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.
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.
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.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
