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Thoughts on AIT014

AI Can Clone Adobe Products Now. Is That Fair?

T014 · by — AI Strategist, Practitioner & Educator · Founder, AI Center of Excellence

AI with computer use can now explore an existing app and build a working clone of it, as ArtCraft did with Adobe. Alexey thinks this is not entirely fair to the companies whose products are the res...

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AI with computer use can now explore an existing app and build a working clone of it, as ArtCraft did with Adobe. Alexey thinks this is not entirely fair to the companies whose products are the result of years of iterations and customer feedback, but that it cannot be stopped.

For customers it means more options: many personal variants of familiar tools, each with the features its maker missed. Cloning becomes easy, selling becomes hard, and big vendors may answer by giving software away and earning on services.

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Now it's possible just to show to Claude or to ChatGPT or maybe in the future to other chat assistants already existing product and ask it, to create a clone of it. Maybe initially, it will be not ideal, but then, you can brainstorm. You can show the user interface. the program can itself... Since it has computer use now, it can go through various, paths, click the button, see how it works, how things are working. Is it ideal? It's not yet ideal. Is it exactly the copy of Adobe?

No. It's not the copy of Adobe. But then I think that what will happen next, people will try to clone Microsoft Office products, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, maybe some others. it will not be very difficult. The question is whether it is fair. I do not think it's very fair, to be honest, because all these companies, you can take Adobe, Microsoft, or others, they have spent a lot of billable hours of their programmers, a lot of iterations, a lot of customer feedback to develop the best product they can.

And Office suite or Adobe, this is the result of this big amount of iterations, big amount of customer feedback. And now if you can just take AI and ask it to clone these results, I think it's not very fair, but I think you cannot stop it. And maybe it's bad for these big companies. What it brings to the customers like us, I think it brings more options. And what I foresee, there are gonna be a lot of products similar to existing ones, but with a different functionality.

So you can take as an example Microsoft Excel. If you would like to create a copy of Microsoft Excel and ask Claude to fully rewrite it, you can do it, and you can also inject into this thing your experience with Microsoft Excel, maybe something which you really wanted Excel to have and it doesn't. So in the end, your version of the clone will be significantly different or maybe slightly different from Excel itself. Then there's gonna be another person who'll do something differently, another person something differently, and there's gonna be a lot of products competing for your attention.

So even though it's easy to do the clone, of course, it's super difficult to do anything with it, like sell it. Why anyone should buy your Excel product and not Microsoft? another thing which I think may also happen that these big companies, they will start giving their products for free, and they will try to monetize it not for selling the software, but for some other services. Adobe subscription is very expensive, and I think that's also the reason why people are speaking about it because just subscription Cost too much.

For office products, maybe slightly different. But still, the pressure on big corporations is there, and I think we are living in a very interesting times. So let's see how it will develop. But for sure, every month or, let's say, almost every week, we're having some news which are changing our perspective to the current reality, to the software development, SaaS market, and in general to how we're moving forward. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.

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Alexey Makarov

Alexey Makarov

AI Strategist, Practitioner & Educator. Founder & Global Lead of the AI Center of Excellence at SEFE. Creator of the Unreasonable AI YouTube channel. Based in Berlin.

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