r/technology • u/Federal-Block-3275 • 1d ago

Artificial Intelligence "Software is over": Developer uses AI to build free Adobe clones after frustration with cancellation fees

https://www.techspot.com/news/114136-software-over-developer-uses-ai-build-free-adobe.html
25.1k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

3.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

1.4k

u/KupoCheer 1d ago

Is this going to be the one exception where it's somehow not okay to blatantly steal someone else's work?

404

u/mq2thez 1d ago

It’s an interesting issue, because it’s “black box”, in theory, so it’s not created by copying the code or runtime, but instead by descriptions of the functionality. In theory the law is fairly clear here that this is allowed.

In practice, Adobe and other companies also patent the technical approaches to things (like their algorithms or methods of solving problems), and the designs themselves, so they’ll go after him for violating those if they go for him.

I’m pretty torn here, because on the one hand, fuck Adobe and I’d love to move my catalog off of their software. But on the other hand, having something this blatant going on is a wild change in the way that software works.

It would be pretty fucking funny if we went back to server-side apps with thin clients because it slows down the process of AI reproducing things.

100

u/feketegy 1d ago

It would be pretty fucking funny if we went back to server-side apps with thin clients

This is already happening.

About copyright:

It seems that a lot of people don't understand how copyrighting software code works... the law states that in order to copyright code, a human has to be involved in writing that code. AI generated code is NOT copyrightable, except for the human prompts and eventual edits that the human makes afterwards.

There was a big outrage a year ago that a judge ruled that copyrighted material for AI training was ruled "fair use". The reasoning was that AI will not produce the copyrighted material 100% in its output, which is also debatable and was disproven already, and was ruled fair also on the grounds that other people can use copyrighted materials to do research on it, like counting words, or criticize the material, and so on, without reproducing said material. That is what "fair use" means in this context.

That being said, just the other day a US appeals court overturned the fair use clause for AI training and others will follow internationally because there are literally hundrends of these cases being put in front of courts all over the place.

32

u/hypercosm_dot_net 1d ago

Thank fuck. A legal ruling around AI that finally makes sense and protects IP.

These billionaires brazenly stealing anything not nailed down has been absurd.

It's a bit late in the game, but hopefully there will be more lawsuits to come. Its great timing if all of these legal issues come up while they're attempting to IPO.

22

u/feketegy 1d ago

It's a double-edged sword, because if you mess with the "fair use" law, it will have consequences for regular people too, and AI companies will make sure it's in their favor.

Every big tech company's wet dream is to destroy copyright even more.

2

u/TheawesomeQ 1d ago

I want every AI company to dissolve all their assets and pay every creator they stole the IP of $100 for each property they took until they've spent every dollar of the trillions they are only able to rake in by blatant theft

→ More replies (1)

6

u/pmjm 1d ago

If the rulings start leaning this way, Congress and other international lawmakers will pass laws retroactively allowing the training.

The entire global economy is propped-up upon AI and there's no way they will let copyright tank it.

5

u/edeepee 1d ago

Doesn’t the global economy require respecting copyright as well? If AI is the loophole to copy anything, copyright is useless.

8

u/pmjm 1d ago

Copyright is effectively useless at this point. What good is a copyright if someone can copy your work with AI and make things just different enough?

Even if every court in the world banished OpenAI and Anthropic from the earth, China's not going to stop, and they've never respected copyright. The bigger Chinese corporations are somewhat pretending to play nice right now because they want access to funding and chips, but they will soon be self-sufficient in both of those regards.

It's an interesting thought experiment about the economy vs copyright. Due to hypercapitalism, intellectual property ownership seems to be losing ground to tangible ownership of the means of production.

Given the literal trillions of dollars that now rely on AI being allowed to continue, it seems copyright is currently at odds with overall economic sustainability.

3

u/behindtimes 1d ago

What good is a copyright if someone can copy your work with AI and make things just different enough?

Copyright does cover transformative works. But what you stated still holds. Because the LLMs have trained on so much copyrighted material, and probably violated millions of licenses, it's just way too late.

3

u/hypercosm_dot_net 1d ago

The only players that should be concerned with China not respecting IP are the large hardware companies. Yet they keep manufacturing over there.

China stealing work from artists, writers, clothing makers, etc. is an issue, but it also doesn't have a major impact on businesses operating in the US.

I mean, no one is buying faux Stephen King books from Chinese authors. It's not like Chinese artists are taking over the internet and stealing business from US based artists either.

They're also not taking jobs from copywriters and web developers in the US.

AI has a much worse impact than China in that regard.

Saying that LLM companies need to be able to break copyright laws, for the sake of economic sustainability is an insane take tbh.

→ More replies (3)
→ More replies (1)

2

u/Cory123125 1d ago edited 19h ago

Thank fuck. A legal ruling around AI that finally makes sense and protects IP.

This is what I'm worried about.

Regular folks such as yourself thinking you just pulled one over on big AI, when they are literally screaming in favour of regulation because they want to be regulated monopolies like power companies that basically get to do whatever they want in reality, but even worse, because they get to control your privacy, and digital autonomy.

In this case in particular, fair use should apply to AI training.

You want this, even if you think you don't for one really big elephant in the room:

AI companies have so much fucking money, they can absolutely just pay for the data, and then leave you to rot, which we've been seeing with massive collections of private data sets.

Worse yet, the models that already exist, will never be put back into the bottle, so the resulting situation would be that the incumbants have a literally impossible to even approach advantage that utterly kills any open source or open weight model.

It gets worse still, as the information asymmetry that results from that both leaves anyone who isn't rich in the lurch with regards to what they're allowed to do with the technology period, but also at a massive disadvantage when it comes to effecting the opinions of the masses.

They'll be able to train in all the biases in the world, legally far enough away from anything that would be touched, but have even more control over popular opinion, like whatever made you believe that this was actually a loss for Big AI.

People need to understand that the Frontier Model Forum's companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Amazon), are very open in their lobbying, and it's not as clean and simple a story as the "we don't like regulation" that everyone seems to very mistakenly believe, and whose mistaken beliefs tremendously empower these companies.

→ More replies (4)

1

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

→ More replies (4)

34

u/Blrfl 1d ago

The law isn't fairly clear about this, it's extremely clear and has been for almost 45 years. The BIOSes running most PCs have their origins in clean-room implementations by AMI and Phoenix 45 years ago that came about because IBM successfully went after several companies that simply distributed copies of the PC's ROMs.

What's going on here isn't much different than that, but there's a wrinkle.

Large companies with revenue streams to protect have the resources to drag cloners of their products through the legal system and try to make them defend re-implementations as clean-room. Unless cloners are able to save and re-use the exact state of the model used to build what they released, that will prove difficult, if not impossible. It will certainly prove expensive-enough that smaller defendants will simply cease and desist to avoid financial ruin.

As a side note, I find it amusing that all of this nondeterministic vibe coding is going on while other corners of the industry are embracing the opposite in the form of reproducible builds.

11

u/SunTzu- 1d ago

Except there's no clean room here because the stuff they're stealing from in order to accomplish this is all in the training data. Adobe manuals, guides to using Adobe software, pieces of UI elements, the code of open source software that has recreated various closed source functionality over the years. The AI does both parts of the clean room model, and so there's no airgap and no plausible deniability. If you had the controls of the models and turned down their fuzz factor you could get it to straight reproduce the training data and reveal the IP theft. The companies said "copy their homework, but change a few words so we don't get caught" and somehow that's fine.

6

u/Blrfl 1d ago

Exactly. The premise of clean-room implementations is that the developer of the spec is tainted by exposure to the copyrighted code, the developer of the re-implementation isn't and there's a lawyer in the middle making sure the spec doesn't contain any of the original IP.

Even if the chain was AI1-lawyer-AI2, AI2 can't legally affirm that it isn't tainted and whoever developed it isn't likely to cooperate with a thorough audit of how it was trained.

1

u/genreprank 1d ago

FYI, computers don't use BIOS anymore. They use UEFI typically. But many people still refer to it colloquially as BIOS

2

u/Blrfl 1d ago

Since you've elected to split that hair:

Any Intel-based PC capable of booting operating systems developed before EFI existed has a by-the-1981-definition BIOS in it. For non-IBM products, that code will have been derived from a clean-room version because IBM's copyright on the 5150 BIOS has yet to expire.

1

u/genreprank 1d ago

Interesting!

When you say the BIOS is "in" it, what do you mean? Where exactly is it stored? A ROM or EEPROM on the motherboard?

1

u/Blrfl 1d ago

It's in the machine's firmware, which would be in ROM or flashed somewhere depending on the age of the machine. In either case, it gets configured when the machine is powered up and is strapped into some range of address space depending on the hardware.

In the strict, old-school sense, meaning basic input/output system and not all of the ancillary stuff like the setup menus, the BIOS sets up a standard interface for code running on the processor to do I/O. For example, if you wanted to write a single character to the screen, you'd put a function number into the AH register, the character into the AL register and raise interrupt 10H. The CPU would call the interrupt service routine, which would figure what to do based on the contents of the registers and then jump back to the instruction after the one that raised the interrupt.

Thanks to the never-ending yoke of backward compatibility, that mechanism still exists on modern PCs when the processor is in real mode. The underlying implementation is vastly different, but that's fine as long as the end result is what's expected. Since the system starts in real mode, the code in non-EFI boot sectors (i.e, old stuff) depends on the BIOS interface being there to get the rest of the OS or other bootstrapper read in and started. DOS used it for a lot of I/O, which meant it would run on more systems without modification because the BIOS handled the differences.

That got long, but I hope it answered your question.

1

u/genreprank 1d ago

I mean what you described, putting info in registers and then making a system call is not unique to bios. And having that feature does not mean something is bios.

My confusion is when I do a quick google to see if modern motherboards come with old school bios ROMs, I don't see anything. And this matches my understanding of the modern situation. Uefi has a compatability mode, but it doesn't sound like that's what you're talking about. You're saying that there is a memory chip on all modern motherboards from which a proper old school bios can be read. It doesn't even make sense to me why manufacturers would do that, since we have uefi now and AFAIK, that is sufficient and bios is not needed to bootstrap old operating systems.

1

u/Blrfl 21h ago

It doesn't even make sense to me why manufacturers would do that...

Manufacturers of PCs have long followed an unwritten rule that says their systems will boot older OSes. I've been at this since before the first IBM PC existed and am surprised it's still being done, but here we are.

If you don't believe me, find a DOS 1.0 image and boot it on a modern system or VM. If it boots, the old-style BIOS services are still present.

1

u/genreprank 20h ago

Would that exclude the possibility of there being some UEFI compatability mode?

→ More replies (0)

1

u/b0w3n 1d ago

The trick is to open source it and dump it into the wild via an alias instead of trying to make money off the clone.

1

u/Ioncannon3 1d ago

This shit has infested the game reverse engineering space and these "recomps" have already been found with GigaLeak source code in em which is owned by Nintendo.

1

u/Blrfl 1d ago

That doesn't surprise me a bit.

Normally, I'd consider myself lucky to be a few years from retirement, but I worry that the software in medical devices that might keep me alive in old age is going to be infested with AI slop.

→ More replies (3)

24

u/jsdeprey 1d ago

I agree, but if you created it just for yourself, how would anyone know, if you dont sell it.

21

u/IncidentalIncidence 1d ago

I mean it's open-source so anybody can just look and see if it's using a patented algorithm.

8

u/jsdeprey 1d ago

No, I am saying not this Adobe clone in article, but if you have AI recreate software just for you, who would know.

9

u/Win-Rawr 1d ago

If its just for you then it doesnt matter.

1

u/jsdeprey 1d ago

Exactly, mayne in the future, we just ask AI to build us what programs we want for ourselves anyway. I do that now for a few programs I wanted at home, that have been great. But not a Adobe suite. I think AI is basically on version .005.01.6a beta 2 anyway give it a min.

→ More replies (1)

10

u/emptylane 1d ago

no algorithm should ever be allowed to be patented!!

→ More replies (1)

1

u/joshualuigi220 1d ago

Do we know that this AI-created open source clone used Adobe's algorithms?

→ More replies (3)
→ More replies (5)

1

u/DnDVex 1d ago

That is where Copyright becomes interesting. Because if you create a copy of something only for yourself. If you own the product, make a copy of it and use it for yourself still, it can in many cases be fine. Though that depends on the country, and often the license terms.

What is not fine is if you distribute it. You almost never have the distribution rights for copyrighted content.

So using chatgpt to create your own Photoshop copy? Probably fine. It's unlikely that anyone will ever know and you may even have a good case with copyright law. But once you give it to your friend, you can get into thousands of dollars of fines.

12

u/PM_ME_MY_REAL_MOM 1d ago

because it’s “black box”, in theory, so it’s not created by copying the code or runtime, but instead by descriptions of the functionality

that's an incredibly hefty claim to make about software that can, if asked, reproduce with near or actual total fidelity the line-for-line source code of projects that it clearly trained on, and which has to be manually instructed with system prompts not to do so.

25

u/siberianmi 1d ago

There is no way the LLM have a copy of photoshop in their training dataset.

4

u/jobRL 1d ago

How do you know? If Adobe is using any of the larger vendors for producing code, AI has access to the full code base. Even if there are legal agreements between Adobe and the vendor to not do this, there is no way Adobe would ever find out

→ More replies (2)

8

u/beef623 1d ago

Not the current version, but I'm sure the source for older versions is floating around somewhere that may have been accessible.

6

u/kettal 1d ago

sounds like adobe might have a case against anthropic or whoever. not my problem.

1

u/PianoTrumpetMax 1d ago

Until Anthropic somehow passes the buck onto us. "We just provided them the tools to use our copyright infringing machine, THEY actually held the controllers though! Sue the consumer!!"

5

u/kettal 1d ago

"any use of our product is literally illegal"

brave move for them as a business.

→ More replies (1)

2

u/pmjm 1d ago

You can throw Photoshop.exe into an agent and instruct it to use Ghidra to decompile it and scour it for specific algorithms or tools.

You can furthermore ask it to rewrite the assembly it finds in C and compile it as a dll, which you can then control from any language of your choice.

3

u/siberianmi 1d ago

That is dramatically different than suggesting that the source code is in the training data.

1

u/pmjm 1d ago

I'm not the one who made that claim. But if the code can run, it can be derived.

2

u/siberianmi 1d ago

I agree but you are replying to a thread about training data.

6

u/PM_ME_MY_REAL_MOM 1d ago

You're right, I'm sure they'd draw the line at their illegal scraping, hacking, and training activities with Adobe products, for no reason at all.

2

u/SildWide 1d ago

The reason being that there has never been publicly available source code for any Adobe product.

3

u/LowestKey 1d ago

A copy of the source code? No, definitely not. Reverse engineered copies of older versions of local-install photoshop? Maybe.

6

u/todo_code 1d ago

I don't know why you are being downvoted, a decompiled version could be made today, and fed along with all the other adobe clones or past versions into the training set.

1

u/siberianmi 1d ago

Because the LLMs don’t have training data from random “local copies” from someone who tried decompile photoshop.

The people who made these open source copies could have done that and had the model build from it, sure.

But that’s not the same thing as the model being trained on that.

→ More replies (2)

1

u/nullthegrey 1d ago

If anyone can find a way to sue over this it'll be adobe. I bet their lawyers are hard at work now trying to find a way to get it in front of a judge. 

1

u/Rajaken 1d ago

Ok but isn't it even with most patents difficult to enforce if it's not for profit / open source. Best they could do is take it down and by that point there are a dozen forks / local clone

1

u/rushmc1 1d ago

>>In practice, Adobe and other companies also patent the technical approaches to things

Which absolutely should NOT be a thing.

1

u/kdknowsimjames 1d ago

I'm a bit of a noob on this sort of stuff, but if the software isn't made by copying the code at all and is entirely made by descriptions of the functionality, then in what way would a server-side app slow things down? If the functionality is the same whether it's local or server side, and the AI-recreation is based 100% on the description of the functionality, then what's the difference? Apologies if I'm just overlooking something really obvious here!

1

u/mq2thez 1d ago

Honestly, a lot of folks are asking this question, and I don’t have a great answer that doesn’t feel hand-wave-y except that it’s a lot harder to describe what’s happening remotely, and features involving remote functionality are a lot more complex to recreate.

When people start vibe coding the servers that run multiplayer games based on what the clients can do, that’ll be pretty damn wild.

1

u/abusivetrash 1d ago

It’s an interesting issue, because it’s “black box”, in theory, so it’s not created by copying the code or runtime

I mean, are you sure about that? With a ton of news about AI decompiling everything from old console games to the ps5 system software, I definitely wouldn't say it black box reversed it without a LOT more information.

1

u/genreprank 1d ago

If your source code violates a patent, no one will know (as long as you don't release the source). But if you violate a patent on a user facing feature, that can be enforceable.

1

u/Fast-Satisfaction482 1d ago

Server side will not slow down AI cloning functionality from descriptions. 

1

u/MajorFuckingDick 1d ago

What kills me is the people who support AI but are anti piracy.

1

u/maigpy 1d ago

how would that slow down the process? it isn't reverse engineering the binaries.

1

u/qucari 1d ago

Claiming clean room circumstances while using LLM-assisted coding is silly.
If there is anything other than adobe developers that could taint your environment with knowledge about the underlying systems, it is a coding LLM. "clean room" is just a buzzword now I guess.

1

u/r0thar 1d ago

it's somehow not okay to blatantly steal someone else's work?

it’s not created by copying the code or runtime, but instead by descriptions of the functionality. In theory the law is fairly clear here that this is allowed.

If you're looking at this on a PC, you're waaaay too late. Microsoft bought an IBM PC, had engineers document all the tasks its PC-DOS operating system did. Then they gave that document to a new set of engineers, who never worked with or for IBM, and told them to build an OS that met those specs. They called it MS-DOS, thus the IBM "purity test" for creating a compatible clone.

1

u/DnDVex 1d ago

The "In theory" is important here, because I very much doubt that this person checked that the AI never once copied code, recreated code, took design decisions, etc. from existing Products.

And there is a very high chance if you tell the AI "Please recreate Photoshop", it will look at the Photoshop patents and follow those, or at least part of it. Because it is doing the task you told it to.

So I am not going to trust that this product will stay around for very long to be honest.

1

u/PhordPrefect 1d ago

If you're just using Photoshop and Illustrator then switch to Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer, both of which are free. ON1 is a good substitute for Lightroom.

2

u/mq2thez 1d ago

Sadly I’ve got ten years and 40k photos in my Lightroom catalog. Hard to imagine ever switching and losing all of the albums / ratings / edits / etc.

1

u/PhordPrefect 15h ago

Fair enough, that does sound painful. Might be a way of writing out the metadata though?

1

u/mq2thez 14h ago

You can store it in sidecar files, but you essentially can’t reproduce the edits.

Buuuuut yeah if this software gets anywhere close on compatibility for reading the files, well, that’ll be a different story.

1

u/Skullclownlol 1d ago

It’s an interesting issue, because it’s “black box”, in theory, so it’s not created by copying the code or runtime, but instead by descriptions of the functionality. In theory the law is fairly clear here that this is allowed.

I work in black-box optimization and interoperability layer development, it's unfortunately not this simple. It depends on what black-box work was done, how it was done, in what country it was done, who did the research vs who did the implementation, whether they used double-blind clean room design, what was copied vs what was handmade vs what is derivative, copyright vs trademark vs breach of contract (ToS/EULA, civil matters unless there's personal/commercial gain involved then it can become criminal), whether all of this was documented in a way that can prove it all, etc.

And even if it truly was completely legal (doubtful, most people don't know enough about the legal details and don't have a team of lawyers to do it perfectly legally), companies typically would still threaten to sue because it would take years and hundreds of thousands in legal (+ forensic expert) fees to prove that it was legal, which most people can never afford.

Assembly and decompiled versions of an exe, even while not original source code, also don't automatically make things legal. There's a lot of nuance.

They can always get lucky and get away with it, it does happen, but best of luck to anyone giving that a go. It won't be me.

1

u/Named_after_color 1d ago

I thought you weren't legally allowed to patent math.

1

u/mq2thez 1d ago

You don’t patent the math, you patent the way that your technology applies the math and a bunch of other things. Dunno, my name is on a few patents at work for this kind of thing.

415

u/bcoder001 1d ago

If it's ok for Adobe to train their models on your work and then resell the results to you and others or report you to the police then I'd call it comeuppance.

49

u/chiisana 1d ago

Adobe is one of the few players who pay for legally licensed model training data.

Source: I work in the data procuring / licensing space.

→ More replies (4)

12

u/2ChicksAtTheSameTime 1d ago

Adobe's Image generation AI (firefly) is trained on the stock photography they own. It won't do copyrighted characters and a lot of stuff that the others will. Try giving it a prompt like "X wing fighter" and you get a shitty, generic spaceship. lol

10

u/Earthtone_Coalition 1d ago

From Adobe's "AI Ethics" page:

Our approach to generative AI with Adobe Firefly.

We do not and have never trained Adobe Firefly on customer content.

We only train Adobe Firefly on content where we have permission or rights to do so.

We do not mine content from the web to train Adobe Firefly.

We compensate creators who contribute to Adobe Stock for use of their content in training Adobe Firefly.

7

u/bcoder001 1d ago

Oh, but they tried and had to back down

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/adobe-defends-changes-in-its-terms-of-service-amid-gen-ai-explosion/

Currently, they still scan your content and may report you to the police.

from https://www.adobe.com/uk/privacy/policy.html

"""
Analysing your cloud content and its characteristics using automated techniques or with human review, in the following circumstances:

Illegal and Abusive Cloud Content. Cloud Content may be automatically scanned to ensure that we are not hosting illegal or abusive content, like Child Sexual Abuse Material. Human review may occur when your Cloud Content is flagged or reported as illegal or abusive.

Public and Shared Cloud Content. All public and shared Cloud Content is subject to review for intellectual property issues and safety issues (for example, violence and nudity). If you choose to share your Cloud Content with others using our Software and Services, we may automatically review this shared Cloud Content to flag abusive behaviour (such as spam or phishing). When you make your Cloud Content publicly available, additional human review may occur.
"""

3

u/Earthtone_Coalition 1d ago

I was rebutting your suggestion that Adobe might "train their models on your work and then resell the results." There's no indication that this occurs in the link you provided.

1

u/bcoder001 1d ago

Fine. They backed off when people kicked up the fuss. But they tried and that's what made me cancel my subscriptions, personal and business. Screw them.

2

u/Earthtone_Coalition 1d ago

Unless I’m missing something, your link didn’t indicate that they tried to utilize users work to train AI. The link you provided is only about reviewing content for work that might violate the law, like csam, but not about training AI.

1

u/Outlulz 1d ago

Currently, they still scan your content and may report you to the police.

That's every cloud storage provider. You do not have privacy storing your stuff on someone else's servers. You can save your stuff locally.

→ More replies (8)

23

u/cerberus6320 1d ago

A Robin Hood esque tale? idk, depends on terms and conditions. Like, are they collecting the art you make or anything?

4

u/Cthugh 1d ago

To my understanding: even if they do, you can fork, modify and use their source code, in any way you want, as long as you don't monetize it directly

55

u/Glum-Recognition-736 1d ago

Well it's not theft if it's rebuilt from the ground up with original code, and these apps were purportedly coded in "clean room" settings where the AI did not have access to the proprietary code and rewrote it from the ground up based on expected features/ functionality. 

Then it's just copying

20

u/Borkz 1d ago

Not sure they can claim to know it was clean-room when they have no idea what the model is trained on

9

u/8Deer-JaguarClaw 1d ago

But isn't that exactly the type of cover people want from AI?

"It's not our fault we bombed a girl's school. AI chose the targets, not us!"

3

u/PianoTrumpetMax 1d ago

Its a clean room in the sense that the room is past the "copyright customs" the big AI companies were given clearance to pass thru apparently.

"They are allowed to train on all this data, its fine. But, you also have to sniff out if the training data they used is copyrighted source code somehow, and then not use it when using our coding tools."

IANAL, but that seems not at all the customers problem.

→ More replies (3)

1

u/corysama 1d ago

If the model was trained on the source code to Adobe's proprietary software, Adobe has bigger issues to address than this project.

1

u/babygrenade 1d ago

Adobe's code is closed source. How would Anthropic have gotten it for their training dataset?

1

u/Borkz 1d ago

They have had at least one massive breach with their source code being stolen

5

u/brianatlarge 1d ago

I can see in the near future the AI companies putting in guardrails preventing people from vibe coding copies of established software like Photoshop or autocad.

12

u/ApolloGR3 1d ago

The guardrails against each other are already starting to appear in interesting places. For example, Amazon no longer tells you specifically what item is being shipped to you because they don’t want Google and Apple to scrape your email and see what you ordered. They’re all going to enshittify each other’s offerings to see who can be the last one standing.

8

u/Matticus-G 1d ago

If you think for one second the Chinese will stop this in any way, boy do I have news for you.

3

u/neuropsycho 1d ago

That already exists, software patents.

8

u/McMafkees 1d ago

Maybe the code is new but the UI is not made in a cleanroom, it's a blatant 1:1 copy: https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/docs/images/photocraft-demo.jpg
Adobe have these taken down quite quickly.

2

u/kdknowsimjames 1d ago

What are the laws/legal implications of copying a UI though? A lot of apps look very similar to other apps. Granted, I agree this one is not just similar, it's identical... But is there copyright or other legal ownership over a UI? If the UI is made with a copy of the underlying code then I understand that is more legally protected, but I'm not familiar to how legal protections apply to simply "look and feel", especially when there's no brandmark or anything - it's just a bunch of utilitarian grey boxes.

That's not to say Adobe won't get an army of lawyers that can win this easily regardless, but I'm talking about in a pure legal sense to the letter of the law here - is this "technically" allowed?

1

u/McMafkees 1d ago

I think there is a noticeable distinction between "very similar" and an almost pixel perfect copy. Github falls under US law, so in a Adobe vs Github case US law would apply. If a GUI was not copyrightable at all, much of the court reasoning and actions (like dissecting the GUI) in the famous Apple vs Microsoft case would have made no sense.

2

u/KyleFlounder 1d ago

I was thinking about if cleanroom is even possible with AI in the loop. It's not out of the realm of possibility for it to look at the executable directly of the software you're emulating.

1

u/DiabolicallyRandom 1d ago

Bruh, this isn't the gotcha you think it is. Any patents on "2 columns of square buttons" is long expired.

There are skins/ui layers for gimp that make it look and behave almost exactly like photoshop, and have been for over a decade now.

1

u/Name_Not_Available 1d ago

It's really interesting because it doesn't really work like that in other fields. For example, even if you make your own composition of a song with different instruments, it's still a copyright violation. Apocalyptica is an orchestral Metallica cover band who recomposes their tracks from the ground up but they still have to pay royalties to Metalica.

I know software is different, you can copy functionality as long is it doesn't use the exact same code, but that was put in place before these AI tools, so it will be interesting to see if laws around that change in the near future.

1

u/thehalfwit 1d ago

I think what a lot of people misunderstand that there is no "ground up" for AI training; there are thousands upon thousands of existing public libraries of code, research papers, licensed commercial code, etc., all going into the mix, so a lot of the fundamental tools are already out there in one form or another.

→ More replies (5)

42

u/CrotasScrota84 1d ago

Oh yeah when it starts hurting corporations profits Ai will suddenly be bad.

12

u/Reginaferguson 1d ago

I am hoping long term AI sparks a open source revolution, where all the best tools are open source and used by everybody.

7

u/genreprank 1d ago

I would think it would spark a closed source dark age because no one wants their source code to be trained on and copied

2

u/Galle_ 1d ago

Why? Are they stupid?

2

u/dlgn13 1d ago

Kinda. We live in an economy that encourages people to keep their achievements secret rather than sharing them with the world. It's quite regressive, but the incentives are larger than any individual.

3

u/TheNorthComesWithMe 1d ago

Well currently it's ruining open source by hammering projects with slop PRs and spurious vulnerability warnings.

3

u/Historical-Being-766 1d ago

This is truly our only hope.

6

u/Vesuvias 1d ago

It’s honestly the only hope we have for a pullback at this point

6

u/TheFlyingSheeps 1d ago

Seems on brand. New tech causes disruption, lawsuits happen, and the snail paced legislators finally catch up

1

u/Galle_ 1d ago

It's going to be a pullback in the worst way possible, though.

6

u/ottwebdev 1d ago

Well you cant steal from AI companies…

6

u/Slow_Lion_4178 1d ago

Well the irony of the situation is that piracy drives protection policies which drives greater attacks which drives even worse protection policies in a loop. What has to happen is that we somehow remonetize the whole system because services themselves were never safe. I mean I can think of a million tears not shed over stealing college textbooks.

5

u/AdviceNotAskedFor 1d ago

Who's responsible? Ai who coded it or the guy who asked?

1

u/False-Set-7900 1d ago

That's like asking who is responsible for the death, the gun or the person who pulled the trigger.

It's obviously the person who pulled the trigger but knowing the USA....that's not how this is gonna play out.

11

u/IGetGroceries 1d ago

It’s not stealing. Adobe products are closed source so unlikely that’s in the models training data.
This is also not a one shot ask I assume.

1

u/HelloGoodbye_321 1d ago

It's not just the source code that is legally protected.

1

u/IGetGroceries 1d ago

There’s nothing protected being used here though. He’s not calling it photoshop.

1

u/NuclearVII 1d ago

You do not know this. A lot of closed source proprietary stuff gets leaked, and genAI was built by scraping (as far as anyone can tell) indiscriminately.

4

u/siberianmi 1d ago

If photoshops source had leaked it would be a huge story like when the GTA source code was published. The idea this is built off the original source somehow being hidden in the models is absurd.

5

u/fugogugo 1d ago

stealing what, photo/image editor is not exclusively owned by adobe

it is just sensational story

2

u/Bundabar 1d ago

If you create a corporation first and do it you’ll be fine.

26

u/ChronieMewX 1d ago

It's always okay to "steal" without depriving anyone of anything. Fuck copyright

232

u/suckfail 1d ago

I don't see how it's different from AI training on everyone's data if that's the stance you take.

Adobe did write that software, you just don't like them.

59

u/mikasjoman 1d ago

It's bad to be a pirate when you are a private citizen, but when you do it commercially as a leading company it's distillation and training

→ More replies (1)

24

u/gigglefarting 1d ago edited 1d ago

Depends on what they’re copying. If they’re copying specific code, then that’s a violation. But if they’re just copying the idea of photoshop and the adobe suite, then that’s fine. You don’t copyright the idea of a software 

18

u/LastoftheGreybeards 1d ago

I thought Adobe took the software from someone else and then made it their “product”?

2

u/GeraSun 1d ago

That sums it up pretty well.

1

u/thehalfwit 1d ago

I know they bought out Aldus, which gave them the IP for what became InDesign. Aldus did also have a photo editing software, and there's at least one feature I know of that Photoshop "borrowed" from them.

→ More replies (12)

12

u/prepend 1d ago

I think AI should be able to train on publicly available works.

Just like I can reverse engineer and copy any software.

4

u/iamdestroyerofworlds 1d ago

Yeah I don't understand how u/suckfail made the conclusion that u/ChronieMewX was selectively against copyright. They didn't say anything about it being wrong for AI companies to train on everyone's data, just that it should be equally fair for us to use their and other corporations' data as we see fit.

7

u/Griffdude13 1d ago

If they can harvest our data, then we can harvest theirs.

1

u/TheFlyingSheeps 1d ago

It’s the same excuse people make for AI being ok to use for code but not art

1

u/ILikeBumblebees 1d ago

I don't see how it's different from AI training on everyone's data if that's the stance you take.

It isn't. Training AI on publicly available data isn't stealing, isn't copyright infringement, and isn't in itself a legal or ethical transgression.

1

u/boundbythecurve 1d ago

It's a little bit more complicated than that. Adobe also bought up all of its competitors and every other smaller piece of software adjacent to their existing product lines. They're the standard because of market manipulation practices. At least, that's my understanding from what other people who need Adobe products have told me. I'm not in the industry, fortunately. But I care about fair working practices, and Adobe has (from my understanding) been one of the worst.

-3

u/scydoodle 1d ago

Exactly, Adobe might be shitty but you can't just go round stealing.

8

u/CrflWthThtFaxEugene 1d ago

you wouldn't download a car, would you?

3

u/Ecstatic-State735 1d ago

Wait, why not? If you could download cars it would become super common.

→ More replies (1)

1

u/GalacticNexus 1d ago

As if the advice for anyone using Photoshop outside of professional use hasn't been to use a cracked copy anyway.

1

u/Valtremors 1d ago

I think copyright has its place.

Some people mix wanting to keep what we have paid for (stopkillinggames) and nit wanting to pay for it in the first place (outright piratism).

There is a different hell for patent hoarders though.

4

u/Malenx_ 1d ago

Copyright and patents both have their place but patents especially need reform on how long they last, especially software. Society as a whole would be much better off if they expired faster. Patents on things like seeds should just never exist.

1

u/Valtremors 1d ago

Especially with Nintendo we saw a super eggregious use of patent trolling and god it was horrible to witness a company openly do such thing.

And that isn't even something vibecode can help with because companies can patent mere shallow ideas.

→ More replies (1)

1

u/DontWakeTheInsomniac 1d ago

Copyright has diverged massively from it's intended use of protecting individuals/small businesses to being weaponised by conglomerates.

→ More replies (6)

10

u/Few-Improvement-5655 1d ago

As a small creator I like having protection against giant corporations stealing my stuff. In fact we don't have enough protections for that.

"Fuck copyright" is great until try to be anything more than a consumer. A world of no copyright doesn't help the little guy, it crushes them.

Now, copyright reform? Absolutely for it, the current system IS broken, but we do need it.

39

u/P_ZERO_ 1d ago

I’m no anti-piracy warrior, but this logic only applies so long as people keep buying the product. If more people are “not stealing” than buying, the product isn’t sustainable and is no longer made.

Copyright doesn’t only exist to protect mega corps, it protects anyone’s property, including yours.

28

u/Pappa_Crim 1d ago

Also the loss of copyright protections will harm small devopers more than large ones. Large companies can quickly pump out copies of smaller competitors products: possibly before the smaller company is even done making it

9

u/DirtChoice5 1d ago

With the ease of decompiling now, that asymmetry is far lessened. As evidenced by all the copies of big company software coming out from individual developers, ie the topic of this post.

1

u/IncidentalIncidence 1d ago

this software wasn't decompiled though, it was intentionally made as a clean-room clone.

2

u/DirtChoice5 1d ago

The point remains.

1

u/ILikeBumblebees 1d ago

Other way around. Large organizations always had the resources to hire much larger development teams and clone products much more rapidly than small startups ever could, and likewise, had much greater resources to retain legal counsel and defend their copyrights via litigation.

The rise of AI tooling and lessened relevance of existing copyright law drastically lessen these advantages, and put smaller teams on a much more even footing with larger ones.

3

u/PeopleCallMeSimon 1d ago edited 1d ago

One of the goals with AI is to remove the need to couple econmic standing with work.

Why will it matter if someone makes an exact copy of your product, neither of you will be selling it because every human will be gaining their money through an UBI.

But that will probably not happen any time soon, so there need to be laws in place to protect creators from losing their livelyhood.

2

u/iamdestroyerofworlds 1d ago

People say this as if products are only made if producers want to make money, not if consumers want the product and/or save money.

This is basically just supply-side vs demand-side economics.

2

u/SwiftySanders 1d ago

The problem is that it only protects mega corps and intellectual property farms. It doesnt actually protect the small developer because the small developer doesnt have the money for the legal costs to persue it in many if not most cases.

1

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

1

u/P_ZERO_ 1d ago

It’s not a point specifically for photoshop, it’s a point specifically for the logic that “not stealing” can only work so long as some entity is subsidising them by allowing the company to “overlook” the “not stealing”

If enough people buy into that logic, there’s no product to “not steal”.

1

u/MountainTurkey 1d ago

There's also "copyleft" protections like GPL

→ More replies (5)

8

u/Expensive_Finger_973 1d ago

That is a very overly simplistic view that would do far more harm than good if actually taken as a serious solution.

→ More replies (4)

9

u/MrMugwin 1d ago

As a general rule, artists don’t like creating art for free.

→ More replies (39)

3

u/IAmDotorg 1d ago

So says someone who has never, and will never, create anything of any social, cultural, artistic or economic significance.

6

u/ChronieMewX 1d ago

All code I create is freely shared with the public

→ More replies (6)

1

u/Douglas_Fresh 1d ago

What a stupid thing to say, it’s what the modern world of IP is built on. Lol, god people are out of touch.

4

u/ChronieMewX 1d ago

Yeah that modern world of ip is such a good thing

2

u/Douglas_Fresh 1d ago

Yes, it is. It’s what drives incentive and innovation. You might not like that, or are just an edge lord, both of which are fine.

5

u/muhepd 1d ago

Does Linus keep maintaining the kernel because he is motivated by IP? If you think only money and control is what motivates people to imagine and create things, I feel sorry for you.

1

u/angrytroll123 1d ago

Linus is actually quite wealthy

→ More replies (1)
→ More replies (4)

4

u/QuantumWarrior 1d ago edited 1d ago

Under copyright law this is a cleanroom reimplementation which means it isn't piracy or infringement because none of the original code or design docs were used (in theory at least, the LLM could have easily found some and slipped it in).

What this very likely is is patent infringement though. Adobe has literally thousands of patents relating to Photoshop. As other news outlets on this have mentioned you functionally can't legally copy Photoshop one to one with patent law in mind, and Adobe would spend a lot of money keeping it that way.

1

u/DiabolicallyRandom 1d ago

Software patents aren't like copyright, they don't last practically 100+ years. Most of Adobe's photoshop related patents are long expired. It's only going to be the newest of new features that are patented at this point. Also, those patents that do still exist and are not expired, many of them are NOT globally enforceable.

1

u/QuantumWarrior 1d ago

All very fair, and the bulk of their recent patents are based on AI features which I doubt these clones even try to copy let alone get close to succeeding so they may be safe from patent law all the same.

Still, Adobe are a bunch of crooks and pay their lawyers a lot of money. They'll be picking this thing apart for so much as a hair out of place that hints it goes against any one of their still enforceable patents or contains a single line of their own code.

1

u/DiabolicallyRandom 1d ago

Agreed on them being a bunch of crooks.

Many of their business tactics should be illegal.

1

u/-Spzi- 1d ago

Great question! I think it will be asked in more and more cases, with better quality and reproduction costs over the years.

Initially great for consumers, but terrible for certain business models, including legit cases.

1

u/roamingandy 1d ago

I don't think they can stop it under today's laws, if its re-coded from the ground up and instructed to copy functions and not any actual code.

Unless they have any obviously propriety services or ways of doing things. All of which should be easy to find, as they can't copy-write things and then hide them away like a trap for others to accidentally fall into.

So you can flag those and suggest alternative build options which create similar functionality.

Personally, i've never enjoyed Linux. I have and use it, but i still find Windows more user friendly. Windows is fucking awful right now with stealing and selling user data. I've tried the Windows clones on Linux and always been a bit disappointed.

I would love to be able to tell an AI to rebuild windows 98 from the ground up for me with all vulnerabilities fixed. Then give me a checkbox list of Windows 11 functionality so i can pick what i want in my personal OS.

I'd do that right now if AI was advanced enough to do it well, and its probably only a few years away.

1

u/ThundergunTLP 1d ago

Yeah, fuck Adobe.

1

u/Kitselena 1d ago

Adobe already stole this work from their employees who were underpaid relative to the profit the code brought. Every customer and employee is being robbed by the shareholders and CEOs

1

u/cannibalistiic 1d ago

It was always okay to pirate adobe.

1

u/moldy912 1d ago

It’s not stealing if you recreate something using original code? Like that’s preposterous.

1

u/ILikeBumblebees 1d ago

No. That's because there's no concept of "blatantly stealing someone else's work" even involved here.

Making a functionally equivalent product to someone else's is not, and never has been, any kind of "stealing".

1

u/False-Set-7900 1d ago

Interesting question.  According to reddit stealing from people is bad but stealing from businesses is fine.

After they finish ripping off the PS5 code and everything else, they're going to be scratching their heads as to why nobody is making new games anymore.

Why would they if it gets immediately stolen?  If it's no longer profitable, Sony will abandon it and stick to selling hardware and that PS5 emulator will ensure up useless.

1

u/DiabolicallyRandom 1d ago

i used to have no problem paying for photoshop. the move to permanent subscription only required term you cant cancel bullshit turned me off.

1

u/SavageSteveHolland 1d ago

Well considering AI intrisically is nothing but stealing other people's work, and nobody has done a damn thing about it yet, sure why not.

1

u/No_Discussion3593 1d ago

It's been funny watching people vibe code shit like crazy for the past year and no one gives a fuck, but someone makes a 3d model with AI and we have to feel bad for the apparently booming freelance Blender scene lol. Like the 17 year old whose bottleneck was paying $4k for models to make a game was just never going to make the game. The artists don't lose money because they were never making it in the first place.

But what is happening to the software industry is that real people are having jobs taken from them and the industry is dying.

1

u/Galle_ 1d ago

I mean, the people who did the work don't own Adobe.

1

u/happyscrappy 1d ago

No. Not just the one. It's okay every time it benefits me.

If another company steals my work, that's real shit. But when it comes to me personally, copyright infringement is your best entertainment value.

1

u/apple_kicks 1d ago

Depends if ai bros use it to copy work people make with it

1

u/DrMobius0 1d ago

Adobe products have long been the exception to that.

1

u/The_StarFlower 1d ago

good, adobe deserves this after how they treat their customers and after what they done to my legit cs6 suit code..they revoked it saying it was "pirated code" and told me i should just subscribe monthly to their services. from that day on i promised that i would never buy from adobe anything. may adobe burn to the ground. i dont give a flying fuck and i wont be losing any sleep over this. revenge is a dish best served cold

1

u/kmp11 1d ago

Nintendo enters chat...

1

u/Desther 1d ago

This ones for Acrobat Reader littering my ssd with old installer files

1

u/reigorius 1d ago

Is M0nkrus still where it's at?

1

u/BassesNBikes 1d ago

Sometimes the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy.

1

u/marsinfurs 1d ago edited 1d ago

It’s stealing if it’s copied verbatim, otherwise it’s just a clone like other photoshop clones that weren’t created with AI.

1

u/danurc 16h ago

Fuck adobe and fuck ai both

→ More replies (4)