I think it’s worth reminding people where the general left wing FOSS conscious was before AI. Every week we’d see an article that was the antithesis of ownership, from celebrating the end of Disney copyright to loopholes in trademarks and the like, it was the heart of a lot of content.
There is a fantastic foreword foreword in The Picture of Dorian Gray from Oscar Wilde about art for art’s sake that I think about a lot, which really boils down to a litany for art for art’s sake, (and by extension education for education’s sake), that is overlooked in favour of being for the sake of profit or capital.
I am of the opinion that in response to AI, we have drifted from a left wing overall movement that rejected ownership in this way, to a protective, defensive style that is largely that stance of a neo-luddide, without any awareness of what ended that era, which was an insufficient boycott and misspent manpower.
I want to say, I’m someone who is overall against AI, I’m not sure how to prove it, any any time I try to explain points like this, people claim AI wrote my comment.
AI is evil, and has enormous destructive capacity, but making the walled garden of large capitalist software irrelevant in favour of FOSS solutions is a huge win, even in regards to being a result of AI.
I’d rather the water, electrical and creative debt that is incurred by AI is paid off by programs like this, than see companies like Adobe operate, particularly considering they literally changed their TOS to train their internal AI on user data.
Either way, your data is being used to train AI, regardless of if you use Photoshop or Photocraft, but one is FOSS, and openly made with that data.
it’s very simple to understand: the companies stole everything and charge for access to it, and this is wrong. There is no contradiction with pre-llm leftist thought.
I’m 99.9% sure that Adobe and all other big tech companies are using LLMs to generate code. So it’s slop either way, but one is at least free and open source
Of course the established alternatives like Krita, Gimp, Inkscape and others are even better, no questions there
Lemme be the first to say fuck Adobe and I’ve been sailing the high seas for their products since CS4, and it pains me to say this but Krita and GIMP have a long way to go before they can match the range of functionality on Photoshop.
I genuinely really hope an open source project comes along to blow Photoshop out of the water but as someone who has been using it for 24 years, no one else is quite there yet.
I can confirm for Microsoft. AI is pushed on us so hard that we must use it everywhere, even for those processes that can be automated with a script (I.e.deterministic).
There’s an annoying popup ive had to deal with at work where it prompts to have AI summarize my document or some such. Takes up only ~5% of the viewing pane, but needs to be manually exited out of for EVERY document opened.
Air can simplify the agent part, but not the four-machine SSH part. At least not yet.
Inside IntelliJ, Air can give you a single place to run Gemini CLI, Codex, Claude Agent, and Junie, including running agents in parallel (you can also add other ACP-compatible agents).
So your workflow could be:
In the Air prompt window, use Claude for a complex refactoring
In the same window, use Codex for a separate implementation task
In the same window, use Gemini for another task or review
…
Become more dependent on the AI, atrophy gradually
Think less, pay more
Pay more, think less
Pay more
Depend more
Pay more
Give everything to those who run DataCenters or have unlimited access to LLM/AI
Become homeless
Devalue and obliterate your art and history
Devalue and obliterate human art and history
Depend more
Depend more
Depend more
Become biomass
Die
…so infinitely much is getting devalued, dehumanized, ruined…
…I’ve been a developer for more than 20 years now…
…such an ineffably sorrowful time to live…
Source (JetBrains Air: Building a System of Products for Agentic Software Development…) [comments]
As i recall, the claim for the entire suite was that it was “clean-room”. No code stolen… unless you are concerned that the entire model is the result of stolen code… in which case we are in agreement.
Can you point me to a model, capable of writing useful code, where the 100% of the codebase used to train the model came from people who explicitly consented to their code being used to train a model? Or was it all scraped from anywhere any everywhere they could find it regardless of consent?
Aside from some very old models that were not that good, I don’t know of any recent LLM models that are not built on stolen properties, with complete disregard for any licensing term.
If you’re advocating on the behalf of the vibe coded adobe alternatives, you’re essentially saying “I support stealing from everyone”. Yes, I hate adobe, I say eat the rich, but dont exploit the poor in the meantime
no i don’t support stealing from everyone. it’s possible to endorse a certain type of action only in certain context. like i don’t think stealing from walmart is morally wrong, but i think stealing from a mom-and-pop corner shop definitely is.
it would be even better if stole from adobe without paying the ai companies, i.e. open weights models.
They were stolen from and they no longer have their property? Or someone else executed an idea they had faster with a different tool? Sorry all this liberal abuse of the word ‘stealing’ feels very 90s RIAA.
Yeah, go against adobe, I support you, but stay with the people. Dont use the big tech’s stealing machine. Dont incentivize big tech’s current fascist push of a product. AI is bad in so many ways, environmentally, ethically; taking away real people’s work, stealing other people’s work.
If you want to use this AI generated alternative of adobe because adobe is horrible, then I understand you, and that’s fine, if you remember that this isn’t perfect either.
This is a lesser evil, and we should seek out alternatives still. Hope there’s someone who isn’t discouraged by this project as its now been praised by literally everyone
Would you oppose this being done with locally run LLMs whose models are open weight (preferably open source) driven by clean energy? (You don’t need a data center to do inference.) Because I don’t oppose “stealing” information when its proletarians doing the “stealing”. E.g., I’ve “stolen” literally thousands of textbooks and papers with LibGen and Anna’s Archive and SciHub, and I will never ever ever feel guilty about that.
Because if your opposition is to increased corporate control, then I get your frustration. I’m absolutely against the corpos controlling… literally fucking anything, but unfortunately they do control the compute these days, so in the short term these are the conditions we have to plan around. So this seems like using the capitalists’ tools against them. It’s obviously not as good as taking the capitalists’ tools away from them, but it’s something.
If you want to use this AI generated alternative of adobe because adobe is horrible, then I understand you…
Actually I don’t plan on using this particular tool. I typically just use GIMP or Krita since I’m not a professional, and I still want to see those ecosystems succeed. If anything, I hope it will convince GIMP to give users choices for GIMP to work like Adobe. I’m speaking up because in some circumstances, I absolutely do not oppose using or creating vibe-coded software from a technical perspective.
I guess I was assuming how this project was made, as some people have pointed out about its “clean-room” method, but checking the GitHub, the main contributor is Claude’s llm, which grabs everything and anything.
I should probably think about how I feel about locally run llms, because its not massive polluting and disturbing data centers, but again, the models themselves are trained on something, and even though you can’t get “good” models without a lot of training data, it would still be unethical, atleast in these cases. Slightly off topic at the end but I guess that’s just my main concern here.
I can also understand the view point of llms being “using the capitalist’s tools against them”, and in some ways you’re right, but I still think we should be aware of what were using and what were doing instead of just praising it in the name of fighting back.
I myself will still not like generative AI, simply because of all the shit and more, but also how damaging it has been for the creative space
Yeah I’m not claiming that the models were trained ethically. Like they basically scraped the entire Internet, definitely including some data it’s unethical to include. Thus, “stealing” isn’t really the right framework. It’s violations of privacy or other rights.
What you get when you download an “AI” (really a LLM, since these things are not intelligent like humans, and we wouldn’t want them to be because otherwise they would have rights) model is basically a big set of numbers. IMO the question is: what are the consequences of using these numbers?
In my view, the best, but ultimately unconvincing argument against using these numbers is that they were generated by an unethical process, so using these specific numbers constitutes an endorsement of the process that created them. As an anti-capitalist, I fundamentally oppose almost every process that created almost every product I have ever used, simply by virtue of the fact that everything I have ever owned has been produced by private firms stealing proletarian labor. If I applied this principle consistently, I would simply starve to death and be completely marginalized and forgotten by capitalist society. Thus, I am willing, to some extent, to live in contradiction of the heuristic that we shouldn’t use products derived from unethical processes. In particular, I believe that local LLMs, despite their ethically sketchy training, have sufficient technical utility for users to offset the harm already incurred. So I think there is absolutely an argument to slow down training of LLM models, especially since I suspect that the system you build a model into is just as important as the LLM “black box” itself (e.g. Claude uses a Linux container and SymPy in the background)…but for users, I don’t believe the argument to stop inference, i.e. using the numbers, is as strong.
I myself will still not like generative AI, simply because of all the shit and more, but also how damaging it has been for the creative space
Honestly, yeah I really am not interested in using LLMs for creative purposes. I only ever use LLMs for technical work, and I really only want to listen to music and consume art arranged by sentient beings.
I would also like to add that “AI” capitalists, like all capitalists, have issues with consent. Their loud insistence that “AI” is inevitable is a propaganda campaign to manufacture your consent for the vile things they want to do to you. Consequently, as someone who uses LLMs in my work, I emphatically reject the inevitability of LLMs, and if someone says they don’t want to use LLMs, I completely respect that choice and won’t bother them about it ever again. My view is that for some people in technical professions, in particular high-information fields, LLMs are and will be incredibly helpful tools…but a lot of people are simply never going to use LLMs and should not be pressured to do so. And as a corollary, we shouldn’t structure our entire goddamn society around these tools.
The “generating” from already existing has a particle of a relatively explainable sense in it, unfortunately… to “de-copyright” it…
Simply put, AI has made it easier than ever to launder image copyright infringement…
That, in turn, is where AI is changing the game. Previously, content laundering was about fooling computers. Now, it may be able to fool humans.
The foundational principle is deceptively simple: copyright requires a human author…
Writing a detailed prompt is not enough.
The machines are producing at extraordinary speed. The law is moving slowly, but it is moving. The businesses that fare best will be those that understood the difference in time.
Even though the models are based on “fair use” of now unknown artists and people, now scrambled and reconstructed… which is all utterly awfully disrespectfully disgusting… indeed…
Also known as “AI-laundering”…
Create or fund a non-profit entity to create the datasets for you. The non-profit, research-oriented nature of these entities allows them to use copyrighted material more easily.
Then use this dataset to create commercial products, without offering any compensation for the use of copyrighted material.
Source (How Stability AI managed to get millions of copyrighted artworks without paying artists…)
I’m not saying adobe is good, I’m saying this adobe alternative is also bad. Like I guess photocraft and its suite is a lesser evil, but you can’t say this project is by and for the people when its, again, built by stolen works
I don’t want to incentivize using tools made through stealing other’s work then claiming it’s for the people
I think it’s worth reminding people where the general left wing FOSS conscious was before AI. Every week we’d see an article that was the antithesis of ownership, from celebrating the end of Disney copyright to loopholes in trademarks and the like, it was the heart of a lot of content.
There is a fantastic foreword foreword in The Picture of Dorian Gray from Oscar Wilde about art for art’s sake that I think about a lot, which really boils down to a litany for art for art’s sake, (and by extension education for education’s sake), that is overlooked in favour of being for the sake of profit or capital.
I am of the opinion that in response to AI, we have drifted from a left wing overall movement that rejected ownership in this way, to a protective, defensive style that is largely that stance of a neo-luddide, without any awareness of what ended that era, which was an insufficient boycott and misspent manpower.
I want to say, I’m someone who is overall against AI, I’m not sure how to prove it, any any time I try to explain points like this, people claim AI wrote my comment.
AI is evil, and has enormous destructive capacity, but making the walled garden of large capitalist software irrelevant in favour of FOSS solutions is a huge win, even in regards to being a result of AI.
I’d rather the water, electrical and creative debt that is incurred by AI is paid off by programs like this, than see companies like Adobe operate, particularly considering they literally changed their TOS to train their internal AI on user data.
Either way, your data is being used to train AI, regardless of if you use Photoshop or Photocraft, but one is FOSS, and openly made with that data.
it’s very simple to understand: the companies stole everything and charge for access to it, and this is wrong. There is no contradiction with pre-llm leftist thought.
I’m 99.9% sure that Adobe and all other big tech companies are using LLMs to generate code. So it’s slop either way, but one is at least free and open source
Of course the established alternatives like Krita, Gimp, Inkscape and others are even better, no questions there
Lemme be the first to say fuck Adobe and I’ve been sailing the high seas for their products since CS4, and it pains me to say this but Krita and GIMP have a long way to go before they can match the range of functionality on Photoshop.
I genuinely really hope an open source project comes along to blow Photoshop out of the water but as someone who has been using it for 24 years, no one else is quite there yet.
I can confirm for Microsoft. AI is pushed on us so hard that we must use it everywhere, even for those processes that can be automated with a script (I.e.deterministic).
Can confirm, at least for Adobe Acrobat.
There’s an annoying popup ive had to deal with at work where it prompts to have AI summarize my document or some such. Takes up only ~5% of the viewing pane, but needs to be manually exited out of for EVERY document opened.
Well, I was thinking about the Adobe devs using LLMs for “coding” their new updates, but yeah, them pushing GenAI onto the users is also a good point
As i recall, the claim for the entire suite was that it was “clean-room”. No code stolen… unless you are concerned that the entire model is the result of stolen code… in which case we are in agreement.
This is ArtCraft we’re talking about, right? The “Adobe” thing is just marketing. It’s just a bunch of AI tools sewn together.
Which model are they using in their product, how do we know it’s stolen?
Can you point me to a model, capable of writing useful code, where the 100% of the codebase used to train the model came from people who explicitly consented to their code being used to train a model? Or was it all scraped from anywhere any everywhere they could find it regardless of consent?
Photo editing apps like Photoshop do not use LLMs, they use ML image models
Aside from some very old models that were not that good, I don’t know of any recent LLM models that are not built on stolen properties, with complete disregard for any licensing term.
Most certainly the latter but if it’s used for open source then in not too mad about it
Edit. I also won’t be angry if AI eventually cures cancer. I’ll celebrate.
stealing from the people is wrong, but i support stealing from the bourgeoise.
If you’re advocating on the behalf of the vibe coded adobe alternatives, you’re essentially saying “I support stealing from everyone”. Yes, I hate adobe, I say eat the rich, but dont exploit the poor in the meantime
Won’t someone think of the copyright companies
That’s not what I said what xd
no i don’t support stealing from everyone. it’s possible to endorse a certain type of action only in certain context. like i don’t think stealing from walmart is morally wrong, but i think stealing from a mom-and-pop corner shop definitely is.
it would be even better if stole from adobe without paying the ai companies, i.e. open weights models.
They were stolen from and they no longer have their property? Or someone else executed an idea they had faster with a different tool? Sorry all this liberal abuse of the word ‘stealing’ feels very 90s RIAA.
You wouldn’t download a car
If I did download a car, which I would, I would also seed said car.
Stealing Adobe’s work is good, actually. Let’s steal Adobe’s everything!
Yeah, go against adobe, I support you, but stay with the people. Dont use the big tech’s stealing machine. Dont incentivize big tech’s current fascist push of a product. AI is bad in so many ways, environmentally, ethically; taking away real people’s work, stealing other people’s work.
If you want to use this AI generated alternative of adobe because adobe is horrible, then I understand you, and that’s fine, if you remember that this isn’t perfect either.
This is a lesser evil, and we should seek out alternatives still. Hope there’s someone who isn’t discouraged by this project as its now been praised by literally everyone
Would you oppose this being done with locally run LLMs whose models are open weight (preferably open source) driven by clean energy? (You don’t need a data center to do inference.) Because I don’t oppose “stealing” information when its proletarians doing the “stealing”. E.g., I’ve “stolen” literally thousands of textbooks and papers with LibGen and Anna’s Archive and SciHub, and I will never ever ever feel guilty about that.
Because if your opposition is to increased corporate control, then I get your frustration. I’m absolutely against the corpos controlling… literally fucking anything, but unfortunately they do control the compute these days, so in the short term these are the conditions we have to plan around. So this seems like using the capitalists’ tools against them. It’s obviously not as good as taking the capitalists’ tools away from them, but it’s something.
Actually I don’t plan on using this particular tool. I typically just use GIMP or Krita since I’m not a professional, and I still want to see those ecosystems succeed. If anything, I hope it will convince GIMP to give users choices for GIMP to work like Adobe. I’m speaking up because in some circumstances, I absolutely do not oppose using or creating vibe-coded software from a technical perspective.
I guess I was assuming how this project was made, as some people have pointed out about its “clean-room” method, but checking the GitHub, the main contributor is Claude’s llm, which grabs everything and anything.
I should probably think about how I feel about locally run llms, because its not massive polluting and disturbing data centers, but again, the models themselves are trained on something, and even though you can’t get “good” models without a lot of training data, it would still be unethical, atleast in these cases. Slightly off topic at the end but I guess that’s just my main concern here.
I can also understand the view point of llms being “using the capitalist’s tools against them”, and in some ways you’re right, but I still think we should be aware of what were using and what were doing instead of just praising it in the name of fighting back.
I myself will still not like generative AI, simply because of all the shit and more, but also how damaging it has been for the creative space
Yeah I’m not claiming that the models were trained ethically. Like they basically scraped the entire Internet, definitely including some data it’s unethical to include. Thus, “stealing” isn’t really the right framework. It’s violations of privacy or other rights.
What you get when you download an “AI” (really a LLM, since these things are not intelligent like humans, and we wouldn’t want them to be because otherwise they would have rights) model is basically a big set of numbers. IMO the question is: what are the consequences of using these numbers?
In my view, the best, but ultimately unconvincing argument against using these numbers is that they were generated by an unethical process, so using these specific numbers constitutes an endorsement of the process that created them. As an anti-capitalist, I fundamentally oppose almost every process that created almost every product I have ever used, simply by virtue of the fact that everything I have ever owned has been produced by private firms stealing proletarian labor. If I applied this principle consistently, I would simply starve to death and be completely marginalized and forgotten by capitalist society. Thus, I am willing, to some extent, to live in contradiction of the heuristic that we shouldn’t use products derived from unethical processes. In particular, I believe that local LLMs, despite their ethically sketchy training, have sufficient technical utility for users to offset the harm already incurred. So I think there is absolutely an argument to slow down training of LLM models, especially since I suspect that the system you build a model into is just as important as the LLM “black box” itself (e.g. Claude uses a Linux container and SymPy in the background)…but for users, I don’t believe the argument to stop inference, i.e. using the numbers, is as strong.
Honestly, yeah I really am not interested in using LLMs for creative purposes. I only ever use LLMs for technical work, and I really only want to listen to music and consume art arranged by sentient beings.
I would also like to add that “AI” capitalists, like all capitalists, have issues with consent. Their loud insistence that “AI” is inevitable is a propaganda campaign to manufacture your consent for the vile things they want to do to you. Consequently, as someone who uses LLMs in my work, I emphatically reject the inevitability of LLMs, and if someone says they don’t want to use LLMs, I completely respect that choice and won’t bother them about it ever again. My view is that for some people in technical professions, in particular high-information fields, LLMs are and will be incredibly helpful tools…but a lot of people are simply never going to use LLMs and should not be pressured to do so. And as a corollary, we shouldn’t structure our entire goddamn society around these tools.
The “generating” from already existing has a particle of a relatively explainable sense in it, unfortunately… to “de-copyright” it…
-–
-–
Even though the models are based on “fair use” of now unknown artists and people, now scrambled and reconstructed… which is all utterly awfully disrespectfully disgusting… indeed…
Also known as “AI-laundering”…
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_washing
I’m fairly certain that Adobe’s genAI offering is trained on licensed works.
I’m not saying adobe is good, I’m saying this adobe alternative is also bad. Like I guess photocraft and its suite is a lesser evil, but you can’t say this project is by and for the people when its, again, built by stolen works