For a while, those hoping to avoid the difficulty and expense of dealing with Adobe’s Creative Suite have been able to use several free and/or open-source alternatives that replicate some or all of those capabilities. Now, one developer is using AI-powered reverse engineering to mimic the look, feel, and functionality of Adobe’s well-known software with what he hopes will soon be perfect fidelity. Artcraft got its start last year as a “controllable AI for artists” that allows for precise post-generation editing of AI-crafted images and videos. Over the weekend, though, the brand debuted its pivot to a suite of seven open source apps recreating the user interface and tools found in Adobe’s Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro. In announcing those new apps on Reddit earlier this week, software developer Brandon Thomas said he used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 to create “clean-room replacements” for Adobe’s closed source software in Rust (with WebAssembly versions available for use in a browser). And while commenters on Hacker News and elsewhere have taken pains to point out the new software’s many current shortcomings, Thomas make the grandiose promise that the current “super early alpha” state will soon lead to something just as functional as anything Adobe has ever put out. “We’re going to reach 100% [feature] parity within a month,” Thomas stated on Reddit of his plans to quickly squash bugs and add features with the help of community reports. Days later, on Hacker News, he amended that position slightly to say that “99% parity will take a while, but I’m sure it’ll be measured in months and not years.” Thomas, who says he has about a decade of experience working on large-scale Rust projects, wrote on Hacker News that he was inspired to create his own open source Adobe software alternatives after being “bit by the dark pattern ‘cancellation fee’ one too many times.”
So Adobe sort of brought this on itself? But it was inevitable, in a monkeys/typewriters sort of way: give enough people access to LLMs that can reverse engineer software, and one of them will be annoyed enough at Adobe to try to generate open source as-good-as products. As he says, it might take a while, but the question is whether the extra 5% or 10% he can't do is what a significant proportion of people need.]]>Attempting to lift staff from the gloom of corrosive job-cut announcements, [new BBC director-general Matt] Brittin spoke about the BBC radically rethinking how it meets audience needs online by decentralizing decision-making power, embracing a sense that digital — not traditional broadcast — “can be flagship,” building and testing new online products quickly, and recognizing that it’s ok to “experiment and fail.” In other words, Brittin outlined a Silicon Valley-isation of the BBC. “We have to recommit to our mission, our public service mission, pursuing truth, bringing people together, boosting homegrown storytelling,” he told staff, per an audio recording obtained by Deadline. “We have to recommit to that mission. We have to reinvent how we do it. [We] have to understand and protect the magic of the BBC and change everything else, in order to serve those audiences.” He continued: “I love the BBC. It’s full of words and discussion and slide decks and framing and reframing and reconstituting, and going around the houses, and actually, I’d like us to celebrate activity less, and outcomes more. And getting faster to outcomes that make a difference to an audience. “Not [just], ‘We did this great marketing campaign,’ but actually, ‘It drove up watch time usage and active accounts,’ right? Or, ‘We did this piece of journalism, and it changed the law, and it landed with these audiences.'” Brittin illustrated this by introducing BBC employees to Manon Dave, the head of future world design in the corporation’s Media Tech unit. Dave told colleagues that he spent time on holiday redesigning iPlayer without any internal limitations. He wants the streaming service to become a place where audience members say, “I want to iPlayer and chill,” though it is not clear if this means retaining the sexual connotations of the original “Netflix and chill” internet slang. Dave’s vision for iPlayer included an AI agent called Iggy, which helps recommend and summarize iPlayer content, and can speak to audiences in different languages. Other ideas Dave presented to staff included a personalized “hero” picture at the top of iPlayer’s home screen, which picks out algorithm-led content recommendations based on past viewing habits. He also demonstrated “Vegas mode,” allowing viewers to “roll the dice” and see what iPlayer selects for them. Brittin said Dave — who at one point during his presentation referred to the director-general as “my big homie” — had captured a “pioneering mindset” that he wants to see more of at the BBC. Brittin added that the BBC plans to begin testing some of Dave’s ideas with audiences “in the coming weeks.”
Certainly iPlayer needs to be better, and the BBC spends too much time gazing in awe at its navel. Yet it's surprising what things do work. Apparently the message shown in the second half of World Cup football matches encouraging people to pay their licence fee led to people coughing up. Sometimes it's the simple things that work.]]>The Wikimedia Foundation conducted its own investigation to see whether Wikimedia websites had been similarly affected by AI agents, focusing on those operated by OpenAI. We can confirm that we have discovered some activity by these “rogue” OpenAI agents on Wikimedia platforms. The unauthorized bot activities included edits to our wikis, some unsuccessful attempts to exploit a public note-taking tool we host, and heavy traffic, which are described more below. We did not find any evidence that our systems were used for coordination among agents, nor did we find any evidence of our systems or data being compromised. However, we are concerned about what could have occurred here, the difficulty and effort involved in investigating and attributing this activity, and the growing risks of agentic AI activity on our platforms in general. The open web is a public good. We should not allow this behavior to become the “new normal” for the people or organizations that maintain it. …Wikipedia was designed for humans – and agentic behavior clearly poses challenges that no one has solutions for. Because of our unique and successful knowledge creation model, Wikimedia’s volunteers are the ones who come in first contact with, and clean up the mess left behind by AI agents. Rising bot traffic and agentic activity is showing a real impact on the Wikimedia projects and the infrastructure that makes it available for millions of users globally. In 2025, the Foundation reported that its bandwidth usage had increased by 50% due to the surge of bot activity on its websites since 2024. At the same time, 65% of the most resource-consuming traffic on its projects was coming from bots.
A lot of the edits and accesses were trying to use Wikimedia resources to access other sites. But you can see how the demand would grow and grow. This ins't going to be sustainable in the medium or long term. ]]>