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Two Programmers Use AI To ‘Clone’ Adobe Photoshop. Now Nothing Is Safe.
A small dev team this week made waves across the internet. ArtCraft, a two-man development studio seemingly out of nowhere has released freeware answers to nearly the entirety of the Adobe Creative Suite of apps. That’s Photoshop, Illustrator and Premier to you and me.
At face value these apps might not seem like anything special. Photoshop has after all inspired all sorts of 3rd party software be it Pixelmator, Pixlr.com or GIMP. But this software doesn’t just have the same abilities, it very nearly is Photoshop right down to the look and feel.
Now this might look like some sort of intellectual property theft but the scenario is a lot less black and white than it may seem. According to the developers, they used vibe coding, that is AI writing code based on user prompts together with some open source magic to create the clones. They reverse-engineered the functionality of Photoshop et al and then created their own versions that imitate the look and feel down to the last pixel.
Unfounded theories in the creative community include using AI agents to replicate minute details. A deeper idea is that they may…
