Well, if thanks to this we finally get open office to figure whatever tricks MS used to get documents to render fully correctly ONLY in office, consider me in.

Yeah, why would you waste time with these instead of Gimp, OpenOffice, etc? Except for the clicks.

It's very obviously better to have open tools than closed ones. This whole screeching about slop is both incredibly tiresome and irrational in the extreme. These are new tools that make software development easier, people are making useful things with them, and they're helping people move off proprietary software. That's obviously a net positive.

If you don't like the tools people are using go ahead and make something comparable by hand, except we both know that you can't. So, you're adding nothing constructive to the discussion here.

I don't understand why anyone is interested in using these. They simply look like the real thing. There is nothing indicating they work remotely the same under the hood.

If you were to generate a bug for bug copy that would be one thing, this is just a doppelganger.

Were it made with Ai or not, its just not something that has any real value.

It is funny though. Microsoft being undermined by the very thing they’re using to undermine working class people.

Tbf they're replacing other vibecoded slopware... Can't be much worse than what it's going after - and at least it's free.

I think they'd eat their own dogfood?

So who’s going to go ahead and reverse engineer drop in replacements for all the proprietary tech that keeps these oligarch money engines alive on consumer and business markets for professional software protected by giant moats of development work?

From how I see the situation: same people as before: nobody.

I gladly welcome this AI slop. It doesn’t hurt us. Actually the opposite. This shit is a thorn in the side of the worst companies. Particularly, companies that are also shoving AI down our throats. Let’s shove a little AI down their throats for once, huh?

Pirating Adobe products was common practice for poor uni students, or occasional users that didn't want to pay exorbitant rates to fix an image here and there. Adobe made that much more difficult. Then you have us Australians that have been getting charged well above the US retail price for years; at one point it was cheaper to fly to America and buy a physical copy.

These slop apps will absolutely let people go back to doing that, and get back at Adobe for overcharging, because the open source tools either don't work with the file formats required, or they just don't cut it. I use LibreOffice & GIMP and they're great, I love them. However, I'm not a graphic designer, and tools like Photoshop leave GIMP in the dust for professional work.

We still don't have a good alternative for prepress production media. I've seen some workarounds, but Adobe is the only actively developed option feature complete for this use case. Mostly because the chances that prepress workers and offset printer operators are also FOSS fiends and developers abysmally low. Prepress is such a small industry too since most people don't really care if their print media looks like shit

30 years after switching to Linux, I still have to use Photoshop because the gimp is still trash.

I played with PhotoCraft, it launches on less than a second, and while still missing features and isn't even a 1.0 release yet, it's better than the gimp already.

And it opened all my psds perfectly.

AI, fucked by the very things its copied off of. If AI companies don't get in trouble, neither should these clones/forks.

Same with pirating content. People only pirate because costs have continuously rose. Otherwise, if it were affordable, no one would need to pirate.

looks inside

slop

To be fair you'd get more or less the same result if you looked inside any modern microsoft product, and they'd ask you to pay for the privilege on top...

(Of course replacing slop with different flavour slop, even if it's cheaper, doesn't accomplish much; better to use properly developed software like LibreOffice.)

No I haven't tried any of these 12 apps, I am perfectly happy with Gimp, affinity photo and LibreOffice. I posted this because for one, the opensource community three days ago had a fervent conversation about photocraft, the same developer. Secondly, as written in the rules of the community it says "feel free to ask questions and share news, and interesting stuff."

I am not promoting anything AI, in fact I hate the direction it is going in and the threat it poses to real developers. That said, there is clearly a plenty of schadenfreude that comes from this, nobody can't deny its sweet to extend the middle finger to these megacorps.

Not sure where you get the idea that I posted this as a marketing ploy reselling genAI tokens?

The second twitter one is infuriating

"Come on, y'all know this" is the best they could come up with to argue that their slopware is better than these long established huge open source projects that have been worked on for decades as opposed to a week

I’ve used the photoshop clone, I’m not a digital artist so I don’t really know much, but it worked ok. I’m sure with time it’ll get better. I’m also using the word craft one and this one works no issues at all. Also on this one I don’t really do a lot of docs but I did some stuff on it and it worked fine

I'm an IP attorney. You don't have copyright over the thing you created with AI as you describe it. Copyright applies only to a minimally original expression by a human at this time.

In broad terms this is already covered.

If you made an exact clone of Photoshop by hand you'd get sued into oblivion, and that would be effective because of the barrier to entry ( in time and resources ) you'd need to get to that point.

Meaning you'd be betting all that upfront effort/resource on the a major corporation either not caring, or not being able to mount a reasonable litigation strategy.

Not many actors would be willing to risk that.

The difference here is that the barrier is now much lower and it tangles up a whole bunch of other potential issues around the legality of vibe code.

Regardless of how it shakes out it will almost certainly be a set of rules that only really apply to the peasants.

"If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class.”

I do think some implications not many people think about is how companies will combat this. Of course there's copyright and patents, though I'm not sure how all that will pan out.

A more impactful implication, in my mind, is this will create a larger push to move applications and/or games to be online only and not distribute any version of the application; since, as far what I can imagine, that is the best and potentially only way to combat this. Just don't give people the compiled programs. Which sucks.

This largely stemmed from modding games together and expanding the capabilities of modding, but I think this may seriously harm modding by preventing it from even happening on new games, which does scare me as a modder.

Granted, we sorta had this already - many Godot and Unity games were relatively easy to decompile, and many popular games are still released using those engines. Though, most, if not all, triple A games have moved away from Unity, if there even were that many to begin with. And that may be because of the fact that Unity games are easy to decompile.

This is all guessing, but I do suspect you'll see the largest impacts of this in triple A games and large consumer-oriented software; commercial-only software may not see as much impact due to security, liability, and licensing implications of using (potentially unsupported) clones.

Doesn't that make software essentially worthless?

Closed source will be worthless. Open source has already been out in the open and has been amazing. All software will become what it should have been all along and like Stalman wanted it, free and open source.

Yes. It makes software worthless. People doubt these things but it's done and set in stone already.

Hmmm... So if someone used CoPilot, which is owned and operated by Microsoft, to copy something Microsoft owns, like Office, does that mean that no copyright infringement actually occurred, because Microsoft can't infringe on their own copyright?

It seems there may even be an argument that an agent of Microsoft willingly released that code.

ArtCraft isn't a Photshop clone in any sense of the word and it looks like no onr actually tried it. It's a bunch of cobbled together AI tools. "Photoshop" is nothibg but AI prompted image generation and in-painting with Nano Banana (or other providers). It's not reverse engineered photoshop. I spent parts of saturday getting it to work on local modals using Claude like apparently God intended, since I was pissed off that it was a rented service like everthing else in this fucking shit industry.

ArtCraft is an obviously hastily made piece of software that is intended to take Adobe Creative Cloud customers over to their cloud service.

If you want a Photoshop alternative you have Gimp and Krita. Those are well made pieces of software that isn't vibe coded over a weekend.

I’m guessing they believe it meets the OSI definition of open source. Essentially that the code is licensed for redistribution.

Does this have tons of meaningless boilerplate and hard to follow call chains? I have read part of the source, and what I’ve seen looks pretty well organized, but if that is how you think the current models write code, you’ve missed many months.

Edit: Just clarified a single sentence.

But what if I deliberately make it hard to read, like mangling it or minifying it?

That you would not distribute the original source code, right? That is A source code, not THE. The generated source code by Claude Ai is THE new source code, there is no higher code generated from it. It is the implementation, the original source. It has an Open Source license. They do not mangle it and distribute a manipulated mangled version and hide the original source code.

What you criticize is the quality of code. But that is not a definition if something is Open Source. By all definitions, the distribution of original source code and a license compatible with Open Source is basically what Open Source means.

Only having the source code distributed is not open source in spirit.

Correct. It requires a license compatible with Open Source, which it is in this case.

“Opening” the source code of slop, with tons of meaningless boilerplates, non-logical paths and flows, heavily coupled modules and functions, thousand-line long functions, achieves none of the purpose of the intention.

This is irrelevant for a definition to be Open Source or not.

Then the mangled version you released is open sourced. The phrase “open source” isn’t really that complicated. The word that’s complicated is “free.” You didn’t release your software freely. Your software is still caged behind a transpilation, unfree.

FOSS communities probably won't form around most of these projects, as you said. Assuming the software can be managed by a few people with LLMs, likely local in the very near future, it's quite possible that plenty end users who didn't use FOSS before would jump on these instead of paying money to MS or Adobe. That in itself is a huge win for the majority. Depriving MS from revenue that is. Then for community FOSS, this has potentially significant positive implications about our biggest challenge - dealing with proprietary formats and proprietary blobs. This could mean perfect .doc/.docx compatibility in LibreOffice. It could mean a perfectly working nouveau driver for NVIDIA GPUs. How about fixing the tons of bugs we workaround in motherboard firmware. Or fixing that corner case in Wine so it can run your fav obscure game. Or reverse-engineering communication protocol of cloud-connected IoT to integrate it in Home Assistant. Etc. Etc.

In short: FOSS is a social activity. Assuming this method can produce very good source from binaries, that itself won't create FOSS communities, but FOSS communities can use it to significantly improve the FOSS they care about.

and proof that frontier LLMs can reverse engineer / clone well (...duh), this is a big pile of nothing.

I don't think this is proof.

It's proof that they can make something that appears to reverse engineer / clone well.

To really know, we'd need to use it as daily drivers long enough to give it a good test. And it hasn't been out long enough for that.

From previous experience we know that LLMs are great at confidently producing plausible output with problems that are hard to detect and fix without expert level knowledge and experience.

Sloppy sauce

LibreOffice is used since years in Spain in companies and administrations

He already released cadcraft, I haven't tried it yet

Let’s reverse engineer every “smart car” software and disable all connectivity.

You'd still need hardware access to install that software, presumably? Surely it would break some sort of warrant. Also, as much as I despise connectivity in smart cars, I'm not sure I'm comfortable having AI code injected into my car. Then again, the car companies are surely already injecting AI slop into every single new car these days... Maybe it's not such a bad idea after all. It's rough, but we gotta fight slop with slop.

Anything with AI in it gets clicks.

most people do not even know that they exist to begin with.

If this came to parity with any of the billion dollar apps it’s trying to replace we would have new laws banning it somehow within a month

Yeah, ArtCraft is very poorly made. It's a bunch of AI tools jumbled together and is basic at best. It also buys into the entire Tech feudalism bullshit by being a cloud service.

You can prey LaTeX from my cold dead hands....

I think youre right, theyll try. Though for 'managing', I don't think that will matter. They don't really need to.

The point of being a legislative giant is that your lawyers use whatever angle will work on a technicality for whatever profit goal you're trying to achieve. Often throwing bullshit arguments one after another, to drown your opposition in paperwork, burden of proof or legal fees until they're forced to cave just to minimise losses.

Companies are abstract entities that don't have any actual principles of copyright to be hypocritical about, and the principles of the many people within them are scarcely relevant at scale as their jobs are dependant on compliance to rules imposed above them.

The owners of these companies won't have to manage anything, because they're insulated from consequence and the company is treated as a separate entity, for some reason.

Yeah man but did you see the "Turn it into a podcast" button???? Great stuff!

Spoiler alert: They won't.

Good software doesn't grow on AI. He's going to maintain all this, and keep up rapport before people even want to trust it. Even then, most professionals don't learn on 3rd party stuff cause that detracts from the process itself. Adobe isn't standard because it's expensive or even well made, it's because everyone uses it. This guy's stuff it a toy, it probably "works" but I doubt it's making anyone any money.

Tried the PowerPoint clone. Opened our corporate template and hit present. Presentation mode runs sluggish as hell. OnlyOffice is way smoother by comparison.

Uninstalled it right away.

You wouldn't download a car?