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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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

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.

AI isn't revolutionary. It's theft.

Not going to use this one either, but I wish I could use LibreOffice.

It's really laggy for me on Windows. Particulary when interacting with the window, moving or resizing it. It's not smooth at all. As someone who uses everything windowed and moves windows around all the time, I tried using it, but it's unusable for me imo.

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.

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

The only satisfactory answer (to me) is that they don't feel urgency because they are entrenched without real competition.

It's where the lines intersects with how much it would cost to fix it and how significantly the bug impacts their revenue.

Its a matter of priority. If you are big contract to them and threaten to cancel over this bug then it would move faster.

Hmm, I see what you are going for but is "instructor" the proper term? To cut AI out of the picture, let's say the guy instead of paying for tokens paid a team of developers who did the work for him. What would you call the guy then? He does exactly the same amount and type of work in both cases, but obviously noone would call him "instructor".

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.

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

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

I think they'd eat their own dogfood?

Exactly. If I needed something more powerful than google docs then I'd download LibreOffice.

Anything with AI in it gets clicks.

True. I think it's greater value is being an AI middle finger to specific proprietary software. Especially if they incorporate and mainly focus on AI these days. As well as encourage it's use as a magical new tool.

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

LibreOffice is used since years in Spain in companies and administrations

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

Freecad doesn't click with me so I'll be so excited for an autocad-like project

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?

Just brand it fjord

You wouldn't download a car?

AI itself is theft

if you didnt call your truck ford or used patented stuff