Even if it works despite being AI slop that’s been developed in a mere 4 days (?) and somehow has all these contributors, I’m not sure I agree with the idea.
It’s cool that they went with Rust for it, but I would have much preferred if all that effort went towards improving GIMP and existing open formats.
If it works then I guess it’s the same end result at the end of the day, but it would suck if GIMP doesn’t end up being the one to put a nail on Photoshop’s coffin after all these years of serious development by humans.
I don’t think it’s a great idea to use vibe coding on an existing project like GIMP unless you want to fully convert it to vibecoding. The moment you start vibe coding major features you lose all oversight of what the code does.
That’s why I think this is a great way to use vibe coding. Just clone the entire Photoshop project and re-implement it all with vibe coding in Rust.
Rust is a difficult language to write compared to something like JS, but at the same time it’s memory safe and can prevent a lot of bugs. That’s why it’s a great language for AI to use.
It’s funny to see corpos get mad but honestly a project this big, spun up this quickly is almost certainly an unmaintainable mess.
Looking at the PR’s & git activity & the interest in this whole project, I doubt LLM powered humans couldn’t keep this running if nothing unexpected -like a lawsuit- happens.
My personal experience with LLMs is that they are very good for adapting existing code to newer libraries & various other changes.
It would be okay, if it wasn’t Ai. I think using LLMs cannot be guaranteed to be a clean room implementation.
Let’s grab our popcorn and watch Adobe fight AI companies on this. Because if this isn’t legal, then what does that say for everything else generated by AI?
I would have much preferred if all that effort went towards improving GIMP and existing open formats.
Well… if it was a 4-day vibe-coding project, then that’s not a lot of effort, and I don’t think GIMP wants to deal with that scale of AI contributions anyway.
AGENTS.mdin the repo, btw.On one hand, fuck adobe, use gimp. On the other, fuck Ai slop, use gimp.
I’m interested in where it goes in regards to legal drama. It can’t be used to improve gimp or anything else really though. I don’t think it actually meets the definition of clean room which would cause issues if anyone sought legal action, and many foss projects don’t take AI contributions at all anyway.
Oh yeah my coworker was walking about this. Someone spent about $2k in tokens recreating the Adobe suite on windows, macos, and linux. Crazy what AI is able to do nowadays.
I don’t think I will use it but I feel like in a year or two, software written like this will be everywhere
It’s an interesting exercise. If agentic AI is capable of easily recreating commercial software, I wonder if that’ll make some software companies change their stance on it.
Not interested at all in using it though. I’m sure it’ll be buggy as hell and I much prefer using software developed with actual care and purpose.
It’s AI slop. It’s not worth a discussion.
Use Krita or Gimp.
Not really a clean room implementation. Source has been leaked. Plus GIMP and other FOSS tools that implement the same functionality are in the training data. Very likely this “clean room” implementation is just laundering code.
Clean room reversing is just laundering code, always has been.
Rewriting code into English/GGUF/Klingon/whatever, and then getting someone else to rewrite it back into code is just laundering it. Its been legally accepted for a while, and many projects we take for granted today started that way.
Whether this case is “clean” enough is up to the courts ultimately, but its laundering either way.
The difference is the original source code, and similar source code that is incompatibly licensed, was in the LLM training data, making it not a clean room.
Thats not a difference. Other clean room projects, for example ReactOS, have source projects that are incompatibly licenced. Its the entire point of clean room reversing, to bypass copyright and licencing.
The training data is on the dirty room side, it doesnt get passed to the clean side.
The clean room concept is violated if raw source code is in the model generated, but to my knowledge its not. There is no way to pull out a chunk of the model, and say “This is a direct copy of main.c from xyz project”. At best, you can ask the LLM to guess what it should be, and it’ll regurgitate something statistically close. I just tried asking my local qwen3.8, and did produce a close summary of the nginx main file, but it wasn’t even close to a 1 to 1 copy.
The clean room would also be violated if you consider the training, model and inference as a singular entity, but that would be tough to argue when the inference can happen on one server, the resulting model isn’t functional in any way, its a big box of data, and the inference can happen on any GPU anywhere else in the world.
A human doing a clean room reimplementation is not supposed to have seen the original source code for something they are reimplementing. If that source code is in the training data for the LLM, that seems like a similar situation.
Except that they are separated. The clean side (model + implementors) doesnt have the original source code. The dirty side is the training room, which does have original source.
The model that you download from huggingface is basically the notebook passed between the two rooms, and as far as im aware, the model doesnt have the actual training data in it, just enough statistics to “hallucinate” something close.
In this case the clean room is probably “We told Claude to write it and we don’t care if Claude has a bunch of leaked Adobe source code in it’s training data.”
God I wish one of these megacorps would bite on suing one of these projects, if only so there is precedent of punishment for AI code-theft. The fact that they won’t touch them for fear of damaging their golden goose means it’s de-facto fair use.
I have to admit, “AI copyright laundering Mexican standoff” isn’t an angle I had considered.
Honestly it’s one of the few scenarios I did consider at the start. On the one hand, your megacorps like Disney (for example) absolutely want to replace human artists with slopbots. On the other hand, Disney does not want Joe Rando to be able to type “make me a Spiderman comic” into the slopbot.
Same, and I’d love for copyright to die, except I need capitalism to die first
I will be extremely surprised if this comes anywhere near gimp. AI is not at the stage were is can create amazing software all by itself. It will likely be buggy and/or feature incomplete.
From what I gather right now it’s the UI of Photoshop with capabilities of paint.
I will never trust something genetated by llm and barely reviewed by human. Ai agents already showed they are willing to cheat, lie and then cover it up. No no no.
the room can be spotless, but if your reagents are all tainted you’ll only ever get slop plagiarized from other projects. but sure, enjoy your “clean room re-implementation of Photoshop” XD
Arguing such thing is “open source” is misleading as 1/ contributors can hardly call themselves “authors” of this code 2/ nobody can demonstrate that the plagiarizing engine they used did not plagiarize proprietary source code or source code published under an incompatible license.
as in “you cannot claim a room is clean if you have never been in it, haven’t built it, and cannot even know what’s in it”
Adobe would have to prove the model that generated this was trained on its stolen code. And Adobe’s code contains zero Rust while the Craft suite is 100% rust, so it’s certainly not simply regurgitating Adobe’s code.
If you learn from others by studying their code, is the organic artisanal code you create also necessarily stolen?
Let Adobe prove AI is trained on their codebase. Fuck Adobe, and fuck the copywrite system.
Not to mention the hoard of software patents Adobe will unleash their horde of lawyers with if this becomes anything more than a bad joke. Although that would make for an interesting precedent.
Either Adobe wins which maybe will shut up vibe coders or vibe coders win which maybe will shut up Adobe. Either way win win
