Roy Carrilho

RuiCarrilho5inc/localllama11d ago

DDave W Plummer@davepl1968X

AI Cloning should be illegal. And I think it might be. It feels self-evident, but we may need to wait for the courts to be sure.

This morning, I took a full Windows application from Microsoft, had AI reverse-engineer it using NSA's Ghidra into a set of atomicizable actions, then translated those actions backward into Rust logic, then compiled the Rust into a brand new application.

And it did it. In one shot. So the process is:

C Code -> Compiler -> Linker -> Exe
then
Exe -> OPS -> Rust -> Compiler -> Linker -> Exe

So you feed it an application, and it produces a Rust version of that same application with 100% of the same functionality and appearance and "none" of the original code - just the logic behind that code.

I don't consider this coding.
It's not even vibe coding.
It is piracy.

This might be a hot take, but cloning an application when the application itself is used as an input does NOT, in my mind, yield an independent work.

I'm even dubious about letting the AI base its work on the application. I specifically did NOT do so for TMOG (http://tmog.org/) because I didn't want it just copying. So I wrote a huge spec instead (which I guess could just be copying via indirection, but I'll leave that aside for now).

This time, I chose an in-the-box Windows application as a proof of concept, but there's no reason this couldn't be applied to Photoshop.

Or heck, have the AI port Final Cut from the Mac to Windows. That's a bigger ask, of course, but we're not far from it.

And so I propose we ruthlessly distinguish any process that uses an application binary itself.

Prompt -> Code -> Binary == OK
Binary -> Prompt -> Code => Binary == Clone

12d ago View on X