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.

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[–] Alpinefolk@slrpnk.net 9 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

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?

[–] Manticore@lemmy.nz 5 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I think youre right, theyll try. Though for 'managing', I don't think that will matter. They don't really need to.

The point of being a legislative giant is that your lawyers use whatever angle will work on a technicality for whatever profit goal you're trying to achieve. Often throwing bullshit arguments one after another, to drown your opposition in paperwork, burden of proof or legal fees until they're forced to cave just to minimise losses.

Companies are abstract entities that don't have any actual principles of copyright to be hypocritical about, and the principles of the many people within them are scarcely relevant at scale as their jobs are dependant on compliance to rules imposed above them.

The owners of these companies won't have to manage anything, because they're insulated from consequence and the company is treated as a separate entity, for some reason.

[–] skarn@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 hour ago

I mean, the problem isn't that they'll look like hypocrites...

The problem is that the bullshit they spout can be used against them in court.

For instance, some of these companies are on trial for using copyrighted works for training. One could claim that the training of a model is fair use. One of the criteria for establishing fair use, is that it doesn't damage the market for the original work.

But their email claim they think LLMs can effectively damage the creators of the content they use, and they publicly repeated over and over how their AIs will make everyone unemployed.

Now they could say that they bullshitted the public, but then MSFT is a public corp, so that might be considered market manipulation? And indeed Microsoft has walked that back earlier than most others.