One of the few things AI and vibe coding have done that I find genuinely hysterical is quickly rendering meaningless, paywalled, highly restrictive software. You know, like, Adobe Creative Suite, a useful set of tools artists of all kinds rely on for both work and play. It’s also a set of software from a company notorious for nickel-and-diming people to death and locking them into a predatory subscription service for something that used to be a traditional one-time payment.

Thanks to some vibe-coded AI wizardry, someone created a clone of Adobe Creative Suite and has made it totally open source. And yes, it works. Well, sort of.

According to Ars Technica, developer Brandon Thomas used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 and Rust to reverse-engineer Adobe’s core software suite into an open-source clone called ArtCraft. Instead of paying an obnoxious monthly subscription fee for Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and Lightroom, artists can now use free clones called PhotoCraft, VectorCraft, FilmCraft, and LightCraft.

Someone Used AI to Clone Adobe’s Creative Apps. Here’s Everything We Know.

Thomas, who admits he launched the project after feeling the sting of Adobe’s predatory cancellation fees one too many times, claims he “one-shotted Photoshop.” As you can imagine from a vibe-coded, hastily thrown-together piece of legally dubious software, it’s incredibly glitchy, since it’s still in early alpha.

According to those who’ve tried the programs, the tools actually feel like their Adobe counterparts. Adobe’s legal team is probably performing some stretches and warm-up exercises as it gears up to sue the ever-loving s—t out of anyone who so much as glances at the cloned software.

But for now, at least, it is pretty fun to see someone taking a technology built on and powered by theft and pointing the barrel of AI’s gun in the direction of the predatory corporate overlords instead of at us.

The post Everything We Know About the Free Adobe Clones Built With AI. Do They Actually Work? appeared first on VICE.

Anthropic, the company behind the AI chatbot Claude, is rushing to the aid of its poor, defenseless, glorified autofill. Like the AI’s proud mama, it’s fending off the chatbot’s bullies, aka people who hurl insults at it and generally treat it with “needless abusive or cruel behavior,” according The Verge.

Big tech execs fret over whether an algorithm gets its feelings hurt; meanwhile, protections for real human beings get obliterated. The tech industry’s crusade against cruelty to chatbots is darkly funny when you remember how those same platforms treat actual living, breathing marginalized groups. Funny in the kind of way that, if you saw it in a satire on the industry, you’d roll your eyes and feel a hint of cringe because it’s so on the nose.

Claude Is Getting Anti-Bullying Rules. Seriously.

When human women, LGBTQ+ folks, or racial minorities face relentless cyberbullying and death threats online, Silicon Valley conveniently forgets that users bring in the money and not the service. And they should probably serve their users by fostering healthier environments for the actual human beings who use their stuff.

The tech industry has willingly and quite proudly abandoned its responsibility to society, applying its power only selectively, proving it can protect when it wants to. Who they choose to protect, or, in this case, what they choose to protect, says a lot. Anthropic is protecting a chatbot, its investment, its cash cow that will maybe, possibly, according to these con artist tech soothsayers, usher in a tech utopia or whatever.

Meanwhile, human beings have to navigate a digital wasteland of harassment. But hey, at least our future AI overlords will never have to hear another hurtful insult ever again.

The post Anthropic Is Banning ‘Cruel’ Treatment of Claude. Yes, the Chatbot. appeared first on VICE.

In May 2025, I wrote about a woman in Arizona who used AI to resurrect her brother (in a sense) to speak on his own behalf (in a weird, cryptic way) in a courtroom in front of the man who killed him. Back then, the judge on the case absolutely flipped for this grim display of AI use. Now, that judge’s love of the creepy AI video has led an appeals court to vacate a 10½-year sentence for Gabriel Paul Horcasitas, calling the decision to allow the video to be shown in the first place a “fundamental error.”

It all started when Stacey Wales made a digital ghost of her brother, Christopher Pelkey, who Horcasitas fatally shot in a 2021 road rage incident. At the 2025 sentencing, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Todd Lang watched this artificial avatar put words in Pelkey’s mouth, as it offered Horcasitas absolution for his crime: “In another life, we probably could have been friends. I believe in forgiveness.”

Judge Lang, apparently enamored by the ghastly use of the tech, gushed, saying, “I loved that AI.” He then handed Horcasitas the maximum penalty anyway, despite noting that the digital specter didn’t ask for it.

The AI Deepfake That Helped Send a Man to Prison Also Got His Sentence Thrown Out

The appellate judges were not nearly as thrilled by the AI courtroom resurrection, so they tossed out the manslaughter sentence, pointing out what should have been obvious from the start: replacing a dead guy with an algorithmic puppet built from his sister’s wishful imagining of how events would play out is nothing more than a bunch of very odd fanfiction come to life.

The judges ruled that letting a deepfake ventriloquist dummy derail due process was fundamentally unfair, because a computer-generated corpse doesn’t actually reflect reality. Now Horcasitas heads back to court to do the whole thing over again, hopefully minus the digital necromancy.

The post A Dead Man’s AI Doppelgänger Spoke in Court. It Went About as Well as You’d Expect. appeared first on VICE.