For the last two weeks I’ve been barraged by people asking me to comment on the appearance of the ArtCraft clones of Adobe and Microsoft products. Whatever I have to say about them, though, will pale against the what both users and courts will eventually say about the clones.
My first take is this: the (now) team behind this effort is sure good at storytelling and marketing. I’m also intrigued by the “Made by Artists, for Artists” tag line given that it really should read “Copied by AI, for AI users.” I’m not being coy with that switch: if you hit the Pricing link you find “Your subscription helps keep ArtCraft free and open for everyone.” Say what?
Given the scope of the project—copy all Adobe and Microsoft apps, with Autodesk next in the queue—putting ArtCraft all together took a pretty large up-front cash and time commitment. I’ve vibe coded with Claude for awhile now, and getting the big models to do this much work probably cost in the thousands of dollars a month, possibly far more if it was done agentically using API credits. Someone is going to have to pay that investment back, and it seems that ArtCraft has picked a near-same model for that as Adobe: subscriptions that come with AI use credits.
Most of the questions I received have had to do with how legitimate the ArtCraft programs are. Well, note that they are all labeled either as “Early Alpha” or “In Development,” with no definition of what that means. Historically, Alpha means not feature complete, and In Development has no agreed upon meaning. Since ArtCraft is creating true clones of products, I also wonder how they’re doing that without breaking a license agreement they must have agreed to at some point. Section 17 of Adobe’s onerous license agreement uses the words “We…don’t allow you to recreate or attempt to recreate our products.” We don’t even have to go to Copyright law—which has a long history of dealing with software copies—to find the likely thing that Adobe’s lawyers are probably working up at the moment in order to stop ArtCraft.
The back-story that keeps getting promoted about ArtCraft also seems disingenuous at best: “[Adobe] charged me the ‘cancellation fee’ on multiple occasions and I’ve hated them ever since.” Founder Brandon Thomas almost always emphasizes doing something for users, but doesn’t point out that such a large project will need money to keep going, and that will only occur via subscription.
I was amused in playing with their In Development products to find that they aren’t just cloning UI, but they appear to be cloning bugs and limitations, too. In ArtCraft’s version of Microsoft Word, for instance, you’ll find the same 2GB file size limitation (due to use of 32-bit memory, not 64-bit found on modern CPUs), as well as one well-known, never fixed bug. Both those things were reasons why I moved from using Word for creating my books ;~).
While I might seem negative in my consideration here, there are some very positive bits to consider. The first is OS parity. Because these products are being developed in Rust (a language) that runs in almost any environment, suddenly we have a Lightroom look/work-alike that can run in Linux and even in a Web Browser tab. The other positive thing is that the apps are all OpenSource and available on ArtCraft’s GitHub to download and modify on your own.
It’s instructive that the ArtCraft GitHub promotes a different “story” than what’s being discussed in the photography sites. Instead of cloning Adobe, there’s a clear identity statement: “ArtCraft is the IDE for interactive AI image and video creation.” IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment. If you go to app.getartcraft.com I believe you'll see what Thomas actually was trying to create. But if you’re going to create AI-generated images and videos, you also need something to edit and modify them. And you'll need AI subscriptions or a need to be running a local model yourself.
My biggest problem is that I don’t know that I can count on ArtCraft. Nothing quite seems finished, there are gaps (can’t read Nikon High Efficiency raw, for example), and there’s the legality problem that will only get addressed once Adobe and Microsoft decide how they’re going to handle this cloning.
Meanwhile there’s an interesting dynamic going on in most of the emails I’ve been getting: the same people who would be enraged if someone (or AI) copied their images are essentially saying that they want to use something that’s a copy. In other words, their real complaint is about the money they pay Adobe. My response would be: if you’re not getting value back for the money you paid, sure, look for another solution, but are you sure you want to encourage copying?
I find my own stance on things being challenged some by ArtCraft. AI is definitely a tool that allows us to do things that we couldn’t do before (e.g. clone an existing program). However, there’s this persistent issue with AI use that keeps arising: AI model makers have been sucking up all human knowledge and patterns, ignoring intellectual property and ethical standards along the way, all in order to build a Goliath that can live among the other tech Goliaths. There’s money chasing money going on here, and I’m getting more than a little peeved at that as an all-encompassing life philosophy. I was never a fan of Venture Capital as a funding source and have watched that corrupt what were good ideas and potential products.
I am a fan of building things that solve user problems and expand user knowledge. And yes, I charge for those things, otherwise I wouldn’t have the time to create them. But it’s not the pursuit of money that drives me, it’s doing what I’m doing better and better for more and more customers that really drives me. And that’s exactly where I can’t quite position ArtCraft yet. They claim to be trying to free the artist. But I don’t see how they do that long-term without money getting involved somehow, particularly once they have to hire lawyers to try to protect what they’ve already done. And once money starts talking…
My basic advice is this: try the ArtCraft (and other emerging clones) if you’d like. But I don’t think you can count on them. I wouldn’t, for instance, drop my Adobe subscription just because LightCraft seems to do much (or most) of what Lightroom does. There are real risks involved in doing that. Thing is, I saw Lightroom as a risk when it first appeared, too. That’s why I’ve kept my photos structured, stored, and backed up in the same heirarchical file system I first created in the 1990’s. If I lose access to a photo, it’s my fault, not some software program’s fault or that I’ve been locked out of modifying it because a subscription lapsed.
Over my now 50-year course of dealing with ever-changing software, I learned one thing fairly early on: you need to control your data, not let someone else do it. You need to be diligent about moving data forward to new storage and sometimes file types. Programs that “help you” create and organize your data come and go. Some have tortoise-like lifespans (i.e. long), while some are fleeting butterflies (i.e. short-lived).
As many of you know, I’ve been on the fence about continuing to recommend Lightroom (see Recommended Mac Software). Adobe created a solid product over time, but it’s now showing its age while the monthly tithe is annoying for what you get in terms of long-term value. It’s clear to me that AI is changing how people browse and find images, too, even outside Lightroom, so the whole catalog-develop approach may be nearing its end.
What I see is that we’re at another fork in the road. We’ve had several big forks in my 50 years on both sides of the software business. AI is creating another one. How that plays out is unclear at the moment. However, after each forking there’s been a small handful of Big Winners and a great number of Large Losers.
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Bonus coverage: Adobe and Microsoft are the two first targets of ArtCraft. Those are not identical targets. I’d argue that Microsoft has completely lost the way with Office. Features seem to go away at the same rate that toolbars get added. Performance sucks. The Officeness (as opposed to individual apps) never evolved. Word never made it to 64-bit memory. Microsoft Word 2.0, which was an early DOS product, had arguably better features and performance than the current version. Microsoft has consistently gone for lowest-common-denominator choices over making a better product. Frankly, they deserve to be cloned out of existence given their poor stewardship of their product.
I can’t really say the same for Adobe. While I don’t always agree with where they steer their ships and there have been some culdesacs they got themselves into (remember 3D in Photoshop?), Adobe seems to be quick to move to new technology (OS changes, AI, etc.), and has continually expanded (most of) their products in ways that a fair number of users find useful. I was worried when they went to subscriptions that they would get lazier about keeping their products current, but that hasn’t seemed to happen.