Comment by echelon
21 hours ago
No, we explicitly do not use reverse engineering. We do not decompile binaries, we do everything 100% clean room:
https://github.com/storytold/photocraft (inspired by Photoshop)
https://github.com/storytold/wordcraft (inspired by Word)
https://github.com/storytold/pdfcraft (one of the more mature apps)
https://github.com/storytold/vectorcraft (another app close to 1:1 parity)
(etc.)
Using REA for something as high profile as what we're doing is likely to result in lawsuits. We're doing everything we can by the books.
We cannot look at Adobe sources. Use of Ghidra is disallowed.
REA is probably great for personal apps and for abandonware, but I think if you publish the results and it's found to have decompiled the original proprietary sources in discovery, you might be in for a bad time.
Using an LLM is not a clean room, imo. Its just IP laundering. Which is fine I guess if everyone is doing it, including the companies you're stealing from. I just dont know what the implications will be for progress.
Licensing/copyrighting encouraged people to think up of new things, and new ways of doing something. Now we're just all copying eachother.
What intellectual property is being laundered here if it's not even the same ecosystem (C++ vs Rust)? If it's so easy, and you just need to rebatch something existing, why has nobody done this over the last 20 years?
Adobe almost certainly has patents covering aspects of Photoshops design and tools?
Microsoft famously has patents covering aspects of the ribbon interface in Microsoft office, which of course this suite must implement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribbon_(user_interface)#Patent...
Meanwhile, Wikipedia has a policy that says screenshots of applications have to be "as small a version as possible" in order to meet the fair use exception for presentation of copyright work. I can only imagine an exact clone of the interface could be similarly ruled to infringe on Adobe's intellectual property.
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Your brain is an IP laundering machine. And it has been doing that even before we had any IP laws.
I agree. The vast amount of data ingested and internalized by LLMs has effectively been "laundered". But they are so powerful and evolving so fast that no one can be spared of their impact. We have to to learn to live with it. Traditional proprietary software being "laundered" is just one part of the broader story...
all human culture and creation is a form of "ip laundering" i guess
Doesn't clean room typically apply to cases where the "dirty" team has legitimate access to copyrighted code, like the IBM PC BIOS which was published in the technical reference manual, and uses this access to write a functional specification for the "clean" team?
I'm not sure how clean room would apply to commercial applications distributed in binary form, as there's no way to look at even disassembled code without violating the license agreement and therefore being in breach of contract and subject to potential copyright infringement claims for copying or even continuing to use the software, let alone cloning it, and surely you're not going to be subject to a copyright claim based on familiarity with the application from merely using it.
The issue is that LLMs very likely have access to the source code of these products as part of their training data, and are then being used to generate clones. There's no barrier in the middle to ensure copyright violations don't leak
The reason why 'reverse engineering' has gotten so good is because what we're actually seeing is fully automated luxury plagiarism
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The practical uses are more applicable to laundering open source code covered by copyleft licensing like GNU.
This is novel Rust/egui code that I imagine looks nothing like Adobe code. I've never seen their code, but it must be a mess of old C++, right?
It's considerably faster than their apps (at startup) too.
Well I hope they trust their LLMs completely, because I'm sure Adobe is currently going over their source code with a very fine comb to build a case. And they have LLMs to help with comparing too.
People made new and better things just like companies without copyright too. In recent times companies made things worse too.
Please don't take offence by this, but:
If AI models can generate designs faster and produce work that is "good enough", what is the actual future of design tools and the design profession in your opinion?
I've tested this myself with some frontier models and the results are kinda impressive enough that it raised the question if design skills are already obsolete. If that is the case, what use are these tools now?
In the future everything will be some form of command line interface. Don’t worry about design.
Good enough is not really good enough.
I've seen a lot of "really cool unique designs" that are obviously just a digested regurgitation of amalgamated corporate slop. Anyone wanting an actual unique design language needs to hire actual designers.
Those designers may use AI tools but the tooling isn't to where they can be completely replaced. I challenge anyone to show me an e2e LLM design toolkit that can actually replace a designer, not just one shotted "wow that looks so cool" character designs.
> We do not decompile binaries, we do everything 100% clean room
AFAIK clean room does not forbid decompilation, I meant that's how it's been done for ages. What's important is that the observer does not write the code, to avoid being impressed by the decompiled one, risking creating a copy close enough to deem it copyright infringing on the original.
Because the copyright applies to the actual code.
How do you know llms you are using were not trained on decompiled apps?
why would that matter? That sounds like a problem between Adobe and the AI companies.
Would love to see an InDesign clone that supports writing to and from their proprietary format.
The death of IP in the west. Good thing? Bad thing? Who knows. Definitely the start of something big though.
Mightn't be so bad if all the value wasn't being captured by trillion dollar corps, despite them benefiting off the labor and creativity of countless non consenting individuals
Those trillion dollar corps also employ millions of people in very high paying jobs. And the extraordinary stock returns have made their engineers (and countless public investors) wealthy across the past half century.
People wishing for the death of the mega corps, are directly wishing for the obliteration of millions of great jobs.
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IP is not dying. It’s being consolidated to just a few mega corps. Good thing? Bad thing? Definitely the start of something big though.
Imaginary Property was always an illusion, one which is now crumbling quickly despite a lot of desperate attempts at maintaining it.
Everything was, is, and always will be a derivative work.
Wow. Maybe AI can win artists over after all.
great work, congratz.
The AI labs already figured it out:
1) reverse engineer the code 2) train a model on the code 3) use the model to write the clean code
Step 2 is the key “cleaning” process
So maybe a good strategy would be to use something like REA, put it on GitHub, wait for the LLMs to train on it, then just use the frontier models
/s
I prefer the word *laundering
LLM's have already trained on similar enough code
Even better, 1 and 2 done, just move to 3 and profit