The gist is that once a company has a captive audience with no alternatives, investors come first. Flashy (no pun intended :-p), cool features to impress investors become more important than the everyday user experience—and this feature does look super cool!
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Still, when I first heard of Adobe Firefly, my initial reaction was “smart business move, by exclusively using images they have the rights to”. Now seeing Turntable my reaction is “interesting tool which could be truly useful to many illustrators”.
Adobe can be a bad and opportunistic company in general but still do genuinely interesting things. As much as they deserve the criticism, the way in which they’re using AI does seem to be thought out and meant to address real user needs while minimising harm to artists.¹ I see Apple’s approach with Apple Intelligence a bit in the same vein, starting with the user experience and working backwards to the technology, as it should be.²
Worth noting that I fortunately have distanced myself from Adobe for many years now, so my view may be outdated.
¹ Which I don’t believe for a second is out of the goodness of their hearts, it just makes business sense.
² However, in that case the results seem to be subpar and I don’t think I’d use it even if I could.
All of this is orthogonal to Adobe's business practices. You should expect them to operate the way they do given their market share and the limited number of alternatives. I personally have almost moved completely to Affinity products, but I expect that Adobe should be better placed to execute products and for Affinity to be playing catchup to some extent.
> I also think “AI art” can be harmful to artists and more often than not produces uninteresting flawed garbage at an unacceptable energy cost.
The big genAI flamewar actually has very little do with copyright or would-be-lost jobs. It's mostly about quality and emotions encoded in the images(deep rage). Lots of tech inclined miss this point.
I think that’s irrelevant to the argument and that it only leads to an uninteresting derailment of the discussion, as demonstrated by the two flagged replies that also focused on that purely contextual piece of information.
Someone else nailed it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41872284
If we ever meet, I’d be glad to answer that question in detail and compare notes. Right now, I think it’d be another distraction that does nothing to advance the conversation.
Cool features that excite users (and that they ultimately end of using), and that get investors excited.
(i.e. Adobe mentioned in the day 1 keynote that Generative Fill, released last year and powered by Adobe Firefly is not one of the top 5 used features in Photoshop).
The features we make, and how we use gen ai is based on a lot of discussions and back and forth with the community (both public and private)
I guess Adobe could make features that look cool, but no one wants to use, but that doesn't seem to really make any sense.
(I work for Adobe)
I mean, is there any Photoshop feature that’s come to dominate people’s workflows so quickly?
People (e.g. photographers) who use Photoshop “in anger” for professional use-cases, and who already know how to fix a flaw in an image region without generative fill, aren’t necessarily going to adopt it right out of the gate. They’re going to tinker with it a bit, but time-box that tinkering, otherwise sticking with what they can guarantee from experience will get a “satisfactory” result, even if it takes longer and might not have as high a ceiling for how perfectly the image is altered.
And that’d just people who repair flaws in images. Which I’m guessing aren’t even the majority of Photoshop users. Is the clone brush even in the top 5 Photoshop features by usage?
There was a brief moment in time where freehand was just a better and faster drawing tool than illustrator (which is whats is shown here) but from there on psp, ill & indesign have pretty much killed all competition out there.
The formats they use are sigularly stupid and arcane for legacy reasons, they are all mem hogs and inefficient to the extreme - but nothing beats that unholy trifecta and it is used it or die.
Now to get the point: generative fill is one of the absolute killer features of psp - in an instant it does what could take multiple hours to do previously with 5-10 sec of watching a loader.
There are many mor gamechangers and this really looks like another
paint shop pro?
Creating a specification for minimum viable features of a raster editor able to replace Photoshop would be fantastic.
Could serve as a roadmap for alternatives and for bragging rights: "Painter2900: implements 99% of the Rasterflames Liberation Standard, and more!".
Beside functions, Gimp's UI looks outdated.
Krita on the other hand is basically everything I remember about old Photoshop. Even the keyboard shortcuts are pretty much the same. The price is quite right too.
What Adobe has done with generative AI has been really impressive though. I am going to probably have to give PS a try just to see what I am missing.