- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se
Brandon Thomas, developer of ArtCraft, a suite of open-source creative tools meant to replicate Adobe applications for free, has now announced apps to replace Microsoft Office tools such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, respectively, named GridCraft, DeckCraft, and WordCraft, that are created with Claude. Thomas has shared his new clones to ArtCraft GitHub, making them free for all to download.
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Great, more slop
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.
i assume this person is making a statement more than anything. but gimp is not an adobe alternative. affinity is but not gimp. but since this is an open source commjnity i should point out affinity is not open source
You’ve obviously never used Photoshop or GIMP because if you have then you would immediately understand why. GIMP is a completely different experience, and its UX is far inferior to Photoshop. On top of that, anybody who is used to the workflow in Photoshop will have a very steep learning curve using GIMP.
Believe it or not, but most people just want a tool that works for what they’re trying to do. These apps have some bugs and rough edges still, but they’re very much usable and make it trivial to switch for anybody who’s used to Photoshop.
The venn diagram of what GIMP does and what Photoshop does isn’t the singular circle people assume. I, too, loathed my time with GIMP wondering how it ever got so popular in the OSS community, but then you realize it’s kind of all they have so of course they’ll support it no matter what.
I haven’t used it in years and based on that experience, I’m not rushing to try it again anytime soon. The UI felt like a UX designer’s prank on the world.
I’ve been using the recent versions of GIMP and it’s surprisingly usable. Of course tools are a bit different and in different places compared to Photoshop, but that goes for any software.
Yeah, you should definitely try using it again - especially since the big 3.0 release.
Menus and tool names/functions still do not map perfectly onto Photoshop’s (it is its own thing after all, so why should it?), but it is a serious and sophisticated piece of software. Easily adequate for my professional reproduction work.
I switched to it from Photoshop two or three years ago and had to spend a few hours watching tutorials and reading the manual to make the transition. But now there is hardly anything I can’t do in GIMP at least as fast, easily and reliably as I could in Photoshop.
Yeah, these are very different tools. And yeah UX in GIMP is something else.
Yeah, there are already good alternatives for the office package. I don’t see why anyone would use a slop version instead of them.
I can’t say anything about Photoshop and autodesk since I don’t use them.
I agree, then I remember those infuriating pricks asking “Can I draw a circle in GIMP yet?” in every thread about updates. The slop is for those people.
Is OpenOffice still maintained?
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.
LibreOffice?
For an office suite LibreOffice is fine, although compatibility with MS Office is still spotty. But for graphics there really aren’t drop in replacements for Adobe apps right now.
At the end of the day, I don’t really care what tools software is made with. Either it works well or it doesn’t. You can make quality projects using LLMs and you can make really shitty software without them. The deciding factor in both cases is skill ans knowledge of the developer building the app.
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.
Have you tried it to say that it just looks like the real thing and that it doesn’t work the same?
It isnt even written in the same language. It won’t be a bug for bug copy. Just slop.
I don’t need to buy the Temu knockoff to know it’ll be s shitty knockoff that looks good on the storefront.
Buy?
It’s a metaphor.
Ok
Decompilations do work the same under the hood.
It is funny though. Microsoft being undermined by the very thing they’re using to undermine working class people.
Funny seeing people losing their shit yet again in front of “AI” claims…
Like all the other spectacular previous claims that is not mentioned: it’s a bird with half wings - it does not fly.
I also created a Photoshop clone, the only caveat is it crashes at start, BUT I TOTALLY DID IT!
Did you try it? No. You concluded that if it works, your worldview breaks, so it cannot work.
But someone tried it.
https://lemmy.ml/post/53794973
(Don’t look at the post I linked, your fragile worldview can’t handle that)
I watched the video (partially because I can’t stand it, such annoying video).
So what’s your point?? Go use it if that’s your turf, don’t come around insulting me for no reason.
Do you have a skin in that fame? Why are you so uptight about a vibecoded project? And you are all on the defensive while telling me I have a fragile worldview he he… Projection? Maybe?
There are ton of missing features, buggy ones, crashes… What’s the point of your dummy doing some tests on the slop?
My point was/is: it seems easy to claims victory these days with half a winning battle.
My point still hold, while yours seem moot.
Good day my little world shattering wannabe ;)
I have a simple reason, I hate closed software, I hate adobe, I hate microsoft. Like every real free software advocate.
Did it crash on startup? No? Well then you lied. You lied for adobe, bootlicker.
And of course your worldview won’t fall apart that easily, you can always just apply another layer of cope.
Did it crash on startup? No? Well then you lied
If you read again, you realize I am not talking about what they slopped, I was saying that I did mine and it is crashing at start, see by yourself:
I also created a Photoshop clone, the only caveat is it crashes at start, BUT I TOTALLY DID IT!
That’s text comprehension, I am just going to end this charade right aboutttt… Here.
Tbf they’re replacing other vibecoded slopware… Can’t be much worse than what it’s going after - and at least it’s free.
I think they’d eat their own dogfood?
I’m pretty happy with libre office. Not keen on AI code
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.
not interested in openslop
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?
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?
I’m aware of the the suite including LibreOffice. It’s not popular with exactly the user base we’re concerned with here. Mostly because of aesthetic and integrations. If you dumped a hundred thousand dev hours into it, I’m sure it could find its way there. Otherwise, it’s still an excellent choice for who would otherwise be Linux users anyhow.
However, LibreOffice shouldn’t have to copy Microsoft. It would be ashame if it did too much.
This project, on the other hand, is precisely doing a clean room copy of Microsoft’s (et al) software. Not only does it go further as a drop-in replacement, but it’s also a form of protest in itself.
It’s not necessary for LibreOffice to fully replicate every nuance of MS Office to be valuable to people who aren’t just those who “would be Linux users anyhow.”
Especially for the light users of MS Office, which are the vast majority. They just need something to create Aunt Bobbie’s birthday invitation, and they won’t care at all whether that thing is MS Office or LibreOffice.
As an anecdote, I’m the IT person at my job. I quietly removed MS Office from a shared PC used by dozens of people. I installed LibreOffice instead, and selected the ribbon UI option. Months later now, and literally nobody has complained or even remarked on it, despite using it every day for their document work. There has not yet been a single instance of anyone contacting me for tech support about it.
None of them work as intended and we already have free options why is this a headline
Anything with AI in it gets clicks.
Exactly. If I needed something more powerful than google docs then I’d download LibreOffice.
most people do not even know that they exist to begin with.
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.
Open source tools for all of these use cases have existed for over a decade and people still buy both adobe and Microsoft office. I don’t think some slop apps are going to change that.
I’m a Microsoft hater but I don’t think this will changes the wider publics opinion on them?
Open office and libreoffice have been around a good while now.
Pirating Adobe products was common practice for poor uni students, or occasional users that didn’t want to pay exorbitant rates to fix an image here and there. Adobe made that much more difficult. Then you have us Australians that have been getting charged well above the US retail price for years; at one point it was cheaper to fly to America and buy a physical copy.
These slop apps will absolutely let people go back to doing that, and get back at Adobe for overcharging, because the open source tools either don’t work with the file formats required, or they just don’t cut it. I use LibreOffice & GIMP and they’re great, I love them. However, I’m not a graphic designer, and tools like Photoshop leave GIMP in the dust for professional work.
Pirating Adobe and MS products is a practice of Nerds which thought they were hackers, since the existence of alternatives which make useless the piracy of this products.
I don’t know where you got that idea. The vast majority of people I knew who passed around a copy of Adobe stuff or MS Office, along with a working key or keygen program back in the day, were most definitely not nerds who believed they were hackers.
I still use my copy of photoshop from time to time.
Photopea has been my go to alternative for opening actual psd docs for a while.
Paint.net was my go to for quick stuff back in windows. I’ve been learning Kirta on linux now.
But for certain work, the 10 year old copy of photoshop is still better at certain things. Specifically for editing actual photos (go figure).
30 years after switching to Linux, I still have to use Photoshop because the gimp is still trash.
I played with PhotoCraft, it launches on less than a second, and while still missing features and isn’t even a 1.0 release yet, it’s better than the gimp already.
And it opened all my psds perfectly.
I know it is aimed at digital artists but I highly recommend Krita as a photo editing alternative. Even with it not being the primary focus it knocks all the socks off Gimp. Unsure of psd support though!
We still don’t have a good alternative for prepress production media. I’ve seen some workarounds, but Adobe is the only actively developed option feature complete for this use case. Mostly because the chances that prepress workers and offset printer operators are also FOSS fiends and developers abysmally low. Prepress is such a small industry too since most people don’t really care if their print media looks like shit
Even if these are slop it forces the large ai pushers to make some decisions regarding copyright. I hope.
AI, fucked by the very things its copied off of. If AI companies don’t get in trouble, neither should these clones/forks.
Same with pirating content. People only pirate because costs have continuously rose. Otherwise, if it were affordable, no one would need to pirate.
Massive nothing burger, those sloppy clones are fucking terrible in production, and dont believe me, look it up yourself.
Id love for it to be really of substantial value as it is now though.
Lots of anti-AI sentiments in here and I get that, but I’d like to discuss the implications here, cause this is actually somewhat revolutionary.
If I can just take any software and reverse-engineer it or recreate it to a precision that is practically indistinguishable from the original (not saying it really is in this case, but for the sake of discussion) and I then have copyright over that copy, doesn’t that turn things on it’s head? Doesn’t that make software essentially worthless? Any software you sell someone, they can recreate and distribute for free, legally (presumably). I suppose we’ve yet to see if this will really turn out to be legal, but it’s hard to argue how this is illegal, I would say - how is this different than a human closely studying Microsoft Word and “simply” writing their own version of the same program?
I’m not sure if this is good or bad honestly, but it sure is interesting. Anyone else have thoughts around how this affects the worth of software?
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.”
If you made an exact clone of Photoshop
Yes but you wouldn’t actually need to make your clone very different for the copyright to be entirely different and then surely you wouldn’t get sued? And I think in this case, it is definitely sufficiently different, it’s a completely different tech stack and while the UI is similar, it’s probably not identical (I haven’t checked though). But also you can’t really copyright UI beyond the design itself, the functionality is free game as far as I understand.
Also worth remembering that different countries may have different stances on this. I’m curious how the EU might handle it.
you can’t really copyright UI beyond the design itself, the functionality is free game as far as I understand.
It’s not just copyright. There are also patents to worry about. Those cover a specific process, like “click here, and the code selects all regions matching the same color (±5%)”. If you make an exact copy, surely you’ve violated some patents.
Sure, patent protections don’t last as long as copyright, and they can be defeated if you prove that it’s “obvious” or can show prior art, but it’s still an expensive legal battle against a megacorp. A vibe coder will likely fold at the first cease and desist.
There may never be a need to challenge Adobe’s patent lawyers in court.
This person used AI to clone commercial software, and then released the cloned software. Imagine instead someone developed an AI that could clone most commercial software…and then they simply published the AI open source. Now, anyone can download a tool that can clone software like Photoshop. They can clone Photoshop on their own computer, and that cloned copy never needs to be distributed anywhere.
Imagine Adobe trying to go after people that did that. It would be like trying to go after people that violate a patent for some device that they build in their garage, only use personally, and never sell. Could you in theory go after home tinkerers for patent infringement? Sure. But in practice it’s impossible to do at scale. Adobe will never even be able to find the people to sue.
Yes but you wouldn’t actually need to make your clone very different for the copyright to be entirely different and then surely you wouldn’t get sued?
Are you confident enough to bet 6-12 months of dev time and resources(possibly lawyer consultation fees) on that assumption ? because up until recently that’s what someone would need to do to find out.
It might be fine, but the threat of litigation is a part of the deterrent.
But also you can’t really copyright UI beyond the design itself, the functionality is free game as far as I understand.
As with all of these things, it’s region specific.
However, game mechanic patents and copyrights exists and are litigated regularly.
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 hope you’re right! Not that I think anyone can predict where this will lead at this time.
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.
I think this may seriously harm modding by preventing it from even happening on new games, which does scare me as a modder.
I did think about games too and I was about to use it as an example, but as software, I think games are actually much harder to legally copy and distribute, because so much of a game is its art assets. Sure you can copy the software no problem, but you can’t really copy the artistic expression of the game. You can’t copy Hades and keep the great illustrations and animations. You couldn’t keep the music or voice acting. All of that would be copyright infringement.
So games are actually somewhat legally protected still, I’d say, basically because they contain much more art and creativity than most other programs.
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.
Yes. It makes software worthless. People doubt these things but it’s done and set in stone already.
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.
You don’t even need to use Microsoft’s AI, you can use any AI you want that is capable enough for the task.
From a technical perspective, yes. I was looking at it from an angle where the company has released their own code via an agent they control. Sort of like calling Microsoft support and asking “hey, can you send me the source code for Office please?”
AI isn’t revolutionary. It’s theft.
It’s funny, but we’ve had LibreOffice for years. I’ll take the human made one, thanks.
But continue making the unaccountable Epstein class uncomfortable. Autodesk next, yes please. I’ll still use FreeCAD but boy is it quirky lol.
LibreOffice is used since years in Spain in companies and administrations
Freecad doesn’t click with me so I’ll be so excited for an autocad-like project
He already released cadcraft, I haven’t tried it yet
CADCraft appears to only be 2D CAD.
Why doesn’t the dev rather work on specific features sets on one existing project instead of building half baked fleet of slop.
Yeah, ArtCraft is very poorly made. It’s a bunch of AI tools jumbled together and is basic at best. It also buys into the entire Tech feudalism bullshit by being a cloud service.
If this came to parity with any of the billion dollar apps it’s trying to replace we would have new laws banning it somehow within a month
If it comes at parity and businesses start using it, then not only it would be banned but also the dev will be sued to hell for “infringing” their “patents” and “revenue loss” caused because of it.
No business would ever use these due to the lice we nightmare these projects would create.
You don’t know Indian small-mid businesses lol. They already pirate a lot of stuff. Adobe and Corel are very strict here—if they find out you are using an unlicensed version of their software, they send legal notices to pay a shit ton for the damages and buy the licensed one for a lock-in period before even suing. Most, if not all, give in because there is no way out of this. Yet a lot of them are willing to take this risk as the potential savings are much higher than the losses if caught.
If these businesses get a grey zone free product, they will happily switch. Big corpos will mostly not.
“creator” my ass
Excuse me, do you call this open source?
For real. I can open source my valueable projects to you. But what if I deliberately make it hard to read, like mangling it or minifying it?
Hell, every piece of JavaScript code on Earth is technically open source. If you can read assembly, everything is open source.
Only having the source code distributed is not open source in spirit. The intention of opening the source code is welcoming auditing, learning, contributing, to name a few.
“Opening” the source code of slop, with tons of meaningless boilerplates, non-logical paths and flows, heavily coupled modules and functions, thousand-line long functions, achieves none of the purpose of the intention.
I’m guessing they believe it meets the OSI definition of open source. Essentially that the code is licensed for redistribution.
Does this have tons of meaningless boilerplate and hard to follow call chains? I have read part of the source, and what I’ve seen looks pretty well organized, but if that is how you think the current models write code, you’ve missed many months.
Perhaps that’s the problem. If it’s bad, I can still tell and choose not to read it. If it seems to make sense but actually not, I’m just going to waste my valueab time.
Edit: Just clarified a single sentence.
But what if I deliberately make it hard to read, like mangling it or minifying it?
That you would not distribute the original source code, right? That is A source code, not THE. The generated source code by Claude Ai is THE new source code, there is no higher code generated from it. It is the implementation, the original source. It has an Open Source license. They do not mangle it and distribute a manipulated mangled version and hide the original source code.
What you criticize is the quality of code. But that is not a definition if something is Open Source. By all definitions, the distribution of original source code and a license compatible with Open Source is basically what Open Source means.
Only having the source code distributed is not open source in spirit.
Correct. It requires a license compatible with Open Source, which it is in this case.
“Opening” the source code of slop, with tons of meaningless boilerplates, non-logical paths and flows, heavily coupled modules and functions, thousand-line long functions, achieves none of the purpose of the intention.
This is irrelevant for a definition to be Open Source or not.
There is still a distinction between bad human-written source code and AI slop.
The human holds the copyright of his work and can do whatever he wants with it, including distributing it under a open/libre license, i.e., open source.
AI slop? Not so much. The model is very likely trained on stolen work. It’s tainted. Nobody owns the copyright of everything it generates. No one can “open source” it. The license every one receives is voided.
And both who (intentionally) releases bad code to the crowd lack the spirit of open source, but the AI one is also right out illegal.
I agree with this reply here 100%. My previous reply was just about the fact that code quality isn’t important in discussion of what takes to be an Open Source code or not. Because your previous argument was “it’s bad code, how can this possibly be Open Source” (paraphrased here just).
I also think if you cannot guarantee the process does not involve in any training data from Adobe software, then how can you proof this is really clean room implementation? And besides the fact that if majority of the code is vibe coded shouldn’t be copyrightable, because machines are not humans who has copyright. And to anyone who argues that LLMs are just tools, no, they are not. It’s more complicated than that.
The whole clean room thing is weird to me. If an llm room is used at all, how can it be a clean room?
Exactly what I’m saying.
deleted by creator
While it’s pretty funny that one of Microsoft’s crown jewels gets shit on with AI, I don’t want to start the pro- or contra AI discussion, but what now? They reverse engineered or rebuild, or however you want to call it, all of Office, Autodesk, hell, for the fun of it do SAP next. Even assuming a perfectly working copy, not getting sued into oblivion, and not the dude going into bankruptcy due to Claude token costs - but what now? There is no way they can manage several repositories of this size alone properly (no, claude doesn’t count). There is no way this gets the community and traction to self-manage.
Apart from a ridiculous invoice from Claude and proof that frontier LLMs can reverse engineer / clone well (…duh), this is a big pile of nothing.
FOSS communities probably won’t form around most of these projects, as you said. Assuming the software can be managed by a few people with LLMs, likely local in the very near future, it’s quite possible that plenty end users who didn’t use FOSS before would jump on these instead of paying money to MS or Adobe. That in itself is a huge win for the majority. Depriving MS from revenue that is. Then for community FOSS, this has potentially significant positive implications about our biggest challenge - dealing with proprietary formats and proprietary blobs. This could mean perfect .doc/.docx compatibility in LibreOffice. It could mean a perfectly working nouveau driver for NVIDIA GPUs. How about fixing the tons of bugs we workaround in motherboard firmware. Or fixing that corner case in Wine so it can run your fav obscure game. Or reverse-engineering communication protocol of cloud-connected IoT to integrate it in Home Assistant. Etc. Etc.
In short: FOSS is a social activity. Assuming this method can produce very good source from binaries, that itself won’t create FOSS communities, but FOSS communities can use it to significantly improve the FOSS they care about.
While I personally think you are right, I don’t think that any “serious” FOSS project will use sources from a fully LLM generated project.
and proof that frontier LLMs can reverse engineer / clone well (…duh), this is a big pile of nothing.
I don’t think this is proof.
It’s proof that they can make something that appears to reverse engineer / clone well.
To really know, we’d need to use it as daily drivers long enough to give it a good test. And it hasn’t been out long enough for that.
From previous experience we know that LLMs are great at confidently producing plausible output with problems that are hard to detect and fix without expert level knowledge and experience.
From previous experience we know that LLMs are great at confidently producing plausible output with problems that are hard to detect and fix without expert level knowledge and experience.
What experiences exactly? Whether the output is correct or just plausible and how many and how severe the problems are depends on the actual problem, and this statement is way too broad. There are also enough experiences where it works. It depends on how you use it.
I don’t see too much of a difference between a LLM producing plausible output as the result of reverse engineering and a human engineer producing plausible output as the result of reverse engineering. Again, we’re not talking about absolute experts doing this for the past 20+ years spending months to do this. For a “regular” engineer doing this, it’s the same best guess.
This is the big difference between AI boosters and normal people: most of us have experienced many times when the AI was confidently wrong and don’t like it as a result.
I want to coin a new term: Slop’n’source
Sloppy sauce
