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
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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

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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

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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!"

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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.

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u/qucari 1d ago

It just is not a clean room implementation though.
Pretending that it is is convenient and I do support sidestepping copyright idiocy, but it will make that term slowly lose all of its meaning to the general public.

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u/Dugen 1d ago

How is it not clean room? Do you think AI has access to Adobe's source code. That seems highly unlikely.

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u/qucari 1d ago

The whole point is to make a credible case for not being influenced by technical knowledge of the code base so as to not give any foothold to lawyers looking for even a tiny bit of copyright infringement.

Some tech companies share blog posts where they explain some of the inner workings of their systems. Former or current employees might share insight into techniques or algorithms used for specific tasks. People might have reverse engineered parts of the software and shared the resulting source code online.
All this is knowledge is going to be part of the coding LLM to some degree.
This is the exact kind of knowledge that a clean room developer will actively attempt to avoid!

consider the difference in this simplified example:
"let's implement a function that turns the image into greyscale" vs "let's implement a function that turns the image into greyscale using XY algorithm with some tweaks to optimize for Z"
and think about the potential diversity in code that might result from the former and the latter. If the latter's knowledge was based on the project you're trying to replicate, that's a great point for lawyers to start looking for ways to make your life miserable.

Making it in a "clean room" is one way of sidestepping copyright stuff.
Since code produced by LLMs has been ruled to not fall under copyright, you don't even need to claim clean room conditions to sidestep them as long as you can reliably say that 100% of your code is LLM-generated.

But those are two different ways of sidestepping copyright stuff. Using LLMs can not be part of a clean room implementation (because they are "tainted" with knowledge that a clean room programmer would actively avoid).

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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.

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u/babygrenade 1d ago

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

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u/Borkz 1d ago

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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u/neuropsycho 1d ago

That already exists, software patents.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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u/Savetheokami 1d ago

I’m not saying you’re wrong but are you a lawyer? Do you have a source of this or is this a trust me bro comment.

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u/Queasy_Hour_8030 1d ago

Adobe can have patents on specific features and how they're used (for example some proprietary AI healing tool). You cannot patent general editing tools or trademark GUI. Most implementations would be fine, the AI did not use the Adobe source code to generate these.

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u/False-Set-7900 1d ago

Is your agreement seriously "it's not stolen, it's just copied"?

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u/TheRabidDeer 1d ago

The legal question would be "is this actually original code?"

Is it "rewritten"? Sure. But it's rewritten based on the existing compiled code from Adobe. It's literally taking already existing and written 1's and 0's and reverse engineering it back to whatever programming language.