AI and the Destruction of the Creative Commons

人工智能与知识共享的毁灭

The balance of software copyright protection and openness has always been fraught with minutiae and detail that bores all but the most nerdy of pedants. Yet, through much effort and 40 years of debate we had reached an equilibrium. Now AI has thrown that out the window.

软件版权保护与开放性之间的平衡，一直以来都充斥着琐碎的细节，除了最书呆子的学究外，其他人对此都感到乏味。然而，经过多年的努力和四十年的争论，我们曾达成了一种平衡。如今，人工智能将这一切抛到了九霄云外。

When I was young I remember typing in BASIC programs from magazines into my Commodore 64 and later teaching myself REXX to write games for a BBS I ran. Without these “open” examples, I would never have been empowered to teach myself the basic tenets of programming. This was the era when the issue of whether software could be copyrighted was still being debated.

我年轻时记得曾将杂志上的 BASIC 程序输入到我的 Commodore 64 电脑中，后来又自学了 REXX 语言，为我运营的 BBS 编写游戏。如果没有这些“开放”的示例，我永远无法自学编程的基本原理。那是一个关于软件是否可以拥有版权的问题仍在争论中的时代。

First there were shareware and freeware, both closed source. Shareware was basically trial-ware; you could try the software and pay a modest fee to register to unlock the full version. Freeware was totally free, as in beer, but the source was not published. Most famously Doom was distributed as shareware, creating a huge market through word-of-mouth copying.

起初是共享软件（shareware）和免费软件（freeware），它们都是闭源的。共享软件基本上是试用软件；你可以试用该软件，并支付少量费用注册以解锁完整版本。免费软件则是完全免费的（如免费啤酒），但源代码并不公开。最著名的例子是《毁灭战士》（Doom），它以共享软件的形式分发，通过口碑传播创造了一个巨大的市场。

The forces on the side of openness pivoted and turned copyright onto itself, coining the term “copyleft” and creating licenses like GPL, MPL, and CC-SA, forcing those who wish to take advantage of software that was both free as in beer and free as in freedom to cascade those rights onto any further derivative works.

支持开放的力量转向并利用了版权制度本身，创造了“著佐权”（copyleft）一词，并制定了如 GPL、MPL 和 CC-SA 等许可证。这些许可证强制要求那些希望利用既“免费”（如啤酒）又“自由”（如言论自由）的软件的人，必须将这些权利延续到任何后续的衍生作品中。

The modern internet and cloud could not exist without free and open software. Every cloud service and the very backbone of the internet itself are derivative works standing on the shoulders of the previous generation’s giants. Without that openness, being online would likely look more like AOL and CompuServe, be hundreds of times more expensive, and be even more of an oligarchy than we have today.

没有自由和开源软件，现代互联网和云服务将不复存在。每一项云服务和互联网的骨干本身，都是站在前人巨匠肩膀上的衍生作品。如果没有这种开放性，在线体验很可能更像 AOL 和 CompuServe 的时代，成本会高出数百倍，且比今天更加寡头化。

While there is much discussion of the environmental destruction, the cybersecurity implications, and the misinformation being imposed on all of us by generative AI large language models, I haven’t seen nearly as much discussion of the destruction of our foundational openness. First, these LLMs are consuming everything they find online, without regard for copyright or license. Any derivative works may or may not reflect the licenses of the original creators and to date there seems to be no appetite for legal enforcement of these obligations.

虽然人们对生成式人工智能大语言模型所带来的环境破坏、网络安全隐患以及强加给我们的虚假信息进行了大量讨论，但我几乎没有看到关于我们基础开放性被破坏的讨论。首先，这些大语言模型正在吞噬它们在网上找到的一切，完全无视版权或许可证。任何衍生作品可能反映也可能不反映原始创作者的许可证，而迄今为止，似乎没有人愿意通过法律手段强制执行这些义务。

The social contract has been broken. I now have every incentive to not share my work, while also being wary of anything I find online that has been shared. If it hasn’t been polluted by slop code, it might have been poisoned with a malicious library, send data off to third parties, or itself be comprised of someone else’s stolen work, implicating me in the crime.

社会契约已经被打破。我现在有充分的理由不去分享我的作品，同时也对我在网上找到的任何分享内容保持警惕。如果它没有被垃圾代码污染，它可能已经被恶意库毒害，将数据发送给第三方，或者本身就是由他人窃取的作品组成，从而使我卷入犯罪。

If I make my code available, AI can be used to more easily discover vulnerabilities to abuse my coding errors, while if I keep my code closed it is far more difficult to find those same mistakes. If I publish my code on a public service like GitHub, I am likely to be inundated with pull requests generated by AI bots and inexperienced users, flooding me with mostly useless slop and taking all of my spare time away just triaging it.

如果我公开我的代码，人工智能可以更容易地发现漏洞来利用我的编码错误；而如果我保持代码闭源，发现这些错误则要困难得多。如果我在 GitHub 等公共服务上发布代码，我可能会被人工智能机器人和缺乏经验的用户生成的拉取请求（pull requests）淹没，充斥着大多无用的垃圾信息，耗尽我所有的业余时间去进行分类处理。

We all have our own set of ethical and moral guidelines, which are also lost once having been absorbed into the colossus. While existing licenses and agreements are imperfect, they have been shown to be enforceable in a court of law allowing me, the creator, power over my own creation. AI has turned sharing knowledge from a gift to the world, into a liability for the author.

我们每个人都有自己的一套伦理和道德准则，但一旦被吸收到这个庞然大物中，这些准则也就随之丧失了。虽然现有的许可证和协议并不完美，但事实证明它们在法庭上是可执行的，这使我作为创作者能够掌控自己的作品。人工智能将知识共享从给世界的礼物，变成了作者的负担。

The act of openness will be twisted and abused into creating more consolidated wealth and power, without respect or credit for those who did the real labour. This will have incredible negative consequences for the future. The past 35 years of openness have created nearly everything we benefit from online, which has transformed the world in a mostly positive and empowering way.

开放的行为将被扭曲和滥用，以创造更集中的财富和权力，而对那些真正付出劳动的人却缺乏尊重或认可。这将对未来产生难以置信的负面影响。过去 35 年的开放创造了我们在线受益的几乎所有事物，这些事物以一种积极且赋能的方式改变了世界。

We are entering a digital dark age. As authors, coders, technologists, and artists we must come together to introduce a new digital Renaissance before too much is lost. If we don’t, we’re likely to end up in some bizarrely twisted version of Fahrenheit 451.

我们正在进入一个数字黑暗时代。作为作者、程序员、技术专家和艺术家，我们必须团结起来，在失去太多之前开启一场新的数字文艺复兴。如果我们不这样做，我们很可能会陷入某种怪异扭曲的《华氏 451 度》版本中。