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.
Edit: I already see the kneejerk dislikes coming, I’m just interested in starting a conversation about the idea of it, I also dislike the fact that it’s AI slop as I already implied. I’d appreciate joining the conversation instead of dislike bombing with no argument.
I don’t know how anything developed by an LLM can be considered a cleanroom reimplementation. The AI has almost certainly seen the source code of the project it’s reimplementing, even of it’s proprietary because the developers of said software are likely using the AI too
That sounds like a problem for layers of ai companies, not users.
I do not believe that they are doing a proper clean room implementation, but I do think it’s possible to do with an LLM.
Let’s say for the sake of argument that the model used on the clean room side is a fully self-hosted version of Nemotron. One of the characteristics of Nemotron is that it’s not just an open weight model, but from my understanding the training set is open, too. So, at least in theory, Nemotron can be proven to be free of any of Adobe’s intellectual property.
To be honest, I think these things will be abandoned very quickly. Therefore I don’t think that there will be any competition to the “flagship” FOSS projects anytime soon. However, in the proprietary world, it’s money above all else, and I think that we’re going to see the quality of proprietary software degrade very quickly. Because why pay engineers to do work if you can have a text generator that does it cheaper and gets there 80% of the way, and then just release it.
I’ll just keep using GIMP, thanks
My concerns for LLMs, despite numerous, do not outweight my hatred for Adobe.
On the one hand, I am opposed to AI slop.
But on the other hand, I am greatly in favour of anything that makes life even slightly more difficult for Adobe.
This is a tricky one.
On the one hand, I am opposed to AI slop.
Me too. But what is Ai slop? To me it is either fully vibe coded, or partially. Either way the user of the Ai ends up not knowing exactly what is going on. That is slop. But if its very carefully used, analyzed, understood, iterated and tested, like a human code would be, then I cannot call it slop. But it doesn’t take away the problems using Ai in the first place. There are inherent ethical issues, and questions if the licensing and copyright will become an issue one day.
In short, not every usage of Ai is slop. But every usage of Ai has ethical unanswered questions.
From their own documentation:
opening and re-saving a document renders the same for 307 of the 309 files in the psd-tools test set and 169 of 170 in our mixed ag-psd/psd-tools set
Just what I want in my editing software, the assurance that my saved files will mostly render properly when reopened in the same program…
This is exactly what will sink any attempts to do similar things, it’s not the broad functionality of the software, it’s all the billions of edge cases.
The LLMs will be able to get all the general requirements mostly right, and that’s where it will stop. The subtle errors and bugs will pile up steadily as the codebase grows too large and complex for even frontier models to accurately summarize, and the people who vibed it to begin with don’t actually understand what is happening, so they can’t troubleshoot effectively.
Automated bug reports will pile up, agents will be dispatched in greater numbers, leading to cost issues and further complicating and compounding the errors in a bloated and convoluted codebase. The leads of the project will get burned out and abandon the project, leaving a giant, rotting, husk behind. Software that was forever, “almost working properly.”
They aren’t saying that opening and saving their own files corrupts. They are saying their psd saving is 99% the same as adobe’s.
I know they are talking about PSDs, they listed it in their test suite. I read it as the test working for all but a few tools, but I guess they could just be talking about coverage.
Either way, it still does and will suffer from all the same issues I listed in my comment.
Most of these are very modular, so should be very easy to maintain. I guess we’ll just have to see.
Software that was forever, “almost working properly.”
That describes how I feel about MS Word quite well.
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve encountered things in IT that “should be easy to XYZ…” That actually were a nightmare to deal with, I’d damn near be retired already.
And you’re 100% correct about Microsoft products. I’ll give you 1 guess what company was bragging loudly earlier this year about how much AI-generated code their software engineers are using.
To me this is on the list of acceptable uses of AI: to fuck over asshole corporations.
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.
On one hand, fuck adobe, use gimp. On the other, fuck Ai slop, use gimp.
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.
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 think there are good reasons to be wary of slop that don’t involve animorphing into an MPAA lawyer and parroting screeds about how you shouldn’t download cars or whatever.
But also fuck Adobe
It is built by AI agents, for AI agents. I guess it’s interesting seeing software built from the ground up with hooks built in for every single action to be controlled by an AI agent, in that sense you could direct your own AI agent to use this to create/edit images. But even then I wouldn’t trust this thing to edit and save over existing images, it is way too new and will have plenty of non-obvious bugs that would get embedded in every image you save.
And like most vibe coded AI projects this one will probably cease being maintained long-term.
If you’re actually going to work with images you plan to keep long term just stick to GIMP, Krita, etc.
As I have said many times: license washing works both ways, this is the end of proprietary software as we know it, no more would I have a need to install a sketchy driver inside a windows VM just to use some crap USB microscope
It’s AI slop. It’s not worth a discussion.
Use Krita or Gimp.
