Will AI trigger mass IP protectionism in software?

Question

One of the reasons AI is so "good" at software development is that it is trained on a snapshot of a large corpus of already solved software problems.In the future, wouldn't that make anyone who produces original code become more cautious of sharing it, being aware that it will just be fed into the "hive mind" and they'll never get any attribution or financial gain out of it?Or has the value of code, tools and software become so cheap it doesn't really matter anymore?

breckenedge · Accepted Answer

Yes, and not just code. It&rsquo;ll be Gnosticism all over again.

brookst · Answer

Did people stop writing recipes because it’s possible someone could appropriate it without attribution?
There are probably software developers (and chefs) driven entirely by recognition, and maybe they’ll keep their secrets secret.
But most people just don’t care. You want my amazing Mac and Cheese recipe (lifted and adapted from others, of course)? Fine.
I do not care if my name is all over it, I do not care if this is the one-in-a-billion case where you’re going to launch a restaurant chain and get rich on the back of my recipe. I am under no illusions that getting a restaurant chain off the ground and profitable is somehow easy, or that my recipe is the secret, irreplaceable piece.

samuelknight · Answer

There are already well-curated ways to protect digital IP (software, writing, music, other media) using the law. The harder problem is that the courts and legislatures are unlikely to extend these laws to protect machine generated media. That means as media becomes more machine generated it becomes more difficult to get protection on them.Software becoming cheap isn't really a bad thing for practitioners or the customer.