Could software cloning change the way we use the internet?

It's being called "the end of software" and the dawn of a new era of AI-powered piracy.

New AI tools are disrupting the tech industry itself, making it relatively easy and quick to clone an existing piece of software and replicate its features. 

Earlier this month, a small team of developers used AI tools to create near-identical, free versions of two commonly used products: Microsoft Office, think programs like Word and Excel, and Adobe Creative, which includes Photoshop. 

Around the same time, a different tool called Reverse Engineer Anything that helps developers use AI to deconstruct and replicate features in other pieces of software shot to the top of trending projects on software repository GitHub. 

For some, this new generation of tools will disrupt software in the same way MP3 file-sharing networks in the late 1990s changed how we listened to music and watched movies, replacing CDs and DVDs with streaming. 

But whether this will give more power to users or further concentrate power in the hands of AI companies remains to be seen.

'Set the clock back' to the 1990s internet

Brandon Thomas is one of the developers who recently announced they had used AI tools to copy the Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative suites.

A 15-year veteran of the US tech industry, he sees himself fighting a "war" for the future of the internet.

In the 1990s, "everything [online] was nerdy, hackable, and weird," he told the ABC.

"Everything in this era could be inspected, copied, shared with friends, remixed. It was amazing."

But over time, the internet became more standardised and bland. Spaces for innovation and personalisation, like Geocities or Myspace, were replaced by closed ecosystems that tightly controlled user access. 

This is "enshittification", a term coined by writer Cory Doctorow in 2022 to describe the perceived decline of online spaces.

Social media platforms like Facebook initially attracted users with clean, chronological feeds and personal connections, then pivoted to intrusive ads and sponsored content. 

Search engines became crowded with sponsored ads and affiliate-marketing spam, pushing out organic search results. 

Software makers shifted to subscription-only models with automated billing and predatory cancellation fees, in some cases worth 50 per cent of the annual contract.

For some, AI is part of the problem, as "slop" content floods online spaces.

But for Mr Thomas, AI is the solution.

"AI flips the tide of this war in a way legislation never did," he said.

"We can build anything, even triple-A video games and operating systems.

"This is the most excited I've felt for the future in a long time.

"I think we have a great opportunity to take back the internet from the monopolistic platforms that became rent-seekers and behaved badly to us as users and customers."

How AI is making software easier to copy

Think of a piece of software like a cake from a bakery.

To copy the recipe, you could break into the bakery and steal the list of ingredients (the source code), for which you would be quickly prosecuted.

Or you could reverse engineer the cake by tearing it apart, tasting it, and studying it under a microscope. This is known as "decompiling".

You can then bake the cake based on what you learned. Each time you bake the cake, you tweak the recipe so the result more closely matches your description.

Marek Kowalkiewicz, an expert on the digital economy at Queensland University of Technology, said AI dramatically sped up this process.

"[AI-powered reverse engineering] is not very different from having a bunch of human software developers doing the same thing, but it's way faster and cheaper," Professor Kowalkiewicz told the ABC.

Reverse Engineer Anything, the viral tool on GitHub, dramatically streamlines the reverse-engineering process by allowing a user without coding skills to replicate features from other software at no cost.

The mood is giddy and chaotic in reverse-engineering forums where users share their projects.

These include hacking into the control systems of cars to replace factory dashboards, playing old games that have lost vendor support, or just figuring out ways to remove ads popping up on their smart TVs. One user wants to make a free version of their therapy practice's management software. Someone else wants their printer to accept less expensive third-party ink cartridges.

One user writes: 

"I'm so excited for all the good and bad stuff that will happen onward."

Software could be recreated legally

AI-generated software cloning means some tech companies face similar issues to musicians, authors and artists who have seen big tech steal their work to train AI.

These tech companies have trained the AI models being used to reverse engineer their own software.

"All those big players will be probably now be lobbying for legislative change and more protection of software," Professor Kowalkiewicz said.

"It's an arms race."

But copyright law was not equipped to deal with the emerging scale of the software cloning issue, Malcolm Burrows, a lawyer at Dundas Lawyers said.

Software in Australia is protected under copyright as a class of literary work.

Reverse-engineered software is illegal where it is a "substantial reproduction" of an original.

But this will be hard to prove where AI tools have been used to copy software without access to the source code.

"It's going to get very grey in terms of source code and reproduction of software," Mr Burrows said.

Tool "devalues work of developers"

While Brandon Thomas and others dream of a retro internet, some fear a dystopian future.

The new AI tools may further entrench the power of AI companies and generate a rash of low-quality "slop" software.

Aaron Snoswell, a computer scientist at QUT, said the tools devalued the work of developers and would lead to more cost cutting and worse software.

"I think for the software industry it creates more of the same headaches and exacerbates the existing AI pain points," Dr Snoswell said.

This trend was already apparent among independent game developers. 

"I'm seeing all these indie game developers who have spent 14 years developing their dream game … and then someone in one weekend can create a functional copy," Dr Snoswell said.

"What point is there in building with human effort, with human soul, if if can be stolen like that?"