I don’t think you can own ideas and concepts (outside of very specific circumstances) and I’m willing to die on this hill.
It would be hypocritical of me to change my mind just because piracy has become mainstream.
Didn’t realize the bar minimum to expect of a technology is not killing everyone. I guess if you lower the bar down to “not committing mass genocide” then it’s a lot easier to like every new tech regardless of any other standard.
As far as I see it LLMs and vibe coding will not prevent people from coding by hand, but they will enable people to steal far, far more easily than they ever could before.
If something built an Automatic Lock Picker 3000, able to pick any lock in the world at an 80% success rate otherwise just try again ad nauseam, then a lot more people will steal shit. People obviously could steal before the ALP3000’s release, but it wasn’t trivial for just anyone to do beforehand. Now it is.
In a similar vein I think LLMs trivialize the process by which people can “steal” concepts. It’s pretty damn demoralizing to know that you spent months to years working on a game, start promoting it, then someone with a Claude subscription can make their own clone of your game then sweep the rug out from under your feet. You’re trying to build a good and successful game, then you could easily have legitimate claims that you’re the clone since someone else released something similar several weeks before you did.
That’s not even to mention all of the code and other assets GenAI stole without consent in order to enable these vibe coders to steal your ideas your ideas.
No it’s not going to be the end of the world (but it sure will enable climate change) but it’s going to make things a lot worse for the people who actually care to craft something good while enabling the people who only care about having that thing done.
deafboy@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
MufinMcFlufin@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
I don’t disagree with that, but my point is more along the lines of enabling low effort “theft” (or if you so dislike that term then perhaps “cloning” would better suit your tastes) demoralizes and thereby disincentivizes high effort creative works, on top of making high effort work harder to find by muddying the waters they’re both going to be put in.
Suppose I put in the work to craft a brand new style of game. Something that nobody has ever seen before. I now have to promote it in order to get sales, but by promoting it vibe coders now see it and can make a low effort clone. Because these particular vibe coders are trying to cash in on the hype I’m trying to build up they don’t necessarily care about quality, only about getting a return on the investment I put in on designing my original idea, so they’re able to produce something functional and ship it within the weeks of time I’m trying to use to build up a fanbase.
Depending on the success of my marketing, how much time I dedicated to marketing before release, the technical requirements to execute my game design, etc then I might still have a successful game and people are able to recognize the difference in quality between my games and the slop cash grabs but I also might now be fighting an uphill battle against the reputation the slop cash grabs have created around my original game design. What incentive do I then have the next time I come up with a new idea for a game?
Getting back to reality, I think many people can recognize a cash grab when they see it but I still think that LLMs enabling them made the already existing visibility problem for indie devs so very much worse.
StupidBrotherInLaw@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Just an interesting tidbit: something similar to this already exists. It won’t pick any lock, but it makes picking the majority of locks dead simple.
MufinMcFlufin@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Yep, I’m familiar with it, though I’ve never used one before. I don’t think it’s as accessible right now as LLMs are, and to my knowledge I believe it’ll still struggle with security bits which I believe are fairly common.
I guess a better comparison would have been something like some “Pickless Lockpicking App”, to emphasize that such a thing would have similar accessibility to LLMs.