Source: Ars Technica
A developer is using generative AI to reverse-engineer Adobe's core functionality into free, open source alternatives—a direct threat to Adobe's subscription-based moat that has held for two decades. AI is collapsing the defensibility of premium software categories: when LLMs can approximate Photoshop or Premiere's outputs at near-zero marginal cost, Adobe's pricing power erodes, forcing a reckoning with its $20B+ creative cloud revenue model. The pressure isn't the individual clones themselves, but that they signal the start of AI-powered commoditization of professional tools that have historically captured massive switching costs and lock-in.