Oliver Earl

    AI has its Robin Hood moment?

    For far too long, AI has been used by big tech to the detriment of its users. At best, that means shoehorning in features that nobody asked for and slowing down the experience, but at worst, using our data to train yet more models. Adobe says they won’t, but you’ll forgive me for not believing them.

    Now, I always take anything done by AI proponents with a pinch of salt because anything positive tends to come served with far more hype than it deserves, but this might well be an exception.

    Enter stage left, ArtCraft. The team behind it have been using generative AI to build alleged clean-room reimplementations of popular software in Rust, making them free and open source, on a wider range of platforms than the source projects support (i.e. Photoshop on Linux and Intel Macs) and even in the web browser. They’re still in early alpha and I don’t want to get bogged down on the specifics, so if you’re interested you can read a little bit more over on Ars Technica.

    Legally grey? Probably. But if AI ever had an ethical use case, it’s this. For far too long, companies like Adobe and Microsoft have bullied users towards expensive, difficult-to-leave subscriptions, meaning you’re renting your software rather than owning it outright. I’ve always been a strong proponent of free, open source software, but I really don’t have a problem with people selling their proprietary software either, provided buying a copy means I can *keep using it* for as long as I choose.

    AI-assisted reverse engineering could well hurt smaller companies, solo developers, and indie gamedevs and I don’t want to brush that possibility aside, but nevertheless, the democratisation of software development is something I welcome, along with the pained shrieks of C-suite executives who have spent far too long earning far too much, for doing far too little. Besides not listening to their customers, that’s for sure.

    Interested? Check out ArtCraft over on GitHub, before big tech attempts to censor it!

    2 responses to “AI has its Robin Hood moment?”

    1. Dan Q avatar
      Dan Q

      Yeah, except the applications don’t actually seem to work properly, in exactly the ways you’d expect from something this large being vibe-coded. Sure, they might well be “90% done”, but it’s the easy 90%.

      I can see why this appeals. We all remember when Adobe’s software was good and not bloated subscription garbage. Hell: I remember buying a copy of CS6 before they stopped selling it and using it for many years before drifting into FOSS alternatives (obviously I never bought-in to CC; I’m not paying monthly to use software that runs on my local system and that I don’t need any updates for!).

      But yeah: it feels a lot like this is somebody remaking Photoshop CS6, which was… fine. But I’d rather people invented NEW things. And while I don’t object to people using AI where it actually accelerates things (and clean-room reverse-engineering might be among those things)… it feels just plain silly to spend half a million dollars of tokens to re-implement old software that, let’s be honest, people who wanted could use old purchased copies of or, ahem, pirate.

      Dave Rupert said it better, though, ‘cos he’s more-concise than me!

      Reply
      1. Oliver Earl avatar
        Oliver Earl

        I’ve had a play with a few of them and some of the workflows aren’t fully there yet. Granted the software is still in an alpha pre-release state, so this shouldn’t be a surprise regardless of whether the software was built by man or machine. Either way I have somewhat high hopes and it works for those who really just *cannot* seem to unstick themselves from Adobe’s ecosystem.

        That being said, I absolutely agree with the sentiment that we shouldn’t waste time or money on replicating soured proprietary experiences when we can make new things. Thankfully I’ve not been dependent on Photoshop for a good number of years, I switched to Krita (https://krita.org/en/) a good couple of years ago and love it. I love it so much that I bought a paid copy on Steam to help support development efforts, as well as a copy for everyone who was volunteering for my game studio at the time.

        Reply

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