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.
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.
The difference is the original source code, and similar source code that is incompatibly licensed, was in the LLM training data, making it not a clean room.
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.”