AI isn't revolutionary. It's theft.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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