Much of the Western world’s economy is founded on the idea that knowledge work carries incredible value. This could be in the form of our designs, our rare knowledge, time-tested processes, or the novel materials that we develop.
Intellectual property law exists to protect the value of this work; nobody else may steal what we have spent our precious resources to create. Its scarcity begets its value. We’ve all grown up in a world where IP lawsuits are to be taken very seriously.
The barrier to entry used to be money: money which bought you people’s time, effort and talent in many forms. It wasn’t an efficient business (see: the end of organisations). Much of an organisation’s resources go into the business of simply running it.
The Reverse Robin Hood
People practically everywhere have rightly spent the last few years complaining about the global-scale IP theft that has fuelled our current LLM boom. The lawsuits which followed came predictably too late, and were reduced to restitution that looks paltry next to the valuations it was paid out of. They already got away with it.
Even worse, it was discovered that AI companies had been buying up millions of physical books, slicing off their spines and scanning them for training data, before unceremoniously dispatching them off to be pulped.
The Reverse Reverse Robin Hood
IP used to be safeguarded within an organisation. The world outside couldn’t access its hard-won treasures. And over the years, we were forced to pay an increasingly hefty price for the access we’d come to rely upon. Cory Doctorow’s term “enshittification” caught the public imagination as this pattern writ large, and consumer resentment began to foment.
But now, with AI, the value of all prior knowledge work is rapidly plummeting to zero. Today’s models are fully capable of decompiling, understanding and recomposing software. You can now generate new proposals, whether for drug trials, legal contracts or product designs.
Hell, OpenAI just released 722 new maths papers. On a Tuesday.
Already, one developer has rebuilt the bloated and overpriced Adobe suite and given it away for free. Others have decompiled classic console games to run in a web browser, and are now recombining them into custom mash-ups, for the sheer fun of it.
Perhaps it’s time for Revenge of the Nerds: “They enjoyed screwing us over—now it’s our turn to do the same.”
With the walls of IP (slowly and quietly) collapsing all around us, it seems we may all be headed back to square one.
Our IP has been reset.
