Brandon Thomas, developer of ArtCraft, a suite of open-source creative tools meant to replicate Adobe applications for free, has now announced apps to replace Microsoft Office tools such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, respectively, named GridCraft, DeckCraft, and WordCraft, that are created with Claude. Thomas has shared his new clones to ArtCraft GitHub, making them free for all to download.
Lots of anti-AI sentiments in here and I get that, but I’d like to discuss the implications here, cause this is actually somewhat revolutionary.
If I can just take any software and reverse-engineer it or recreate it to a precision that is practically indistinguishable from the original (not saying it really is in this case, but for the sake of discussion) and I then have copyright over that copy, doesn’t that turn things on it’s head? Doesn’t that make software essentially worthless? Any software you sell someone, they can recreate and distribute for free, legally (presumably). I suppose we’ve yet to see if this will really turn out to be legal, but it’s hard to argue how this is illegal, I would say - how is this different than a human closely studying Microsoft Word and “simply” writing their own version of the same program?
I’m not sure if this is good or bad honestly, but it sure is interesting. Anyone else have thoughts around how this affects the worth of software?
AI isn’t revolutionary. It’s theft.
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.
I hope you’re right! Not that I think anyone can predict where this will lead at this time.
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 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.
But that only strengthens the argument that software is worthless now - I can copy existing software with AI and it is public domain basically is what you’re saying? So again, I can make a copy and legally distribute it. How can anyone earn money on software in that world?
People have been earning money on free and open source software for decades. Vibecoding is still a ton of work and not everyone has the time or the capacity to do it. Also, add the sentimental element too. Some people still support others even though the can make the same software.
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.
Yes but you wouldn’t actually need to make your clone very different for the copyright to be entirely different and then surely you wouldn’t get sued? And I think in this case, it is definitely sufficiently different, it’s a completely different tech stack and while the UI is similar, it’s probably not identical (I haven’t checked though). But also you can’t really copyright UI beyond the design itself, the functionality is free game as far as I understand.
Also worth remembering that different countries may have different stances on this. I’m curious how the EU might handle it.
Are you confident enough to bet 6-12 months of dev time and resources(possibly lawyer consultation fees) on that assumption ? because up until recently that’s what someone would need to do to find out.
It might be fine, but the threat of litigation is a part of the deterrent.
As with all of these things, it’s region specific.
However, game mechanic patents and copyrights exists and are litigated regularly.
It’s not just copyright. There are also patents to worry about. Those cover a specific process, like “click here, and the code selects all regions matching the same color (±5%)”. If you make an exact copy, surely you’ve violated some patents.
Sure, patent protections don’t last as long as copyright, and they can be defeated if you prove that it’s “obvious” or can show prior art, but it’s still an expensive legal battle against a megacorp. A vibe coder will likely fold at the first cease and desist.
There may never be a need to challenge Adobe’s patent lawyers in court.
This person used AI to clone commercial software, and then released the cloned software. Imagine instead someone developed an AI that could clone most commercial software…and then they simply published the AI open source. Now, anyone can download a tool that can clone software like Photoshop. They can clone Photoshop on their own computer, and that cloned copy never needs to be distributed anywhere.
Imagine Adobe trying to go after people that did that. It would be like trying to go after people that violate a patent for some device that they build in their garage, only use personally, and never sell. Could you in theory go after home tinkerers for patent infringement? Sure. But in practice it’s impossible to do at scale. Adobe will never even be able to find the people to sue.
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.
I did think about games too and I was about to use it as an example, but as software, I think games are actually much harder to legally copy and distribute, because so much of a game is its art assets. Sure you can copy the software no problem, but you can’t really copy the artistic expression of the game. You can’t copy Hades and keep the great illustrations and animations. You couldn’t keep the music or voice acting. All of that would be copyright infringement.
So games are actually somewhat legally protected still, I’d say, basically because they contain much more art and creativity than most other programs.
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.
You don’t even need to use Microsoft’s AI, you can use any AI you want that is capable enough for the task.
From a technical perspective, yes. I was looking at it from an angle where the company has released their own code via an agent they control. Sort of like calling Microsoft support and asking “hey, can you send me the source code for Office please?”
Yes. It makes software worthless. People doubt these things but it’s done and set in stone already.