How do you verify someone’s age reliably without identifying them? Unless there’s some standard around zero-knowledge proofs they’re implementing that I’m not aware of, they’re probably going to end up identifying everyone as part of this system, since kids will try and bypass it and parents will demand it be made more robust. Kids will still bypass it no matter what we do.

You don't. The law we're discussing doesn't verify someone's age. Please stop calling it an age verification law, because that's completely disingenuous FUD.

I don’t understand how video evidence from a mass surveillance network would have helped here. They found your car without it! Shouldn’t your issue be with the prosecutor, and thus your ineffective local government?

Otherwise, what’s to stop them from just telling you video evidence isn’t enough, because jurors have become accustom to thinking that video evidence can be faked by vindictive cops?

Really hate to say it, but I’ve stopped publishing my work too for this reason. I spend most of my time now building my own little software ark, and I aspire to no longer think of programming in the next few years. I feel like the creative economy in general will be unrecognizable in the near future, maybe nonexistent. I wonder what modes of collaboration on ideas might form in the next few years.

Here is what the purveyors of AI don't seem to realise. You can bend copyright law all you want in order to train your models on whatever you can grab, but in the absence of genuine protection of their creative work authors are simply not going to be publishing at all.

I think they see it all too well. They still think they can make bank today while it lasts, whatever comes after is some other shareholder's problem. And if we're talking about open source, killing it might be a positive side effect, they'll be ready to sell you a closed source alternative when you no longer have options.

I don't think we're going back to closed source. I think we're going back to guilds. Aka. closed knowledge.

Furthermore, if people not only stop publishing, but also take down already published works, it will create a moat around already existing Language Models

And the more they DDOS small websites — instead of respectfully scraping once — the more realistic my conspiracy theory looks.

People who are making stuff because they want to share it are still going to be publishing. And fighting to be noticed in an unending torrent of slop.

Without any material or immaterial benefits? And with one's work being ground up and turned into weights for the next version of the machine that's threatening one's employment?

I personally am sharing stuff because I want people to read my comics, and maybe join my crowdfunding campaigns.

If I could put everyone pushing all this AI crap into a meat grinder, I would.

> People who are making stuff because they want to share it are still going to be publishing.

Those people who do that are too few and far between to make a difference. The majority of open source devs aren't giving away the source without a license. That license is how they specify what they want in return.

> The majority of open source devs aren't giving away the source without a license.

100% of open source devs aren’t giving away the source without a license, since a licence—the grant of permissions for what is otherwise exclusive to author under the law—is what makes something open source.

> That license is how they specify what they want in return.

No, the license is how they legally give away permission to use material that is legally subjejct to their exclusive rights by virtue of creation. The license may be a contract license that, as you suggest, involves mutual exchange of value, but for many (especially permissive) open source licenses it is a gratuitous bounded grant of permission which has limits but does not involve giving something of value back to the creator.

The sad thing is I feel trapped on all sides of the debate, I wrote a book about LLMs and human creativity (spoiler Humans win for a long time) but I was going to do it as a blog series, instead I published https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GXCSY4W8 because I felt at least I might get a bit back for literally 100’s of hours of my life I poured into the book and my editor and friends who read and provided reviews.

And I push a lot of open source code including a ton for the SWGEmu project, but now I’m of mixed mind to stop pushing anything public. I can’t decide, am I talking out of both sides of my mouth, it’s a confusing time to navigate for sure.

Indeed sad, congrats on publishing your book though. I’ve certainly felt a bit of that same angst myself.

I think SWGEmu (cool project, just learned of it from you!) do represent some optimism though. Maybe these sorts of passion projects will take over the space?

> Really hate to say it, but I’ve stopped publishing my work too for this reason.

Me too; not that I've published a lot, but definitely more than most. That won't be happening anymore.

I don’t think people realize that these devices can even be used that way. I talk with people outside of the tech scene frequently, and they are routinely surprised when I tell them about this sort of capability. The ring doorbell Super Bowl commercial about finding lost dogs was a genuine shock to people! I think there’s a degree of visibility you need to get people’s attention on an issue, and it’s just difficult to see a doorbell as a threat for the average person.

You know how when you finish prompting some code generator to build something, and you look over what it has built and feel a sense of emptiness even if it does what you want? I think about what I wish the prototype looked like, and basically start describing details that I expect to exist (think longer versions of e.g. “this should be using our internal graph library, and I figure we can model this task as a traversal, how far have you strayed from this and why?”) and let the agent analyze what it built against my expectations. I’ve spent hours in conversation just “refining the context” this way, and then I channel that into an update process. I figure the prototype is just about proving out behavior, and this next phase is about refining it into the pieces I’ll use elsewhere. It’s kinda fun, I’d absolutely burn out a coworker if I grilled their PRs the way I roast AI contributions :P

I’m still pretty skeptical about OpenRouter. I have a client implemented for them so I can use them with my harnesses, but at the same time that client was generated and tested in an hour or so just like all of the other llm provider clients that I have. Using these services interchangeably by just swapping out clients has so far been working well for me. I think when it comes down to it, the only real inconvenience that they’re solving is where I put my credit card number. Is there something key that I’m missing about this service (besides it being a nexus of attention) that warrants this kind of investment? Or is this truly the bar for starting a successful AI company :P

I once had someone start _arguing with me_ about stuff using generative text on Slack or generated email replies. Not even to provide information, but just to write flat denials to even continue discussion on the subject. This person had a very distinctive writing style, and the shift to the AI writing style felt pretty obvious and uncanny.

I can’t describe how disturbing it was to realize that my voice suddenly no longer mattered, and that I was speaking to something that would never get tired of creatively dismissing my ideas without ever really addressing them. This behavior compounded and was unaddressed by anyone, no one I talked to seemed willing to try actually pushing back against it. Best solution they had was to have physical meetings w/ n>1 people on each side in the room. Trust plummeted, and eventually all meetings with that team were recorded and transcripted, and people started talking like they were on stage vs trying to solve shared problems. Work ground to a halt on even basic things, and I ended up leaving. This was on a pretty major project that has a name people here would know, but don’t ask me what!

This is honestly terrifying and a perfect example of where AI can end up leading us.

usually it takes lawyers for this!

Lucky find! Just picked up one of those for a build, ohhhh boy was that a painful purchase. Thank god for my fortune to work in tech.

It has been funny to watch people’s attitudes on copyright change ever since ChatGPT blew up. All I used to hear and experience was copyright used by corporations to shut down open source projects threatening their business models, but now it is the savior of the little guy who is a victim of flagrant corporate violators. In the background, the wealthy and powerful disregard all of this and seem to do whatever they want, and the little guy looks at millions of dollars in legal costs to defend themselves in either case. Costs that are increasingly a rounding error to their opposition as they continue to grow by exploiting a broken system, and the “little guy” now includes whole industries.

I feel like adversarial interoperability more than free market capitalism should have been the death knell for most of the negatives highlighted in this post. Everyone is still so determined to make money from mere ideas however that we still use 1700s law designed to protect book publishers to enable the existence of “businesses” so warped in valuation that they are now trillion dollar entities yet always face the existential threat of copy+paste. What if the more profound truth is that tech is beneficial to humanity but inherently worthless to sell, and that our present woe’s shape is determined by the antiquated institutions built service this illusion of value? In an inevitable future age of generative AI as an accessible technology, as opposed to a business model with a moat, what even is our goal for such institutions? What sorts of creativity do we want motivate, and what meaningful regulatory constraints even are there to begin with? I hope we figure it out soon, because IP will be impossible to enforce post-deglobalization in any case.

Think it's just the hypocrisy. Either copyright for everybody or copyright for nobody is much more defensible than the current state of affairs, where infringing copyright is legal as long as you're rich. Some random guy in Nebraska had to pay $250,000 to a music company for downloading one MP3, but OpenAI can download all music that ever existed and pay nothing. Meanwhile they prosecute "Anna" who did the exact same thing, because "Anna" isn't politically well-connected.

> where infringing copyright is legal as long as you're rich.

This isn’t true. A rich person and a poor person can train LLMs on copyrighted material in 2026. How they acquired those materials matters. Wealthy corporations hold no legal advantage in this space. For example, Anthropic recently settled for $1.5 billion due to acquiring books via piracy: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/technology/anthropic-sett...

My understanding is that an individual could likely pirate the same books without paying a dime (not due to differing legal standards but simply due to the fact it would be hard to identify them in many jurisdictions). In a practical sense it seems corporations are held to a higher standard in this regard.

The discrepancy is that some people equate training a model with piracy even though they are not the same thing. This is typically due to intellectual laziness (refusal to understand the differences) or willful misrepresentation (due to being an ideologically opposed to generative AI). No need to make such a mistake here though.

Of course it's not the same thing -- it's way worse.

The piracy comes first, and it's exactly the same thing. GenAI Corp. can't train models on illicitly obtained media before illicitly obtaining said media. And that very thing is already what private individuals got and get sued for millions over.

The GenAI Corp., having gotten away with that unpunished, then goes on to commit further violations by commercially exploiting the media with neither a license to do so, nor any intentions to pay the rights-holders for their use.

By the media conglomerates' own math, these GenAI companies should all be drowning in lawsuits over kazillions of bajillions of dollars.

> The piracy comes first, and it's exactly the same thing. GenAI Corp. can't train models on illicitly obtained media before illicitly obtaining said media.

My contention is that this is not happening. Most generative AI companies do not source their training data from illegal torrents and the few that do are currently paying for it. Further, I suspect the companies that get away with it today are _smaller_ not larger.

Training data is typically sourced by scraping the publicly available web.

> Of course it's not the same thing -- it's way worse.

Setting aside your own moral standards here, we should at least be able to agree that from a legal standpoint training a model is not copyright infringement.

> A rich person and a poor person can train LLMs on copyrighted material in 2026.

Updating an old adage for the modern age:

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.” ― Anatole France

As others have said, it's not a change. There's no inconsistency in applying copyright to protect people. When Gigantic Company uses copyright to bully the little guy who isn't doing anything to materially harm Gigantic Company, that's bad. When AI steals the little guy's work, that's bad. They're both bad. That's consistent. It's also obvious that it's consistent - i.e. I don't believe people making the "AI copyright complaints are funny" quip are being honest. I believe they are simply engaging in petty social politics.

>It has been funny to watch people’s attitudes on copyright change ever since ChatGPT blew up. All I used to hear and experience was copyright used by corporations to shut down open source projects threatening their business models, but now it is the savior of the little guy who is a victim of flagrant corporate violators.

That isn't a change. Both claims are true.

I agree. My point in short is that we seem to reflexively frame right and wrong on an axis defined by copyright, and somehow we’ve lost sight of the fact that the law itself is used much differently than we might otherwise want.

Technolibertarians confuse free market capitalism via copyright-enabled businesses as a viable strategy for individual freedom, and we find with time that only bastards win in a competition with loose rules and high stakes. Those concerned for the continued flourishing of human creativity in the face of LLMs confuse copyright as a means for small creators to have some ownership over their work, when it actually just seems to be a cudgel that can only be wielded by the wealthiest. Same losing fight, different flavor. I ask: why do we continue to allow “ownership of ideas” to underlie the moral basis of our conversations to begin with?

I think it's more that we see copyright as a necessary evil that can be used to defend our rights, but will be abused by the powerful, regardless.

To me, the biggest sin of cyberlibertarianism is the assumption that "cyberspace" is de facto another universe, separate from material reality, that doesn't need to be affected by the mundane and vulgar rules of "meatspace." John Barlow refers to "your governments" as if using a computer actually separates him from the state in some meaningful way, as if he has ascended beyond the flesh and now looks down upon the world as a being of pure Mind. But of course, "cyberspace" is just computers, servers, infrastructure using power and resources and thus is inextricably subject to government and systems of law. Zion was never an escape.

So yes, because cyberspace doesn't actually change the rules of the game, we have to play the game, crooked as it is, with the hand we're dealt. The legal pretense of ownership and copyright is all we have. If you want to abandon the idea of "ownership" altogether, then the wealthiest and most powerful still wind up controlling everything by virtue of their wealth and power. What do you suggest?

There’s a great moment from the Pirate Bay trial that captures this:

Lawyer: "When was the first time you met IRL?"

Peter Sunde: "We don't use the expression IRL. We say AFK."

Judge: "IRL?"

Lawyer: "In real life."

Peter Sunde: "We don't like that expression. We say AFK — Away From Keyboard. We think that the internet is for real."

— Peter Sunde, The Pirate Bay trial (as shown in TPB AFK)

TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard; Directed by Simon Klose (2013).

https://archive.org/details/TpbAfkThePirateBayAwayFromKeyboa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPB_AFK

The whole thing just shows a huge lack of imagination, at least for something which is supposedly a 'founding document'. Barlow's "cyberspace" is for irrelevant shit like furry larping or talking about the latest Deep Space 9. Its not a place where you do banking (or even watch DS9).

> John Barlow refers to "your governments" as if using a computer actually separates him from the state in some meaningful way, as if he has ascended beyond the flesh and now looks down upon the world as a being of pure Mind. But of course, "cyberspace" is just computers, servers, infrastructure using power and resources and thus is inextricably subject to government and systems of law. Zion was never an escape.

I don't understand what you're trying to say here, is it that "cyberspace" couldn't exist as anything "real" because governments can just shut down servers? That's why you can't buy drugs and credit card numbers online anymore, right? Sarcasm aside, you seem to be using the fallibility of the current-popular physical layer to dismiss the otherwise separate tangible "space" that does seem to exist when lots of people can communicate fluidly with each other across vast distances. Or is your critique centered on the ability of "cyberspace" to go beyond just communication and serve as a space one can actually "live" in?

> The legal pretense of ownership and copyright is all we have. If you want to abandon the idea of "ownership" altogether, then the wealthiest and most powerful still wind up controlling everything by virtue of their wealth and power.

Limiting abandonment of "ownership" to only "copyright" and IP generally, what do you propose the wealthy would control that would allow them to replicate present circumstances in "cyberspace"? The best I can think of would be communications infrastructure, and they didn't build that by themselves (at least in the US) to begin with.

For example, why would TikTok continue to be usable as a brainrot generator & propaganda tool when content is necessarily separate from the algorithm and presentation layers? Current bastards exploit their centralized control based on this house of cards ownership structure. Nothing is practically stopping users from cloning the contents from the cdn and writing a new frontend besides legal threats. This is true of almost every tech business that exists, and many of them themselves exploited this asymmetry during their founding. They exist because billionaires use the legal system to scare individual upstarts from threatening their business model.

The Luddites were rational and correct.

Probably. But not helpful.

Being rational and correct is a low bar, it is likely that all sides of any given debate a rational and correct to some extent. Someone dumping their entire life savings into a casino can be said to be rational and correct if the person doing it genuinely prioritises short term pleasure enough - still a stupid thing to do.

Why do you think we're all better off?

The reasons that jump out at me are that, as a society, we're setting up to produce a more stuff with less effort, provide higher quality advice to everyone at an absurdly low cost, revolutionise research and it looks like we're going to be able to get a step-change improvement in the quality of economic management which is huge in and of itself. The wins seem like they're going to be big.

> we're setting up to produce a more stuff with less effort

According to Jevon's paradox[0], this would lead to more consumption of resources. We're already straining at the limits of the Earth. Depletion and collapse won't be good for anyone.

> provide higher quality advice to everyone at an absurdly low cost

Given every LLM's propensity to hallucinate, the only quality advice is that which can be followed back to a human expert-vetted source. But we already have people who don't check sources and get bad advice.

> revolutionise research

Maybe, but AI is also being used in a mass spread of misinformation.

> a step-change improvement in the quality of economic management

I don't know exactly what you mean by this, but from what I'm seeing so far, this looks like it will massively increase wealth disparity, which is bad for most people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Mythos is good for cybersecurity simply because now executives can’t just tell people that only superhackers can break their stuff, as people wouldn’t believe them now anyways.

Infosec for decades has been 99% “hey I found some low-hanging fruit” only to get treated like a liability by the company you report it to, if you got acknowledgment at all. Because of Mythos though, now Artificial Superhumans can find these same vulns, and anyone could be running such an intelligence! Even better, the rich untouchable people operating this particular Artificial Superhuman can’t just be suppressed or ignored by the other set of rich untouchable people that have routinely not cared in the past. So long as it makes anthropic money, maybe we’ll actually see actual improvements in security!

I don't see that it makes much difference until we know the distribution of issues that Mythos finds and how reliably it discovers them? Vulns from inspection are discovered via a stochastic process of someone looking at the code, knowing about bug classes and paying sufficient attention to notice them. That's still the case.

IMHO the main thing thats interesting about AI assisted bug hunting is that it changes the balance of power from people who had a lot of free time & attention to the state and big business, who have money and frontier model access. It's a broadly "conservative" development in the sense that it distributes more power to groups who've already got it.

Waiting for the cyber "proxy wars" where state A equips deniable groups x, y with frontier access to undermine state B.

My point is less about Mythos specifically, more what it represents to the general public. “Mythos” has broken through and started gaining popular mindshare like “ChatGPT” did a few years ago. It now becomes hard to (falsely) claim that fixing basic flaws isn’t a priority, because now that everyone knows that it’s probably easier to hack stuff than it was in the past.

If you only rely only on stecurity through obscurity (eg attackers not having the source code) you gonna have a bad time. And even if your source code is not available, you can make a good guess about their dependencies. Find a vulnerability there and chances are your software is also vulnerable.

Hi, security professional here! A lot of the time, we don't need it.

The "open source movement" has proven reasonably effective over the past few decades.

It’s good enough to find one known function from libc in programs memory to mount the attack. Moreover, there are automated methods how to leak pointers to functions, etc., without having access to the binary itself.

LLMs are very good at reverse engineering binaries. You just have to convince them you're doing defensive security not offensive so they comply.

And state actor LLMs probably don't need convincing