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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

Is it based on Midjourney? So you need an internet connection and you're sending potentially highly encumbered/lock and key assets to a remote server and third party?

Oh yeah, can't see how this is going to backfire at all...

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Stable Diffusion : controlnet extension is already uploading their own version of generative fill.

Adobe has no moat on creative software anymore. As impressive as their demos are, I'm actually less bullish on their future than ever before.

The open source community is doing more with GenAI and they're doing it better. If Gimp weren't in such bad shape, Photoshop would be over. This exact feature would already be ready to go and would be far superior to Adobe's version.

Any startup with minimal effort and capital will be able to duplicate this product. They'll eat Adobe's thick margins away.

I have to keeping saying this on HN: moats have only a little to do with technical superiority. For the most part, moats rely on stuff like brand, UX, integrations, compatibility, business arrangements, past familiarity, etc. It's very rare for technical superiority in itself to override all that. Even if Gimp could match PhotoShop technically, it would still miss all the plugins and UX. So OSS often doesn't manage to overtake paid offerings. It depends on special people who are doing the extra effort.

That said, OSS is in way better shape in the image space than in the LLM space. There are actually products and installers based on SD out there, something that won't happen in LLM space for awhile.

> Adobe has no moat… If Gimp weren’t in such bad shape…

Only been saying this for 15 years or so.

And yet, here we are.

Look where Blender has gone in 15, it’s a real alternative to other programs in the same segment. GIMP is a failure in that sense of never working with or listening to the users, and never understanding the userbase and having the wrong kind of developers attitude.

Even Godot is going with that playbook like Blender and doing what GIMP never did. It’s a shame imo.

Hats off to the Blender team, from a piece of software so obtuse the right mouse button was the select button they really just sat down a few years ago, started addressing new user complaints instead of attacking them like a lot of open source projects do. Started seriously innovating, fixing the interface and pushing things forward and now it's truly paid off they're a major competitor and the next generation is all learning on Blender.

Imagine a world if GIMP and other open source creative tools had acted this way instead of the status quo of "Patches welcome" and "NOFIX", the attitude in the 21 year old "Adjustment Layer" feature request comes to mind...

We don't need Gimp anymore. The new sets of tools are being built in the open right now. It's just a shame Gimp couldn't make it.

Krita makes Gimp irrelevant. I don't know why anyone would use Gimp over Krita other than knowing the Gimp workflow that well.

Gimp is awful but I don't think Krita is the replacement. It seems great for drawing but 90% of my Photoshop use is image editing and Krita seemed to lack a lot of features in that department. Or I just have trouble navigating their UI.

Affinity for image editing, and Krita for painting. Or old copies of Photoshop were already 99% feature complete.

i am not a fan of adobe but nobody has been eating any margins or market share from adobe, really (c1 aside). skylum tried but guess what, having a half-baked, barely QAed product that you can't rely on is not competing with adobe. adobe's photography products are full fledged and at 10 bucks a month not even expensive.

but thinking you can fight adobe's photography setup (lightroom, ACR, photoshop, bridge etc) with minimal effort and capital to gain users for 6 bucks a month is delusional. but hey, if it happens, awesome.

Affinity is making slow but surely inroads. I know lots of people who use it know vs almost no one a few years ago. They stand the best chance of eating some of the cake.

Yes, though it's an open secret their development teams are barely functional and have management that can't manage much of anything. Even their forum staff are snippy and rude, discouraging people from reporting bugs etc. Things have stabilized over time, but it used to be the case that both Designer and Photo were absolute minefields to use - opening certain panes would crash, saves would corrupt, etc.

>The open source community is doing more with GenAI and they're doing it better.

Stable Diffusion is extremely cool and is a great project, but it does not compare favourably to Midjourney[1] or Adobe's offering. On the LLM side, StableLM is terrible compared to competitors. Some other "open source" models aren't open source at all, but instead were the "this doesn't compete so let's just dump it in the open" reactions.

Add that Adobe has a moat of legally licensed content that they used to train their model, which might turn into a massive differentiator if penalties fall hard on competitors.

[1] - A lot of people speculated that Midjourney used Stable Diffusion, but the products have veered so completely away from each other, the former just dramatically better for almost any prompt, that if they started with it they have made enormous improvements.

Midjourney has incredible default output, but the amount of control you can exert on the generation is extremely limited. Can't influence composition, pose, colour scheme (only to a degree), not inpainting, no outpainting, no API, no local operation, the list goes on.

So far nothing from Gimp is good. Sorry. I am yet to see an impressive AI demo in Gimp. They might have done it first or whatever but none of it looks decent.

I don't think this is true. Imagine a piece of software you have been using 15 years. Sure it has its problems, and there may be ways to work around those problems, but you are familiar with those problems. Switching to something new may fix those problems, but bring an entirely new set of their own.

> and you're sending potentially highly encumbered/lock and key assets to a remote server and third party?

As the joke says: Patient: Doctor! Doctor! When I push here it hurts. Doctor: Well, then don't do it!

If you are working with potentially highly encumbered / lock and key assets then keep them on your computer. If you are worried that your employees might leak them, then block the connection with a firewall.

That's easier said than done, though. Adobe is free to change how the connection is made which means that sysadmins would have to set up elaborate configurations just to continually check how it's done, and especially in shops where the primary focus isn't Photoshop, but a mix of tooling, that just creates more hell on top of the existing amount of hell sysadmins have to deal with.

reportedly it's not, they've trained it on their stock

I never get this criticism. When the internet and computers first rolled out, everybody realized the dangers of security with devices. Paper and pen would always be safer since you could lock it up where no-one could access it.

Eventually, the cost benefit shifted greatly towards being less safe because of how much faster people can be. Anybody using AI to generate images is going to be way faster than someone not. Any company selling generative AI is going to be miles ahead of open source alternatives.

Anyone not embracing or figuring out how to bend the rules around assets is going to get smoked in a business.

Seems like you do very well understand or "get" the criticism, you just don't agree with it.

That's kinda it. People called out the security problems and little was done. The Internet is still a security disaster.

It would be nice to at least try to get it right this time.

I'm not sure they needed to wait until there was some enterprise data solution before enabling it. It looks like a useful feature and if someone has assets that they're fine using it with, do they really need to wait until some enterprise solution is built to handle the other cases? Is the argument that the feature is so useful that people will send enterprise data/assets even after being told they shouldn't and that the feature shouldn't ship until those people are protected from themselves?

>Is it based on Midjourney?

No.

> potentially highly encumbered/lock and key assets

I'm not sure what this phrase means, can you explain?

Given the demos in the thread, I'm seeing a lot of 'production line' graphics being done a lot faster and easier with this feature. I'm not seeing a problem, but I'll eat my words if this will backfire like you said.

(I won't eat shoes or anything though, I'm not that confident!)

Meaning, I have a client that has a very, very secret project worth millions to my design company. One of my junior employees working on the project uses this feature. The client's assets get sent up to a remote server, which is either breached, MITM'd (proxied, etc.), or otherwise compromised. Now that project is considered leaked to the public, perhaps literally so.

Junior loses job, company loses millions, potentially the client relationship, client loses perhaps even more. Everyone loses. All because it's not clear this feature sends your project files to the remote server.

You're not familiar with Adobe Creative Cloud, are you.

I am, yes. I saw several comments mentioning Midjourney, which is neither an Adobe product nor part of the creative cloud sphere.

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