Even if it works despite being AI slop that’s been developed in a mere 4 days (?) and somehow has all these contributors, I’m not sure I agree with the idea.
It’s cool that they went with Rust for it, but I would have much preferred if all that effort went towards improving GIMP and existing open formats.
If it works then I guess it’s the same end result at the end of the day, but it would suck if GIMP doesn’t end up being the one to put a nail on Photoshop’s coffin after all these years of serious development by humans.
Edit: I already see the kneejerk dislikes coming, I’m just interested in starting a conversation about the idea of it, I also dislike the fact that it’s AI slop as I already implied. I’d appreciate joining the conversation instead of dislike bombing with no argument.
On the one hand, I am opposed to AI slop.
But on the other hand, I am greatly in favour of anything that makes life even slightly more difficult for Adobe.
This is a tricky one.
From their own documentation:
opening and re-saving a document renders the same for 307 of the 309 files in the psd-tools test set and 169 of 170 in our mixed ag-psd/psd-tools set
Just what I want in my editing software, the assurance that my saved files will mostly render properly when reopened in the same program…
This is exactly what will sink any attempts to do similar things, it’s not the broad functionality of the software, it’s all the billions of edge cases.
The LLMs will be able to get all the general requirements mostly right, and that’s where it will stop. The subtle errors and bugs will pile up steadily as the codebase grows too large and complex for even frontier models to accurately summarize, and the people who vibed it to begin with don’t actually understand what is happening, so they can’t troubleshoot effectively.
Automated bug reports will pile up, agents will be dispatched in greater numbers, leading to cost issues and further complicating and compounding the errors in a bloated and convoluted codebase. The leads of the project will get burned out and abandon the project, leaving a giant, rotting, husk behind. Software that was forever, “almost working properly.”
As I have said many times: license washing works both ways, this is the end of proprietary software as we know it, no more would I have a need to install a sketchy driver inside a windows VM just to use some crap USB microscope
I think this is a nice test to see, if license washing machines can defeat adobes lawyers.
Utterly doomed licensing. I mean rule #1 of a clean-room reimplementation is to not openly admit you’re ripping off another product.
Secondly, as others have said, “AI did it” is not a clean room. Otherwise I can make the next pokemon game and just say that I got AI to reinvent the word pokemon and to generate all the pictures of pikachu therefore I’m good.
Thirdly, the amount of horrible AI verbiage makes the documentation alone awful to read, I have no temptation to try this.
Do they even say which version of Photoshop they’re mimicking?
AI slop.
even the people over on hacker news concede that they are unusably buggy so… i think vibe coded slop is vibe coded slop - use gimp
It’s really funny going back and forth between lemmy and HN to compare the reactions
It’s AI slop. It’s not worth a discussion.
Use Krita or Gimp.
Arguing such thing is “open source” is misleading as 1/ contributors can hardly call themselves “authors” of this code 2/ nobody can demonstrate that the plagiarizing engine they used did not plagiarize proprietary source code or source code published under an incompatible license.
as in “you cannot claim a room is clean if you have never been in it, haven’t built it, and cannot even know what’s in it”
Not to mention the hoard of software patents Adobe will unleash their horde of lawyers with if this becomes anything more than a bad joke. Although that would make for an interesting precedent.
Either Adobe wins which maybe will shut up vibe coders or vibe coders win which maybe will shut up Adobe. Either way win win
Just more bullshit hype. This project will go nowhere.
I would have much preferred if all that effort went towards improving GIMP and existing open formats.
If it’s AI slop I’m glad they didn’t shit up gimp with it
If the authors used the same method to improve GIMP, they’d be introducing a bunch of slop code to GIMP. This code is not going to be of GIMP quality.
I also doubt this will hold a candle to GIMP for the aforementioned reasons. It might appeal to a small audience, but I do not expect it to dethrone GIMP any time soon.
I mean that shit is legitimately funny. Personally, I don’t care that much that these people are using the current fad* to (potentially) destroy the business model Adobe popularized. The real questions are this:
- Is this project even maintainable?
- will a community of maintainers even exist long term?
Not really a clean room implementation. Source has been leaked. Plus GIMP and other FOSS tools that implement the same functionality are in the training data. Very likely this “clean room” implementation is just laundering code.
Clean room reversing is just laundering code, always has been.
Rewriting code into English/GGUF/Klingon/whatever, and then getting someone else to rewrite it back into code is just laundering it. Its been legally accepted for a while, and many projects we take for granted today started that way.
Whether this case is “clean” enough is up to the courts ultimately, but its laundering either way.
God I wish one of these megacorps would bite on suing one of these projects, if only so there is precedent of punishment for AI code-theft. The fact that they won’t touch them for fear of damaging their golden goose means it’s de-facto fair use.
I have to admit, “AI copyright laundering Mexican standoff” isn’t an angle I had considered.
Honestly it’s one of the few scenarios I did consider at the start. On the one hand, your megacorps like Disney (for example) absolutely want to replace human artists with slopbots. On the other hand, Disney does not want Joe Rando to be able to type “make me a Spiderman comic” into the slopbot.
Same, and I’d love for copyright to die, except I need capitalism to die first
In this case the clean room is probably “We told Claude to write it and we don’t care if Claude has a bunch of leaked Adobe source code in it’s training data.”
It’s an interesting exercise. If agentic AI is capable of easily recreating commercial software, I wonder if that’ll make some software companies change their stance on it.
Not interested at all in using it though. I’m sure it’ll be buggy as hell and I much prefer using software developed with actual care and purpose.
