I am waging a silent rebellion against Amazon. The internet giant owns Goodreads, the leading service for tracking and cataloguing books, but is generally considered to be a poor steward of the platform, which is built on ageing technology. Frustrated with the user experience, I have used AI to vibe code my own Goodreads app, relegating the official one to mere plumbing in my private fiefdom. Take that, Amazon, for I have breached your terms of service!
I am not alone in my AI-enabled rebellion. It feels like I come across daily examples of people using AI to unofficially remix and remake software, whether that is creating a free copycat version of Adobe Photoshop, stripping the ads from their smart TV, mashing up video games or getting printers working on unsupported devices. It is all happening so quickly that lawyers don’t seem to have sprung into action to prevent it, though in some of the more egregious copyright-infringing cases, I would expect them to eventually.
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For my Goodreads app, Amazon probably doesn’t know, or even care, about what I am doing. I won’t bore you with the full technical details, but I have built the app in such a way that it avoids mass “scraping” Goodreads – systematically harvesting data from its website – which would be easy to detect and block. By treading lightly, my app aims to resemble a human user and fly under the radar.
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This connects to another ongoing battle over the interaction between AI-enabled individuals and companies: AI agents. The promise of an AI agent is that it can go out on to the internet and do things for you, like shopping or booking appointments. A flurry of examples has launched recently, including Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots, and companies have begun fighting back, with the likes of Amazon and JPMorgan Chase blocking Muse in high-profile pushbacks. Ironically, Meta sits on both sides of this battle: its automated tools blocked a protest account on Instagram after detecting activity from a Claude AI tool that “resembled automated bot traffic rather than an ordinary human browsing our systems”.
All of this comes down to a much older conundrum: where do your rights end and others’ begin? We have seen this play out every time a major new technology has hit the internet, and the results of a few historical examples might inform what happens next with AI. The first is a technology you probably don’t even think about anymore: your web browser.
In the late 1990s, the two main browsers were Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape’s Navigator. They worked slightly differently, and websites often instructed users to choose one over the other. As more browsers flourished, Microsoft pushed back, most notably in 2003 by blocking a competitor browser called Opera from accessing its MSN website, a popular destination at the time. In the end, browsers began misidentifying themselves to websites as other browsers in an effort to avoid this. Today, the right to use any browser you like has essentially won out against the right of websites to restrict them, although the rise of dedicated smartphone apps has put some of the power back in companies’ hands.
Nested within this battle was another: ad blockers. Once your browser has fetched the HTML code for a website, should you be obligated to display it all on your screen? As websites began displaying adverts to make money, people began downloading ad blocker add-ons to take back control of their browser. In response, companies developed new techniques for displaying ads, and ad blockers adjusted to remove them. Today there is a stalemate, with around 30 per cent of internet users blocking ads.
Finally, there is the grandfather of all internet copyright battles: Napster, a peer-to-peer file-sharing service that people used to illegally share music files. The companies mostly won this battle thanks to the rise of Spotify and other similar music streaming services – with an easy legal option, piracy faded away, the side effect being that most people generally don’t own the music they listen to anymore.
Internet users largely prevailed after the browser wars, ad blocking is at an impasse and streaming music seems to have benefitted the big corporations. What does all of this mean for AI?
The difference here is decentralisation: just as I have used AI to create my own Goodreads app, so could anyone else, each of them slightly different. Fully blocking them all without restricting normal human access would be a monumental task. There is a slight caveat here – most AI use is centralised through the big providers like OpenAI and Anthropic, and Amazon could theoretically ask them to build in a block against creating such software (or sue them), but I think that is unlikely. In any case, the availability of open-weight AI models that anyone can download and run on their own hardware makes that a losing battle.
I think it is most likely that we will be heading for a mix of all three. When it comes to remixing software, anything you do in the privacy of your own computer is going to be very hard to stop. Once you release it online, however, expect the lawyers to hunt you down. What we might see is the sharing of prompts that will get an AI to do the work for you in private – writing “recreate Photoshop, make no mistakes” isn’t something that any lawyer can stop – and there already exists a slightly more complicated version of this in the form of an instruction set for AI called Reverse Engineer Anything. As with browsers, individual choice will win, but this time the choices will be even more granular.
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For software that goes out into the wider internet, including AI agents, there will be two tiers. I expect Meta and Amazon will eventually come to some kind of agreement that allows Muse to shop for you. We are already seeing this with the development of a “personal agent protocol” that Meta is developing with businesses, including payment-processing services like Shopify and Stripe. For anyone using a commercial AI agent, what you can and can’t do will be decided by the companies, just as music streaming services dictate how you listen.
But why should you use a commercial AI agent? People like me with a little technical know-how and even less coding ability are already using AI to create their own independent agents. As AI gets better at writing software, the barrier to entry will get lower and lower. I think companies will just have to come to accept this, as they have done with ad blockers. In future, a decent percentage of users that look like humans will actually be custom-made bots in disguise, doing things solely for the benefit of their creator. These bots will be ungovernable, for good and for ill.
Further AI reading
- Anthropic has used its Claude AI model to solve a historical cryptography mystery. In the 1990s, the US National Security Agency (NSA) chose five specific mathematical objects called elliptic curves to serve as the basis for a cryptography standard used to generate digital signatures, now known as ECDSA. No one knew how these curves were chosen, but cryptography lore suggests that an NSA employee used a specific phrase, perhaps “Jerry deserves a raise”, to generate them. In fact, Claude was able to guess the specific mechanism – random number generation based on a timestamp – and regenerate the curves. The finding has no implications for cybersecurity, it merely answers a long-running question.
- Spotify says it has removed 50 million AI “slop and spam” tracks from recommendations on the platform, as part of a range of efforts to put “human artistry first”, according to the firm’s announcement. Other measures include a format for disclosing the use of AI in producing a track, or verifying an artist as human. Similarly, video game store Steam seems to have been overrun by AI games at its latest Next Fest demo event.
- The majority of people in the US say that AI is a bad thing for society, according to a new poll. The survey found that 57 per cent of people in the US share this view, while 42 per cent say it is good for society. I’m not quite sure what to make of these numbers, though, given “AI” can mean many different things to different people.
- A comment piece in Nature argues that AI models aren’t conscious and may not be in the future. I find these arguments fairly convincing – I already believe our current AI models are definitely not conscious – but I hesitate to make firmer predictions about what’s to come.