Comment by baranul
3 days ago
That is possible, crowdfund the money up front based on reputation or the buzz surrounding the idea. The more popular something is, however, the more likely it will become a target for copycats.
Part of the issue is that people can feed the idea, descriptions, and pictures into the AI. Thus create knockoffs, for their crowdfund or as the basis for their similar software.
If the original person ever actually releases software, they can buy a copy and feed to the AI, to then beef up the features in the previously created similar software. The difference between the original and copycats can be few to just about none.
Unless the original creator is willing to fight it out in court, there is little they can do about the situation. Updates made in the original, can be "transferred" to the copycats. AI makes the speed and quality orders of magnitude higher.
It's happening. Check Artcraft. And Adobe could still profit from it. Custom plugins for companies, interop, optimization, rock-solid polished releases (and more optimized than ever) than vanilla MIT builds...
Also as a plus every user would be trained on Adobe's workflow. Companies would just pay Adobe for stable releases... and support. Ah, yes, the LLM's... sure. But when you have humans on your side, things get explained much better, even if Adobe points to an AI too to troubleshoot. They know how to explain problems to an AI and tell the best solutions to the user back and forth.
How that's all going to go down remains to be seen, because it's not clear how Adobe and Microsoft (who have very deep pockets) view the situation or what their response is going to be.
While it is true that money could possibly be made indirectly and around the product (e.g. training, support, ads), the questions surrounding doing the equivalent of turning their IP into open-source remains. Usually, dominant companies don't like change or having to figure out new ways to obtain revenue, other than what's direct and obvious to them.
As for customization and plugins, that looks to be an AI versus IP problem too: (1) that companies would turn to Adobe or Microsoft, versus using their own AI (2) 3rd parties reverse engineering their plugins with AI.
Most likely way that it appears possible, is some type of licensing deal between the AI company and the original IP owner. Would be surprised if they do that smoothly, prior to lots of court fights, because corporate types usually don't like to share.
They can't prevent people from making their own in-house clones. They can take down Artcraft/whatever OSS repo but it's meaningless. I have my own C++ Photoshop/Office clones that I've been using for a few months now. Full replacement for anything Microsoft/Adobe has put out. How are they going to prevent me from using my own code? Or how will they prevent anyone else from just vibing up another Artcraft replacement (in case it gets taken down)?
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