Comment by lifeisloving
19 hours ago
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.
Copyright is so flawed... This would mean an hommage is a breach of intellectual property in general, even if you paint it completely differently (say watercolor vs oil)
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
It is very unlikely that LLM had access to original source code of Photoshop.
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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.