Good software doesn't grow on AI. He's going to maintain all this, and keep up rapport before people even want to trust it. Even then, most professionals don't learn on 3rd party stuff cause that detracts from the process itself. Adobe isn't standard because it's expensive or even well made, it's because everyone uses it. This guy's stuff it a toy, it probably "works" but I doubt it's making anyone any money.

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

Spoiler alert: They won't.

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

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.

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.

He already released cadcraft, I haven't tried it yet

LibreOffice is used since years in Spain in companies and administrations

I think youre right, theyll try. Though for 'managing', I don't think that will matter. They don't really need to.

The point of being a legislative giant is that your lawyers use whatever angle will work on a technicality for whatever profit goal you're trying to achieve. Often throwing bullshit arguments one after another, to drown your opposition in paperwork, burden of proof or legal fees until they're forced to cave just to minimise losses.

Companies are abstract entities that don't have any actual principles of copyright to be hypocritical about, and the principles of the many people within them are scarcely relevant at scale as their jobs are dependant on compliance to rules imposed above them.

The owners of these companies won't have to manage anything, because they're insulated from consequence and the company is treated as a separate entity, for some reason.

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.

I'm an IP attorney. You don't have copyright over the thing you created with AI as you describe it. Copyright applies only to a minimally original expression by a human at this time.

Yes. It makes software worthless. People doubt these things but it's done and set in stone already.

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.”

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.