This headline keeps being repeated by this one for profit CEO. Have you looked at the business model being “disrupted”? It’s ads and upsells for premade CSS widgets.
Yeah, I’mma call bullshit on this. No sane boss refers to 3 out of a team of 4 as “75%”. Also, everything in the article sounds like a marketing person looking for excuses for his business not working out.
I think 75% is apt here, tailwind is incredibly popular and most people wouldn’t know how many engineers they have. If it said “tailwind let 3 people go” I bet most (including me) would assume alright… tailwinds big they may have 30-50 people around… 3 is not too bad right?
I also disagree with this being entirely bullshit, I think he is right that the impact of AI has made the situation worse for him by impacting his most valuable sales funnel (their own documentation pages). But separately, it is a very populated space (UI libraries) with multiple options to compete with, some of which are rather well established and free - so it was an uphill battle to begin with.
What would be wrong with saying “3 of their 4 engineers”?
Nothing, if that was your point then I misunderstood what you were suggesting - also perfectly valid.
One can only be happy for those three lucky ones who no longer have to do those stupid monkey jobs at tailwind.
lol, somebody clearly didn’t read the article.
This is a wierd article. It was originally Googles fault, then it was AI and google is now sponsering the project?
Why would the revenue be down because AI when “it’s more popular than ever”?
“Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever,” he added. He then goes on to explain that “The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can’t afford to maintain the framework.”
People no longer need to look at their docs or their website because they ask AI how to do something with tailwind instead, so they no longer get to expose and advertise their product (tailwind plus).
Tailwind plus is a one time payment, not a subscription. If there are no new customers to buy it, their income is gone.
The claim is the as revenue they generate from their documentation site has been cut because LLM programming tools and AI-summaries on search engines reduce the number if people visiting the doc site
People who are discounting this because the author used sensational phrasing (75%) or because he was monetizing open source are ignoring the important part:
Traffic is down 40%
This is really bad news. All open source projects need attention in order to succeed.
“Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI
The real threat isn’t AI using open knowledge — it’s AI companies killing the projects that make knowledge free
https://www.citationneeded.news/free-and-open-access-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/
“Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI
I hate this take. “Open source” is not “public domain” or “free reign to do whatever the hell you want with no acknowlwdgement to the original creator.” Even the most permissive MIT license has terms that every single AI company shamelessly violate. All code derived from open source code need to at the very least reference the original author, so unless the AI can reliably and accurately cite where the code it generates came from, all AI generated code that gets incorporated into any publicly distributed software violates the license of every single open source project it has ever scraped.
That’s saying nothing about projects with copyleft licenses that place conditions on how the code can then be distributed. Can AI reliably avoid using information from those codebases when generating proprietary code? No? And that’s not a problem because?
I absolutely hate the hypocrisy that permeates the discourse around AI and copyright. Knocking off Studio Ghibli’s art style is apparently the worst atrocity you can commit but god forbid open source developers, most of whom are working for free, have similar complaints about how their work is used.
This is where many creators find themselves today, particularly in response to AI training. But the solutions they’re reaching for — more restrictive licenses, paywalls, or not publishing at all — risk destroying the very commons they originally set out to build.
Yeah blame the people getting exploited and not the people doing the exploiting why don’t you.
I don’t think there’s any disagreement (among you, me, and Molly White) about who the bad guys are.
The question is: What is an effective legal framework that focuses on the precise harms, doesn’t allow AI vendors to easily evade accountability, and doesn’t inflict widespread collateral damage?
Cory Doctorow has a pretty good stab at that: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/
The question is: What is an effective legal framework that focuses on the precise harms, doesn’t allow AI vendors to easily evade accountability, and doesn’t inflict widespread collateral damage?
This is entirely my opinion and I’m likely wrong about many things, but at minimum:
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The model has to be open source and freely downloadable, runnable, and copyleft, satisfying the distribution license requirements of copyleft source material (I’m willing to give a free pass to making it copyleft in general, as different copyleft licenses can have different and contradictory distribution license requirements, but IMO the leap from permissive to copyleft is the more important part). I suspect this alone will kill the AI bubble, because as soon as they can’t exclusively profit off it they won’t see AI as “the future” anymore.
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All training data needs to be freely downloadable and independently hosted by the AI creator. Goes without saying that only material you can legally copy and host on your own server can be used as training data. This solves the IP theft issue, as IMO if your work is licensed such that it can be redistributed in its entirety, it should logically also be okay to use it as training data. And if you can’t even legally host it on your own server, using it to train AI is off the table. And the independently hosted dataset (complete with metadata about where it came from) also serves as attribution, as you can then search the training data for creators.
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Pay server owners for use of their resources. If you’re scraping for AI you at the very least need to have a way for server owners to send you bills. And no content can be scraped from the original source more than once, see point 2.
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Either have a mechanism of tracking acknowledgement and accurately generating references along with the code, or if that’s too challenging, I’m personally also okay with a blanket policy where anything AI generated is public domain. The idea that you can use AI generated code derived from open source in your proprietary app, and can then sue anyone who has the audacity to copy your AI generated code, is ridiculous and unacceptable.
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One extremely loud developer has claimed repeatedly that their project’s recent difficulties are due to AI
OK
I’m seeing it quite a lot on mastodon where maintainers from big projects, like even curl, are expressing their grief and annoyance with ai generated bug reports wasting their time and overwhelming them. I don’t think it’s an isolated incident.
That’s completely different though. I’ve seen (legitimate) complaints that AI-generated reports are popping up and swamping projects while adding little to no value, but that’s not killing the projects. This article is solely about Tailwind, where the developer asserts that LLMs are responsible for people no longer reading the project’s documentation, which then is where the project directs users to its paid tiers and so (they allege) the project is suffering an unsustainable drop in subscriptions.
A project’s premium subscriptions drying up is different from a project’s developers being hit with time-wasting bug reports.
honestly with how popular and widespread tailwind is, every company using it should contribute something back
