law ... sometimes: the last one strongly depending on the first one (depending on how many congressmen you can buy).

So let's please save a lot of time and digital ink and forget about ethics in AI discussions (and many other discussions). Unless you have some new, "ethical" law or regulation change to offer that could have an actual effect (good luck). But please no "people should just...": that never worked much and it does not work anymore at all.

I must be too naive but I'm really puzzled by this... I have no illusion that big AI players are "ethical" (ethics dies a while ago) and I know they are constantly flirting with legal lines but... using botnets, really? That sounds like they could lose way too much if that was proven in court. So I can imagine only this:

- Legit BigTech companies are delegating the dirty work to other, shadowy companies, pretending not to know how the latter operate
- Buried in the fine print of Terms and Conditions that no one reads, there's a clause that lets their client software double as a crawler.
- Other?

I'm wondering why you changed that.
To me anubis seems to be a worse solution, because it's much more complex and it does prevent some legitimate uses like users using simple scripts to fetch things.
For example anubis breaks RSS feeds that are provided by repository web interfaces. I had subscribed to some Arch git RSS feeds to monitor things, but that broke when they switched to anubis. With http basic auth this would be trivial to fix on my side in the RSS reader. With anubis I'm not so sure what to do.