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.
Can one of the unscrupulous fucks who thinks incentivising closed source projects to go fully cloud based is a good idea at least shell out the tokens for a rewrite of FL Studio? Even just the Spitfire Audio LABS suite (from before they got hijacked by splice)?
I get that people are complaining about bugs, but its still quite an achievement to decompile to commented source with meaningful function names and variables, and just be able to recompile.
It turns out this is not what author claims to have done. Recreation from scratch is the claim. https://github.com/storytold/photocraft
Age of decompiling to reasonably named functions is here though. https://github.com/morluto/rea . Which is what I assumed was used to clone.
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Yeah, the guy that just released all Adobe products a week ago that barely work, surely releasing another suite of tools next weekend instead of fixing the plethora of bugs is a good sign that he is capable to keep maintaining a project in long term.
I did try the PhotoSlop, and within the like 20 minutes I couldn’t make the canvas the size I asked for, the work (mostly trying random stuff, but that’s not the point) did not get saved when I saved it, and it froze when I alt-tabbed, so I lost all of it.
I’m sure it’s getting them a lot of attention, but why would I use anything of his when he got bored with it and moved to another project in literally a week while it has absolutely blocker issues?
I heard next week he’s releasing GTA 7 made by AI.
Rookie mistake, clearly forgot to add “make no mistakes” to the prompts. Also, ironic that his suite is called “ArtCraft”, too bad its creation is so far from any art or craft.
I’ve seen people mention that he in the “AI art is art” crowd, even his username might actually be that? I didn’t check, but that would fit.
Bullshitting is an art, I guess
Please support real FOSS projects instead of this artificial slop.
Sure but pitting leeches like Adobe against AI is also hilarious.
I will also be sticking with and supporting Libre Office, however destabilizing the software monopolies like this can only lead to good.
I will be taking a look at InDesign, as that’s the only one so far that i have not been able to find FOSS.
lol His Username is “ai_art_is_art”… get fucked
You’re gonna have to get over it.
This guy and his crew speedran twenty years of FOSS development over a week of manic effort. What the fuck have you created lately?
I’m not getting over it.
You’re just going to have to accept that fact and get over it.Have fun dying mad about it. The rest of us will be over here doing stuff anyway, while you seethe.
The tech isn’t going anywhere. It already runs on your phone - like, on your phone. No one could stop you. The part that does the scary thing is small and fast and will only get stronger. Most people are going to use it for utterly unremarkable tasks, or the sort of above-board goals they never found time for.
Insisting they’re not in any way responsible for what they make, or that it is utterly disqualfied from being creative, personal, distinct, or expressive… that’s only gonna go over well with like-minded curmudgeons. Grumble away, I guess.
I dug up dirt with my hands and filtered it into clay and made a little bowl.
ai can absolutely get fucked.
One thing that really puts me off AI is how its boosters talk to other people.
Also I disagree with that label. I’m taking the radical position that… it’s probably fine. It largely works, and people can do stuff with it. Staying mad about it is poorly justified and bad for your health. It’s just a chatbot. Make your peace.
Meanwhile the insistence that ‘AI [thing] isn’t [thing]!’ gets shakier and fuzzier, but no less loudly confident. An AI cartoon isn’t a drawing, sure. But it is an image conveying someone’s idea. AI music is still a song, by any definition. It’s usually well within western music theory. AI reverse engineering has demonstrably produced byte-for-byte identical results, and some folks still insist it doesn’t count, somehow. What is anyone supposed to say to that? It’s an absurd denial framed like philosophy. A counter-poke and saying ‘relax’ do not make someone a delusional cultist.
You have to be able to understand disagreement in terms besides an opposite extreme.
get fucked
Et tu?
God the reply is SO RUDE.
Anyone script kiddie can fork libre office and call it their own.
So I guess I just did it 3 times while writing this comment, idk what took this dev so long
These are clean-room re-implementations.
Do you think LibreOffice includes a 99% identical Photoshop clone?
Clean room implementation would be taking the spec, API calls, etc. & writing the code that implements them from scratch. This is de-compiling existing code & converting it to another programming language. Same source routines in another language.
It’s like taking a book written in Chinese, translating it to English, and calling it your own.
Bullshit.
Clean room implementation would be taking the spec, API calls, etc. & writing the code that implements them from scratch.
Which they did.
This is not a decomp. They gave the tool all of the available specs, and the expected behavior, and let it run. They had a suite of test PSD files but no Adobe software.
Please explain to these other commenters how and why that counts.
May I ask where this is documented? I tried searching, but there’s just too many results to parse, and/or my Google-fu is failing me.
I find it hard to believe near full feature parity could be achieved in under a month for multiple major apps even for an experienced dev using AI. It’s a bit hard to buy.
This project is weeks old. I dunno what detailed writeup you expect to exist. But the project’s Github page says: “Implemented from public specs and observed behaviour only. No proprietary code, shaders or assets.”
There’s no secret sauce in Photoshop. Image editors have been done. Every individual feature is a tractable problem. You can now buy your way out of those, in bulk.
No such thing as clean room LLM output, unless you wrote everything in its training model.
It’s in fact by definition as dirty as possible.
Right, because clean room means you’ve never seen any code in your life.
People - spicy autocomplete was not going to derive C from first principles. Neural networks are example-based. The model still obviously never saw Photoshop’s source code, because that shit’s not on Github.
The models were built upon the data, code, art, and texts stolen from a generation of internet users and artists, and from generations of writers.
Do you seriously believe that these companies which built themselves on theft would stop stealing once their first model was built?
If a single adobe programmer (or even employee, depending on how lax their internal security is) used a cloud-hosted LLM at work, you can be assured that whatever code and data that malware could access from their computer ended up being part of the next generation of that company’s model, and eventually of any other’s.
Even if they didn’t, if any windows 11 computer had access to the code you can be certain it scrapped it and sent it home to be given to openAI and any other “AI” company willing to pay.
Thieves will steal. No LLM model ever started clean, and they only get filthier and filthier with time.
That’s still not what clean room means.
Y’all will bend over inside-out to pretend these models need a terabyte of linear algebra just to copy-paste a text file they obviously did not have.
I’m with you on your first paragraph - unless we’re doing some pioneering work, we learn it from somewhere.
But the possibility of decompiling means you don’t have to have access to the source just so long as you can access the code in some form - including the generated executable.
C-clean room AI?
So like someone wrote trillions of lines of training data just for this project?
Ooorrrr did a fancy search engine hype them up that they’re a cool kid now and they wanted to believe it so bad they’re willing to claim ownership over anything
Neoliberalism sure has poisoned our minds.
Despite what bosses and market pundits will tell you when they’re trying to underpay you, the value in a software development effort is not just the end product that you can sell to customers — it’s also the knowledge of how the codebase works, and how to modify it over time.
I’m not an ostrich when it comes to AI-powered development. I’ve been to multiple conferences and courses over the past year specifically about developing with AI. My Youtube and Substack and podcast history is multiple hours per day of content about AI news, practices, and opinions. My weekly visit to my bookstore has been mostly to pick up or place an order for books about AI. I use agents for my daily coding tasks at work. I have multiple local LLMs on multiple machines at home that I use from multiple harnesses. I have ralph loops, I have full-AFK workflows, I have custom sandboxes.
I could go on, but you get the point: I’m not standing on the sidelines when I say…
The vast majority of AI use today is horrifically irresponsible. Current AI use is digital asbestos in the walls of our technological society. It will take generations to fully recover from this. I am not excited, I’m not gonna “get over it”, and I’m not gonna grant any degree of false equivalence between actual FOSS and these slop stunts.
The bubble cannot pop soon enough. Not just so that we can minimize the economic damage, or so that hardware prices can once again experience gravity, but so that we can actually be honest about what this stuff is and how to use it.
almost everyone wants to get a good deal, corperate people included.
If only some technology could could summarize huge quantities of text, or modify code the user doesn’t fully understand.
Bemoaning capitalism is certainly one response to an aggressively libre / gratis clone of infamously greedy software.
The bubble will pop any day now. God willing, every leading company swiftly goes under. And then, people will continue using this technology, because long-term maintainability is such an absurdly high-level concern that it obviously won’t stop anyone from exploiting this witchcraft. This is just a thing computers can do now. It will continue to improve as people fuck with how networks are designed and trained, even if none of them are throwing around three-comma budgets.
Businesses won’t need you to understand and support their processes, because they’re not gonna hire you, they’ll just make the software themselves. It’ll be a fragile mess, much like their databases. And much like their databases, so long as billing works and they keep making spoons or whatever, apparently that’s good enough.
Downvotes won’t change that this works.
Sneering at people using the tool won’t make the tool go away. It produces running code, to spec, real quick.
I have a few original projects I haven’t been arsed to finish (or in some cases, start) and now I could have them finished by close of business Friday, for the cost of a night out. And y’all would make excuses for how it somehow doesn’t count. It’s not my idea, it’s not my intent, it’s not my design, it’s not my insight… whatever. It would make something real which doesn’t exist yet. I would be the only human to blame for it. Once it is demonstrably made, either I made it, or the robot did. If your philosophy can’t handle that then your philosophy is wrong.
If this project still exists in a year, I’ll eat my words
It’s already in a functional state. Eat now, braggart. If they achieve their goals within the month, clap the dust from their hands, and walk away with the job done, how is that less impressive than bumbling along for an entire year, to accomplish the same thing?
Apparently you don’t understand what “maintenance” is.
This slop project is going to fall apart within a year due to being utterly unmaintainable. Will it take Adobe and Microsoft down with them? One could hope, but that doesn’t make their codebase good.
Cause it was scraped from those original projects and doesn’t exist without them
You can flex it “only” took the entire dev time of libre office, all open source software, and every book that has been scraped + the time it took the dev to make, but to argue they made this solo is laughable.
If you want to sit with the big kids you gotta be able to handle the heat, Microsoft changes their document format more than their taskbar - I strongly doubt this dev even understands how their files are read.
Do you think there’s a Libre Modern Warfare 2? Because the same tool did the same shit to Modern Warfare 2. Show me the open-source repositories that simply copied from.
I do believe there are more shooters than just MW2, is it at all binary compatible? That would impress me (cause its impossible for an ai without scraping the source lmao)
Its like how they ‘revived’ the dire wolf by getting a white husky. Like imitation isnt equivalence, even if you slap the same title on it.
OK. I bet you could trace most of the code back to LibreOffice. AI couldn’t have done this without the countless FOSS projects that already have.
An AI rewrite is just open source with more steps
Also theft.
Legally it isn’t, actually. Morally, yes.
Check out “AI has a labor issue, not a copyright issue” chapter of “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI” by Cory Doctorow
It’s a hard chapter to read, but it’s important to understand.
EDIT: I love the downvotes for speaking the truth, seriously people, please understand. It’s important.
I’ll stick to Libre Office for now.
Maybe AI can fix LibreOffice’s horrible user interface
Yes please do the Autodesk tools without the insane price, Gbs of bloat, insane DRM and only on the cloud crap and with Linux compatibility and being open source so all the little quality of life improvements that everyone has been demanding for decades are finally done within a month.
Autodesk has been sitting on its laurels for decades by being industry standard. About time someone knocks them down a few pegs. I just want to make things to 3D print to use in my own house. I shouldn’t have to put up with all that shit.
I hope they keep going and that the legal system won’t be weaponized against them. Liberating those tools will unlock so much more innovation in the world.
Oh, he already has AutoCad, called cadcraft.
Feel free to try it out and let me know how well it works.
I played around with it a little. Seems pretty great for 2D CAD although I don’t have much experience in that. This program is ancient by modern standards.
What I am really interested in is them making a clone of Inventor or Fusion360. That will be huge for anyone who owns a 3D printer.
We might get SolidWorks with a functioning Undo before GTA VI.
Maybe they release a vibe coded gta 6. GTA Vibe City
I hate AI as much as the next Lemmy user but the new ability for AI to near effortlessly decompile code into readable source code is insane.
This is such a social upheaval of established tech empires. Im not about to go installing these vibe coded apps mainly for securty reasons but you cant deny its insanely impressive how this is even possible this quickly.
I truly believe this is what will burst the ai bubble. Because tech companies probably didnt want the whole world open sourced lol
Or it could usher in an age of cloud-only apps where customers don’t have access to the binaries so they can’t reverse engineer them.
This is already a clean-room reimplementation, not a binary decomp.
Lol would be fun to watch all of big tech turning hostile to AI.
New conspiracy theory: all the bugs and shitty code generated by LLMs are actually corporate safeguards to ensure you don’t create actually working competing products
For a while I have been thinking that all this nonsense about AI world domination and lousy safe guards on grok enabling people to do indecent stuff is just a way for fastforwarding us into passing regulations for hardware gated LLMs so that people can’t use open models too easily. After all, introducing bugs will shoot them in their own foot if open models surpass them.
As for shitty code, I think the more unmaintainable it is the better for them because then you rely on their services to maintain the code and eventually they might quite substantially ramp up prices provided open LLMs remain underdeveloped or hard to access.
I look forward to people dropping the performative ingroup signalling before saying anything positive about this technology.
good luck
it’ll a generation
and it’ll get worse before then because ai will be literally collapsing our society
I give it another year.
It’s already like ‘I’m as vegan as they come, but you wanna go get some brisket?’
im about ready to just go full luddite on a hill somewhere
pentiumpunk amish, making your own chips in a shed with a quartz tube furnace
Yup. Experienced it myself. Had a manufacturer who used Linux drag their feet at releasing certain kernel module sources (even though the binary clearly states they’re GPLv2).
Threw Claude at it and overnight it managed to reconstruct most of the modules, instruction for instruction, even throwing in a few bugfixes for free…
How long will it take before Macroslop adds detection in their AI that says “you may not implement this feature as it is copyrighted by Macroslop”?
sure to make users find an alternative to macroslop to give their money to to lick to the center of the slopsie roll.
Just tell it you’re wearing a green shirt!
It’ll happen very shortly before these companies find out how well local models compete.
Mistral is a few weeks out from releasing a 1T model nicknamed Le Chonk. Running that on consumer hardware would take some shenanigans… but these dorks are getting pretty good at shenanigans.
Any sharply reduced distillations from that will have to compete with e.g. Qwen 3.8 27B. I haven’t seen it mentioned in any specific projects, but it does have Xbox 360 decomp plugins.
