I have used RW for 10years + and like most who have I have a very extensive stack collection (200+). As someone who is not a web developer and more a “copier and paster” I bought these to “solve” situations I wanted to do but never had the skill nor coding knowledge to do - thats Ok I supported developers who could.
Then a long came Elements which I started in early Beta use, pre v3 and in early beta I wanted to do “X” but could not as the Element was not there yet or I just was incapable so I used to chat to ElementsBot and get closer to where I wanted to be. Most of my focus was on “animations” or in my simple language wanting things non static. So I learned how to use the HTML Tool. When I got stuck I would project on community page and then the master of animations Steve @upssjw, Gary @Doobox and lots of other regulars would then come on and help me get to where I wanted.
I let that these projects belonged to the community so used to put them on here free for everyone to use e.g my PDF viewer, my Video and PDF accordions, my selection of “snow” “Halloween” effects, highlighted glowing texts etc. Some of these became basic Elements and other developers used them to give professional products which I am eternally grateful for.
So now my dilemma as we now have v3 and the use of AnyBot.com MCP or App Key link . I tried to get Chat GBT set up much to my cost and failure. I have Grok in my Tesla so I decided to use SuperGrok and got it all set up at weekend and boy oh boy am I amazed but then it struck me! I now know why Holywood writers went on strike last year!
So over to you I am at a moral crossroads and at my age I have a very strong moral compass. So here we go:
I have three or four stacks which I use for most projects (pre Elements) two of them work in the new STACKS 6 but two the developers stopped developing them but they still work in RW8. So today just for fun I thought could Grok replicate one of the old neon supported Stacks and to my amazement in about 1 hour back and forth I have replicated this stack to about 95% of what the original one was. So now my moral feelings are struggling! At what point does replication of something, now not supported, you paid for many years ago, used a lot, kept within the terms and conditions of sale and now can be replicated with AnyBot.com, come in to the actual “I now have a replicated Element built by AI that I can use”.
Personally I detest plageurism and I can assure you that I will not use this AI Stack in Elements - my morals won’t let me - but where do we draw the line. I could open my Animations project which has over 40 pages in dedicated to each animation, written in HTML editor and ask Grok to make them into Elements tools only components and see where I go. But just need some views from forum about where the line is so I don’t cross it.
Things are changing very quickly, and it’s great to see that users now have more tools available to them than ever before.
I would suggest sharing everything you’ve created yourself; it would be a wonderful gift to the community. You were right to cite the code’s origin, as it wouldn’t be appropriate to distribute work produced by professionals.
Personally, I don’t think it’s necessarily an ethical question, but more a question of target audience. A hobbyist may not place the same value on their time because they are doing it for fun, while someone working professionally needs reliability and security, and their time may well be worth more than the tokens spent.
They are different target audiences, but I don’t think that distinction is fully clear to users yet.
I have always put all my projects on here for free as I’ve done them so it just a case of looking through my old posts. Sadly due to disk space some have been removed however if people ask I can add them for a short while no problem. Perhaps tomorrow when I have time I’ll put up my snow and halloween snow file as its nearly Halloween again.?
I do feel for you as its your income thats affected but I could not just feed a stack into AnyAIBot.com and ask it to replicate it and then use it. Maybe its my age and we come from a different world of view on these things?
Everyone has to establish and live with their own moral/ethical construct. Here in the RealUS (e.g. not the Make America Go Away one), that also means respecting when others have a different one. So I hear you.
However, at the risk of repeating myself, what you’re worrying about has always been in play, with perhaps the only difference today being the speed at which it is happening. I’ll give an example: Visicalc.
I sold one heck of a lot of Apple II’s and Visicalc packages to middle-to-top managers at Fortune 500 companies. What they did with that is replicate what their company’s IT departments would do after sending an analyst to understand the problem needing solving. Instead of “six months later you’d get a formal solution” these managers were creating the same thing in a day, no more than a week. Not only was the Apple/Visicalc solution faster—and here comes the important part—it was more directly doing exactly what the manager needed.
I mentioned it in another post, but if you haven’t seen https://www.everythingisaremix.info/ and considered the underlying thesis presented, you probably should.
FWIW, the Hollywood writers I know are all using AI now. They use it to advise on structure and other things, not to write exact dialog or even come up with the overall plot.
So, what I’d say is this: use AI to solve your problems and make the best version of what you need. Use your creativity to direct the AI instead of just relegating all decisions to it. AI is a tool. You can use it as a copy machine (another tool) or you can use it as a directed agent (like I do with employees).
All that said, if someone abandons their intellectual property, as in Stacks no longer maintained or updated, I don’t understand what the dilemma is in creating a replacement (whether by AI or by the usual sleeves-rolled-up methods).
so I used to chat to ElementsBot and get closer to where I wanted to be. Most of my focus was on “animations” or in my simple language wanting things non static. So I learned how to use the HTML Tool. When I got stuck I would project on community page and then the master of animations Steve @upssjw, Gary @Doobox and lots of other regulars would then come on and help me get to where I wanted.