Brandon Thomas, developer of ArtCraft, a suite of open-source creative tools meant to replicate Adobe applications for free, has now announced apps to replace Microsoft Office tools such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, respectively, named GridCraft, DeckCraft, and WordCraft, that are created with Claude. Thomas has shared his new clones to ArtCraft GitHub, making them free for all to download.
Massive nothing burger, those sloppy clones are fucking terrible in production, and dont believe me, look it up yourself.
Id love for it to be really of substantial value as it is now though.
I refuse to discourage people from providing everyone free and open source alternatives. If you don’t like or want to try then don’t. If they are working at making it better then that’s great for us.
Open source tools for all of these use cases have existed for over a decade and people still buy both adobe and Microsoft office. I don’t think some slop apps are going to change that.
I’m a Microsoft hater but I don’t think this will changes the wider publics opinion on them?
Open office and libreoffice have been around a good while now.
30 years after switching to Linux, I still have to use Photoshop because the gimp is still trash.
I played with PhotoCraft, it launches on less than a second, and while still missing features and isn’t even a 1.0 release yet, it’s better than the gimp already.
And it opened all my psds perfectly.
We still don’t have a good alternative for prepress production media. I’ve seen some workarounds, but Adobe is the only actively developed option feature complete for this use case. Mostly because the chances that prepress workers and offset printer operators are also FOSS fiends and developers abysmally low. Prepress is such a small industry too since most people don’t really care if their print media looks like shit
Pirating Adobe products was common practice for poor uni students, or occasional users that didn’t want to pay exorbitant rates to fix an image here and there. Adobe made that much more difficult. Then you have us Australians that have been getting charged well above the US retail price for years; at one point it was cheaper to fly to America and buy a physical copy.
These slop apps will absolutely let people go back to doing that, and get back at Adobe for overcharging, because the open source tools either don’t work with the file formats required, or they just don’t cut it. I use LibreOffice & GIMP and they’re great, I love them. However, I’m not a graphic designer, and tools like Photoshop leave GIMP in the dust for professional work.
Pirating Adobe and MS products is a practice of Nerds which thought they were hackers, since the existence of alternatives which make useless the piracy of this products.
I still use my copy of photoshop from time to time.
Photopea has been my go to alternative for opening actual psd docs for a while.
Paint.net was my go to for quick stuff back in windows. I’ve been learning Kirta on linux now.
But for certain work, the 10 year old copy of photoshop is still better at certain things. Specifically for editing actual photos (go figure).
I don’t know where you got that idea. The vast majority of people I knew who passed around a copy of Adobe stuff or MS Office, along with a working key or keygen program back in the day, were most definitely not nerds who believed they were hackers.
Comedy gold.
The question for me is how this affects the copyright discussion. Microsoft and Adobe have been happy to use and promote AI which has stolen the work of others. When they go after Artcraft, and I’m sure they will, how do they manage to not look like the huge hypocrites they are?
This is quite literally one of the best things of this fucking century. Imagine what is going to happen to these mother fuckers and their bottom line. They have been a knife in Linux’ side for decades holding so many people from switching and now look at this. Your love or hate towards AI right now actually doesn’t matter, because the end result is way greater than it. I’m rejoicing hard over this
!["cat looks inside" meme template: "[...]", "looks inside", "slop"](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/0cbd3492-56c9-4d38-9555-d561d93411c3.png)
Should this be allowed here in !opensource@lemmy.ml?
It is obviously built using Claude,
but it is not (as I first thought) a project that started a month ago - the first commit in the current repo is from a month ago but it refers to their previous (“multi-hundred GB” lol) git repo. So this is actually built on something with history going back to before the vibe coding era.(edit: actually i take it back, i see now photocraft started on september 30 and the commit message on the second commit is “one-shot” 🫠)I see the project lead’s two most recent posts on the site formerly known as twitter are disparaging LibreOffice and Gimp and Kdenlive.
Until yesterday this part was under a “fair source” (meaning not open source) license but now it has been relicensed MIT + Apache 🤔
Have you actually tried any of these 12 apps yet, OP? Are they any good, or are they just marketing for a service reselling genAI tokens?
The second twitter one is infuriating
“Come on, y’all know this” is the best they could come up with to argue that their slopware is better than these long established huge open source projects that have been worked on for decades as opposed to a week
Honestly there is a good chance the LLM ripped code from the long standing projects to cut corners.
looks inside
slop
To be fair you’d get more or less the same result if you looked inside any modern microsoft product, and they’d ask you to pay for the privilege on top…
(Of course replacing slop with different flavour slop, even if it’s cheaper, doesn’t accomplish much; better to use properly developed software like LibreOffice.)
I’ve used the photoshop clone, I’m not a digital artist so I don’t really know much, but it worked ok. I’m sure with time it’ll get better. I’m also using the word craft one and this one works no issues at all. Also on this one I don’t really do a lot of docs but I did some stuff on it and it worked fine
No I haven’t tried any of these 12 apps, I am perfectly happy with Gimp, affinity photo and LibreOffice. I posted this because for one, the opensource community three days ago had a fervent conversation about photocraft, the same developer. Secondly, as written in the rules of the community it says “feel free to ask questions and share news, and interesting stuff.”
I am not promoting anything AI, in fact I hate the direction it is going in and the threat it poses to real developers. That said, there is clearly a plenty of schadenfreude that comes from this, nobody can’t deny its sweet to extend the middle finger to these megacorps.
Not sure where you get the idea that I posted this as a marketing ploy reselling genAI tokens?
Not sure where you get the idea that I posted this as a marketing ploy reselling genAI tokens?
Sorry if it seems like I meant to imply that that was your intention; i did look at your profile before asking and saw that you aren’t a spammer :)
However, it seems like reselling tokens is the primary business model of the company which has presumably just spent a significant amount of dollars worth of tokens to vibe code this suite of software.
Whether they have actually produced a dozen useful apps which many people will actually use, or merely made something which is just barely functional enough to get a bunch of free marketing hype, is not yet clear to me. They have certainly succeeded in getting a lot of press, though.
I want to coin a new term: Slop’n’source
Sloppy sauce
While it’s pretty funny that one of Microsoft’s crown jewels gets shit on with AI, I don’t want to start the pro- or contra AI discussion, but what now? They reverse engineered or rebuild, or however you want to call it, all of Office, Autodesk, hell, for the fun of it do SAP next. Even assuming a perfectly working copy, not getting sued into oblivion, and not the dude going into bankruptcy due to Claude token costs - but what now? There is no way they can manage several repositories of this size alone properly (no, claude doesn’t count). There is no way this gets the community and traction to self-manage.
Apart from a ridiculous invoice from Claude and proof that frontier LLMs can reverse engineer / clone well (…duh), this is a big pile of nothing.
FOSS communities probably won’t form around most of these projects, as you said. Assuming the software can be managed by a few people with LLMs, likely local in the very near future, it’s quite possible that plenty end users who didn’t use FOSS before would jump on these instead of paying money to MS or Adobe. That in itself is a huge win for the majority. Depriving MS from revenue that is. Then for community FOSS, this has potentially significant positive implications about our biggest challenge - dealing with proprietary formats and proprietary blobs. This could mean perfect .doc/.docx compatibility in LibreOffice. It could mean a perfectly working nouveau driver for NVIDIA GPUs. How about fixing the tons of bugs we workaround in motherboard firmware. Or fixing that corner case in Wine so it can run your fav obscure game. Or reverse-engineering communication protocol of cloud-connected IoT to integrate it in Home Assistant. Etc. Etc.
In short: FOSS is a social activity. Assuming this method can produce very good source from binaries, that itself won’t create FOSS communities, but FOSS communities can use it to significantly improve the FOSS they care about.
While I personally think you are right, I don’t think that any “serious” FOSS project will use sources from a fully LLM generated project.
isn’t Artcraft’s products vide coded?
and yep they are
ngl its impressive Claude can replicate programsWell, there is no lack of good OpenSource Office suites out there, most made in Europe, LibreOffice, Calligra, OnlyOffice, CryptPad, Euro-Office, ZetaOffice. Collabora Office, Murena Workspace…
Tbf they’re replacing other vibecoded slopware… Can’t be much worse than what it’s going after - and at least it’s free.
Great, more slop
I don’t understand why anyone is interested in using these. They simply look like the real thing. There is nothing indicating they work remotely the same under the hood.
If you were to generate a bug for bug copy that would be one thing, this is just a doppelganger.
Were it made with Ai or not, its just not something that has any real value.
Well, if thanks to this we finally get open office to figure whatever tricks MS used to get documents to render fully correctly ONLY in office, consider me in.
It’s very obviously better to have open tools than closed ones. This whole screeching about slop is both incredibly tiresome and irrational in the extreme. These are new tools that make software development easier, people are making useful things with them, and they’re helping people move off proprietary software. That’s obviously a net positive.
If you don’t like the tools people are using go ahead and make something comparable by hand, except we both know that you can’t. So, you’re adding nothing constructive to the discussion here.
Excuse me, do you call this open source?
For real. I can open source my valueable projects to you. But what if I deliberately make it hard to read, like mangling it or minifying it?
Hell, every piece of JavaScript code on Earth is technically open source. If you can read assembly, everything is open source.
Only having the source code distributed is not open source in spirit. The intention of opening the source code is welcoming auditing, learning, contributing, to name a few.
“Opening” the source code of slop, with tons of meaningless boilerplates, non-logical paths and flows, heavily coupled modules and functions, thousand-line long functions, achieves none of the purpose of the intention.
I’m guessing they believe it meets the OSI definition of open source. Essentially that the code is licensed for redistribution.
Does this have tons of meaningless boilerplate and hard to follow call chains? I have read part of the source, and what I’ve seen looks pretty well organized, but if that is how you think the current models write code, you’ve missed many months.
Perhaps that’s the problem. If it’s bad, I can still tell and choose not to read it. If it seems to make sense but actually not, I’m just going to waste my valueab time.
Edit: Just clarified a single sentence.
But what if I deliberately make it hard to read, like mangling it or minifying it?
That you would not distribute the original source code, right? That is A source code, not THE. The generated source code by Claude Ai is THE new source code, there is no higher code generated from it. It is the implementation, the original source. It has an Open Source license. They do not mangle it and distribute a manipulated mangled version and hide the original source code.
What you criticize is the quality of code. But that is not a definition if something is Open Source. By all definitions, the distribution of original source code and a license compatible with Open Source is basically what Open Source means.
Only having the source code distributed is not open source in spirit.
Correct. It requires a license compatible with Open Source, which it is in this case.
“Opening” the source code of slop, with tons of meaningless boilerplates, non-logical paths and flows, heavily coupled modules and functions, thousand-line long functions, achieves none of the purpose of the intention.
This is irrelevant for a definition to be Open Source or not.
There is still a distinction between bad human-written source code and AI slop.
The human holds the copyright of his work and can do whatever he wants with it, including distributing it under a open/libre license, i.e., open source.
AI slop? Not so much. The model is very likely trained on stolen work. It’s tainted. Nobody owns the copyright of everything it generates. No one can “open source” it. The license every one receives is voided.
And both who (intentionally) releases bad code to the crowd lack the spirit of open source, but the AI one is also right out illegal.
