AI and the Destruction of the Creative Commons

Recorded: Sept. 20, 2026, noon

Original

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AI and the Destruction of the Creative Commons
September 13, 2026
AI
LLMs
OpenAI
Anthropic
Copyright
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Open Source

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.

The established equilibrium between software copyright protection and openness has been disrupted by the advent of artificial intelligence, prompting a critical examination of the foundational principles of digital sharing. Historically, the debate over software copyright has involved concepts like shareware and freeware, which were typically closed source, but this evolved into the concept of copyleft licenses such as the GPL and CC-SA. These licenses mandated that those utilizing free software must cascade those rights onto derivative works, emphasizing the importance of openness for the development of the modern internet and cloud infrastructure, which rely fundamentally on these shared resources.

The author contends that while discussions surrounding the environmental impact, cybersecurity risks, and misinformation posed by generative AI large language models are prevalent, there is a significant under-discussed consequence: the destruction of foundational openness. Large language models consume vast amounts of online content without regard for existing copyright or licensing obligations, a situation where legal enforcement of these obligations remains lacking. This mechanism has effectively broken the social contract, creating a scenario where creators are deterred from sharing their work out of fear that it might be polluted with malicious code, stolen material, or compromised by vulnerabilities.

This transformation fundamentally alters the incentives for creators and developers. The author suggests that making code publicly available, such as on platforms like GitHub, now carries a new liability, as AI can exploit coding errors or existing flaws more easily. Furthermore, the act of openness risks being distorted into a means of consolidating wealth and power without due credit for the labor involved. When code is shared openly, authors face the risk of being inundated with low-quality content generated by AI bots and inexperienced users, requiring time to triage this output rather than pursuing creative work.

In essence, AI shifts the paradigm of knowledge sharing from a public gift to a potential liability for the author. The history of openness over the past thirty-five years has fostered immense positive and empowering technological advancements. The author warns that if this trajectory continues unchecked, the result will be a digital dark age, suggesting that authors, coders, technologists, and artists must urgently collaborate to initiate a new digital renaissance to prevent a highly constrained and distorted future.