Office Space

Basically, generative AI is killing open source — between slop contributions overwhelming maintainers, and the increasing feasibility of “clean-rooming” open source software to remove any obligations that private companies might otherwise have towards projects they depend on, and models cleaving traffic away from the documentation sites that get people involved.

Edit: If you have advice to make it clearer, I’m all ears. The “fractions of a penny” scene seems to perfectly capture the tech grift mentality, so I wanted to use it as the base. But I wanted to steer away from keeping it as “stealing”, because I don’t think copyright is a good basis for AI criticism. I think the fragmentation, noise, and distrust with which it infests our global collaboration infrastructure is the key part. But I really don’t know how to put that succinctly. We don’t really have many historical analogues for this, so there’s not a good shorthand.