Ever since AI reversed engineered Adobe products, we can now get it to run much easier on Linux natively. At least something positive is coming from AI. I’m not saying AI is the bees knees or anything, but i can’t lie and say im not enjoying how we’re now using AI against these greedy corpos who told us to get used to not owning our games and constantly shoving AI down our throat. Well, now we’re using it just like you wanted! 😊 (well I’m still not actually going to unironically use it but you get what I meant lol)
They’re gonna keep coming after hardware ownership and jacking up prices like they’ve been working on. Even if you get an Intel Arc Pro card that’s moderately affordable, you’re gonna need a reBAR / Above 4G decoding compatible mobo to handle it, along with all the other system components that are already unaffordable for most.
They’re gonna buy up platforms like they did with Hugging Face to stop as much proliferation of the open-weight models as they can. And enshittify them ala every other thing they own
No more tinfoil hats and excuses, this shit is happening and is gonna keep happening. If revenue can go up, they’re gonna make it go up at any cost.
The final cost may be deadly.
Edit: for the record, I agree with you.
“The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them”
You realize there are non-ai alternatives?
You are not going to get a 10-year graphic designer to exclaim “Oh, wow, it’s called GIMP? I’ve never heard of it before, thank you!”
Yes but the Adobecucks have proven time and again they’d rather take ungreased Adobe pole than learn an alternative.
Read a review by someone, this vibed up solution isn’t going to win anyone over either because it evidently sucks. It may imitate the UI more closely for what works, but not much works adequately.
Tbf it’s declared “early alpha”, so not surprising.
At least my experience is that a vibe coded app gets to ‘early alpha’ then stays there. If AI is augmenting a developer who is otherwise competent and they don’t let it get ahead of their own understanding, it can work out though not as ‘miraculously fast’ as this. If AI can oneshot an application then it can also work out. If a project vibes itself in a week or two to ‘looks like what it should be but isn’t good enough’, then thus far every one I see is doomed to sit there, because the AI can’t finish it and if you let the GenAI produce that much code, it’s generally not serviceable even for very capable developers.
I spent a lot of time last week basically peeling back an overly vibed attempt at an application by a colleague. It was too flaky and incomplete and deleting large sections of it was frankly more practical than trying to rework it. It had gotten to the point where every attempt to try to have GenAI fix it one way would just break something else. That project was, essentially a fairly small command line utility, I fear to think what something the level of a Photoshop knockoff would be like.
I found it doing quite decently when using it with strongly opinionated web frameworks and some rules. After all, most web projects are mostly CRUD anyway. For desktop apps it seems mixed, probably because there aren’t many frameworks that give structure. It did however throw together a working app for me so i can map my mouse buttons, but it’s in golang. I’m more of a python / php guy, so i can’t really tell if it’s coded correctly. It didn’t delete my computer yet, though.
With this photoshop clone however, i’m surprised it starts at all. Last time i’ve tested something more complex for desktop, it failed spectacularly. So i’m quite curious how far they can push this thing. What i don’t like, is that GenAI stuff they have to generate images. Coding is one thing, but using it for “automated art” is not so great…
Ya it’s a buggy mess. It’s foreshadowing Adobe’s doom and that in itself deserves a cheer.
GIMP is awful though. I havent seen the new ui yet, but the old one was unusably bad
try krita, specially for digital painting with tablet
I’m not trying to make a painting with a drawing tablet, though. I just want to edit the alpha values of an image. From what I can tell, nothing offers that type of basic image editing. Paint.net comes close, but even that can be finicky and relies on community addons that often become unavailable.
Make a circle.
Good fucking luck.
Circular select, fill?
Have you considered that photoshop is also awful, and pretty much visually 1:1 to gimp at a glance
Yeah but Adobe just works. Although recent versions suck hard. But there’s nothing wrong with a pirated older version. As long as Adobe doesn’t get any money it’s fine for me.
AI is just pure evil, which is harmful to the environment, water and power supply, and helps tech giants become even more powerful. Zero tolerance for AI.
I don’t want to incentivize using tools made through stealing other’s work then claiming it’s for the people
I think it’s worth reminding people where the general left wing FOSS conscious was before AI. Every week we’d see an article that was the antithesis of ownership, from celebrating the end of Disney copyright to loopholes in trademarks and the like, it was the heart of a lot of content.
There is a fantastic foreword foreword in The Picture of Dorian Gray from Oscar Wilde about art for art’s sake that I think about a lot, which really boils down to a litany for art for art’s sake, (and by extension education for education’s sake), that is overlooked in favour of being for the sake of profit or capital.
I am of the opinion that in response to AI, we have drifted from a left wing overall movement that rejected ownership in this way, to a protective, defensive style that is largely that stance of a neo-luddide, without any awareness of what ended that era, which was an insufficient boycott and misspent manpower.
I want to say, I’m someone who is overall against AI, I’m not sure how to prove it, any any time I try to explain points like this, people claim AI wrote my comment.
AI is evil, and has enormous destructive capacity, but making the walled garden of large capitalist software irrelevant in favour of FOSS solutions is a huge win, even in regards to being a result of AI.
I’d rather the water, electrical and creative debt that is incurred by AI is paid off by programs like this, than see companies like Adobe operate, particularly considering they literally changed their TOS to train their internal AI on user data.
Either way, your data is being used to train AI, regardless of if you use Photoshop or Photocraft, but one is FOSS, and openly made with that data.
it’s very simple to understand: the companies stole everything and charge for access to it, and this is wrong. There is no contradiction with pre-llm leftist thought.
I’m 99.9% sure that Adobe and all other big tech companies are using LLMs to generate code. So it’s slop either way, but one is at least free and open source
Of course the established alternatives like Krita, Gimp, Inkscape and others are even better, no questions there
Lemme be the first to say fuck Adobe and I’ve been sailing the high seas for their products since CS4, and it pains me to say this but Krita and GIMP have a long way to go before they can match the range of functionality on Photoshop.
I genuinely really hope an open source project comes along to blow Photoshop out of the water but as someone who has been using it for 24 years, no one else is quite there yet.
It’s wild to see the divergence between Hump and Qgis.
10 years ago both were barely functional. Qgis however, is now I would say better than it’s corporate alternative.
Probably a book could be written about the differences between the two projects.
I can confirm for Microsoft. AI is pushed on us so hard that we must use it everywhere, even for those processes that can be automated with a script (I.e.deterministic).
Can confirm, at least for Adobe Acrobat.
There’s an annoying popup ive had to deal with at work where it prompts to have AI summarize my document or some such. Takes up only ~5% of the viewing pane, but needs to be manually exited out of for EVERY document opened.
Well, I was thinking about the Adobe devs using LLMs for “coding” their new updates, but yeah, them pushing GenAI onto the users is also a good point
Air can simplify the agent part, but not the four-machine SSH part. At least not yet. Inside IntelliJ, Air can give you a single place to run Gemini CLI, Codex, Claude Agent, and Junie, including running agents in parallel (you can also add other ACP-compatible agents).
So your workflow could be:
-
In the Air prompt window, use Claude for a complex refactoring
-
In the same window, use Codex for a separate implementation task
-
In the same window, use Gemini for another task or review
… -
Become more dependent on the AI, atrophy gradually
-
Think less, pay more
-
Pay more, think less
-
Pay more
-
Depend more
-
Pay more
-
Give everything to those who run DataCenters or have unlimited access to LLM/AI
-
Become homeless
-
Devalue and obliterate your art and history
-
Devalue and obliterate human art and history
-
Depend more
-
Depend more
-
Depend more
-
Become biomass
-
Die
…so infinitely much is getting devalued, dehumanized, ruined…
…I’ve been a developer for more than 20 years now…
…such an ineffably sorrowful time to live…Source (JetBrains Air: Building a System of Products for Agentic Software Development…) [comments]
-
As i recall, the claim for the entire suite was that it was “clean-room”. No code stolen… unless you are concerned that the entire model is the result of stolen code… in which case we are in agreement.
This is ArtCraft we’re talking about, right? The “Adobe” thing is just marketing. It’s just a bunch of AI tools sewn together.
Most certainly the latter but if it’s used for open source then in not too mad about it
Edit. I also won’t be angry if AI eventually cures cancer. I’ll celebrate.
Which model are they using in their product, how do we know it’s stolen?
Can you point me to a model, capable of writing useful code, where the 100% of the codebase used to train the model came from people who explicitly consented to their code being used to train a model? Or was it all scraped from anywhere any everywhere they could find it regardless of consent?
Photo editing apps like Photoshop do not use LLMs, they use ML image models
Aside from some very old models that were not that good, I don’t know of any recent LLM models that are not built on stolen properties, with complete disregard for any licensing term.
stealing from the people is wrong, but i support stealing from the bourgeoise.
If you’re advocating on the behalf of the vibe coded adobe alternatives, you’re essentially saying “I support stealing from everyone”. Yes, I hate adobe, I say eat the rich, but dont exploit the poor in the meantime
Won’t someone think of the copyright companies
That’s not what I said what xd
They were stolen from and they no longer have their property? Or someone else executed an idea they had faster with a different tool? Sorry all this liberal abuse of the word ‘stealing’ feels very 90s RIAA.
no i don’t support stealing from everyone. it’s possible to endorse a certain type of action only in certain context. like i don’t think stealing from walmart is morally wrong, but i think stealing from a mom-and-pop corner shop definitely is.
it would be even better if stole from adobe without paying the ai companies, i.e. open weights models.
You wouldn’t download a car
If I did download a car, which I would, I would also seed said car.
Stealing Adobe’s work is good, actually. Let’s steal Adobe’s everything!
Yeah, go against adobe, I support you, but stay with the people. Dont use the big tech’s stealing machine. Dont incentivize big tech’s current fascist push of a product. AI is bad in so many ways, environmentally, ethically; taking away real people’s work, stealing other people’s work.
If you want to use this AI generated alternative of adobe because adobe is horrible, then I understand you, and that’s fine, if you remember that this isn’t perfect either.
This is a lesser evil, and we should seek out alternatives still. Hope there’s someone who isn’t discouraged by this project as its now been praised by literally everyone
Dont use the big tech’s stealing machine.
Would you oppose this being done with locally run LLMs whose models are open weight (preferably open source) driven by clean energy? (You don’t need a data center to do inference.) Because I don’t oppose “stealing” information when its proletarians doing the “stealing”. E.g., I’ve “stolen” literally thousands of textbooks and papers with LibGen and Anna’s Archive and SciHub, and I will never ever ever feel guilty about that.
Because if your opposition is to increased corporate control, then I get your frustration. I’m absolutely against the corpos controlling… literally fucking anything, but unfortunately they do control the compute these days, so in the short term these are the conditions we have to plan around. So this seems like using the capitalists’ tools against them. It’s obviously not as good as taking the capitalists’ tools away from them, but it’s something.
If you want to use this AI generated alternative of adobe because adobe is horrible, then I understand you…
Actually I don’t plan on using this particular tool. I typically just use GIMP or Krita since I’m not a professional, and I still want to see those ecosystems succeed. If anything, I hope it will convince GIMP to give users choices for GIMP to work like Adobe. I’m speaking up because in some circumstances, I absolutely do not oppose using or creating vibe-coded software from a technical perspective.
I guess I was assuming how this project was made, as some people have pointed out about its “clean-room” method, but checking the GitHub, the main contributor is Claude’s llm, which grabs everything and anything.
I should probably think about how I feel about locally run llms, because its not massive polluting and disturbing data centers, but again, the models themselves are trained on something, and even though you can’t get “good” models without a lot of training data, it would still be unethical, atleast in these cases. Slightly off topic at the end but I guess that’s just my main concern here.
I can also understand the view point of llms being “using the capitalist’s tools against them”, and in some ways you’re right, but I still think we should be aware of what were using and what were doing instead of just praising it in the name of fighting back.
I myself will still not like generative AI, simply because of all the shit and more, but also how damaging it has been for the creative space
the models themselves are trained on something
Yeah I’m not claiming that the models were trained ethically. Like they basically scraped the entire Internet, definitely including some data it’s unethical to include. Thus, “stealing” isn’t really the right framework. It’s violations of privacy or other rights.
What you get when you download an “AI” (really a LLM, since these things are not intelligent like humans, and we wouldn’t want them to be because otherwise they would have rights) model is basically a big set of numbers. IMO the question is: what are the consequences of using these numbers?
In my view, the best, but ultimately unconvincing argument against using these numbers is that they were generated by an unethical process, so using these specific numbers constitutes an endorsement of the process that created them. As an anti-capitalist, I fundamentally oppose almost every process that created almost every product I have ever used, simply by virtue of the fact that everything I have ever owned has been produced by private firms stealing proletarian labor. If I applied this principle consistently, I would simply starve to death and be completely marginalized and forgotten by capitalist society. Thus, I am willing, to some extent, to live in contradiction of the heuristic that we shouldn’t use products derived from unethical processes. In particular, I believe that local LLMs, despite their ethically sketchy training, have sufficient technical utility for users to offset the harm already incurred. So I think there is absolutely an argument to slow down training of LLM models, especially since I suspect that the system you build a model into is just as important as the LLM “black box” itself (e.g. Claude uses a Linux container and SymPy in the background)…but for users, I don’t believe the argument to stop inference, i.e. using the numbers, is as strong.
I myself will still not like generative AI, simply because of all the shit and more, but also how damaging it has been for the creative space
Honestly, yeah I really am not interested in using LLMs for creative purposes. I only ever use LLMs for technical work, and I really only want to listen to music and consume art arranged by sentient beings.
I would also like to add that “AI” capitalists, like all capitalists, have issues with consent. Their loud insistence that “AI” is inevitable is a propaganda campaign to manufacture your consent for the vile things they want to do to you. Consequently, as someone who uses LLMs in my work, I emphatically reject the inevitability of LLMs, and if someone says they don’t want to use LLMs, I completely respect that choice and won’t bother them about it ever again. My view is that for some people in technical professions, in particular high-information fields, LLMs are and will be incredibly helpful tools…but a lot of people are simply never going to use LLMs and should not be pressured to do so. And as a corollary, we shouldn’t structure our entire goddamn society around these tools.
The “generating” from already existing has a particle of a relatively explainable sense in it, unfortunately… to “de-copyright” it…
Simply put, AI has made it easier than ever to launder image copyright infringement… That, in turn, is where AI is changing the game. Previously, content laundering was about fooling computers. Now, it may be able to fool humans.
-–
These two challenges converge on a single point: the need for transparency about what data was used to train a model. Without such transparency…
-–
The foundational principle is deceptively simple: copyright requires a human author… Writing a detailed prompt is not enough.
The machines are producing at extraordinary speed. The law is moving slowly, but it is moving. The businesses that fare best will be those that understood the difference in time.
Even though the models are based on “fair use” of now unknown artists and people, now scrambled and reconstructed… which is all utterly awfully disrespectfully disgusting… indeed…
Also known as “AI-laundering”…
- Create or fund a non-profit entity to create the datasets for you. The non-profit, research-oriented nature of these entities allows them to use copyrighted material more easily.
- Then use this dataset to create commercial products, without offering any compensation for the use of copyrighted material.
Source (How Stability AI managed to get millions of copyrighted artworks without paying artists…)
I’m fairly certain that Adobe’s genAI offering is trained on licensed works.
I’m not saying adobe is good, I’m saying this adobe alternative is also bad. Like I guess photocraft and its suite is a lesser evil, but you can’t say this project is by and for the people when its, again, built by stolen works
Stop making poor excuses for using AI. both AI and Adobe are evil. Juts pirate photoshop, put in some effort and creativity and stop complaining, unless it’s about AI.
That’s still leaves you dependent on a corporation. I prefer a world where they no longer exist because it isn’t economically viable anymore.
You’re still dependent on Adobe if you use a clone of their software which has been cleanroom reverse engineered and re-implemented. And then it needs to happen all over again when Adobe releases a new version. It’s just a Rube Goldberg way of getting Photoshop and the clone is probably a buggy mess.
It’s not a copy of adobe’s code, it’s all new code that’s simply implements the same features. So Adobe releasing a new version won’t have any effect.
If you get enough people to move to the clone, that stops being true though. The clone gets to decide the direction from that point onwards.
Juts pirate photoshop
Fuck that, piracy gives them more legitimacy than they deserve. I will use gimp.
I cannot understand anything from gimp. It’s so counter intuitive, I even prefer ms paint over gimp. Sad, because I would love to have a proper alternative to PS.
Same here. I use Gimp but I don’t like the UI at all.
Also the name makes me think of a Gimp suit every fucking time. I know it’s an acronym but guys that’s a poorly thought-out acronym to use…
That’s probably for three reasons:
- some “interesting” UI decision in GIMP
- force of habits
- GIMP is not a replacement for photoshop
Photoshop merges two very different things, editing and drawing. If you do only editing, GIMP is great. If you also do drawing/painting, GIMP is completely subpar, but Krita is fantastic.
There’s also other tools of course. But GIMP, by itself, is not close to be a remplacement for all of photoshop.
“Use gimp to replace photoshop!” - Linux users
“GIMP is not a replacement for photoshop” - Also linux users
I found that the PhotoGIMP patch helps transition from Photoshop to GIMP.
this patch transforms GIMP’s interface by mimicking Photoshop’s layout, reorganizing tools, adjusting canvas settings, and reassigning keyboard shortcuts to match Adobe’s documentation.
Saving this for the next time I’m trying to convince a friend to move from Photoshop to GIMP
I felt that when I had to try using Photoshop at work once. Then after 20 minutes I just installed gimp.
Thank you. Im so sick of gimp being the constant recommendation when its UI sucks so much.
Not that ive found any other good options. The one that came close, Affinity, had controls so wack compared to what I’m used to that I gave up when it asked me to log in, again. Which in itself was giving me some real shady vibes.
Have you tried Krita?
I’ve been trying to familiarize myself with it and found it way more appealing than gimp. But it’s still not close to a 1:1 for Photoshop’s flow.
Even a single use of AI we deem ethical is still ultimately, not.
The models are trained on stolen material; modern day techno-colonialism.
I just hope Adobe sue Anthropic
I believe it’s disrespectful towards our history, irresponsible towards our future… or just inhumane… to “not care it’s slop”…
Yeah, if this is used as precisence then all open source software can be done dirty the same way. It’s a dangerous legal precedent. Also, the slop machine stole code from many devs ignoring all licenses to create the slop.
Its unsafe code which would do anything. I don’t suggest running it under any circumstance either.
Fuck man I’m so happy for this specific instance, fuck adobe, but I have to hate it.
What would be cool, but won’t happen, is if this kinda just forced out an essential “mit license for everything” wild west situation. It won’t, corps will fuck ot, but would be cool
With regards to this specific project, I think the best case scenario would be a bunch of developers taking the code and using it as a starting point, going through it with a fine-toothed comb and re-writing however much needs to be re-written. There’s never been a viable competitor to Adobe’s suite, and if this results in that, then we can at least applaud the outcome if not the methodology.
however much needs to be re-written
that would be 100% then, as its clearly impossible to be a clean room development.
Sure, and if the momentum and publicity this has generated is the catalyst that gets people to do it, then great. Good outcome in the end.
Why not just continue development and support for the projects already existing (krita, GIMP, PhotoPea, …)?
I haven’t tried the vibe coded suite, so I can only speak from what I’ve read, but my understanding is that it’s attempting feature and control parity with Adobe’s suite, which none of the other options have or try to have. If someone who’s used to Adobe can make the switch without having to functionally learn new software, it’ll be a lot easier to get people to actually do it.
If you use any AI generated software, whether it’s to undermine a corp or not, you are continuing the problem.
You think these companies don’t have investments in the same AI that’s making the ‘open source’ version? You dangle your wallet in front of them like bait while they steal the bread off your table. Except you don’t have any bread because the field is a datacenter now and the water needed for irrigation has been diverted to it. And you conttributed. Zero tolerance for AI.
My GIMP is in the corner begging me to use it.
With or without lube?
AI slop implies AI peak.
This project brings a smile to my face.
shit, how do i get myself out of this moral dilemma
