Comment by ryandrake

The article says clearly there's no guarantee this feature will be released.

Which I'm reading as "Demo-ready, but far from production-ready."

Somewhat relevant: my experience with Photoshop's Generative Fill has been underwhelming. Sometimes it's wrong, often it's comically wrong. I haven't had many easy wins with it.

IMO this is a company that doodles with code for its own entertainment, not a company that innovates robust and highly useful production-ready features for the benefit of users.

So we'll see if Mr Spinny Dragon makes it to production, and is as useful as billed in the demo.

I disagree with your analysis. I think this is a novel use of AI in a commercial art product. Is there any AI feature that Adobe could release that you would not view as "pushed from Wall Street"?

I don’t think those ideas are mutually exclusive. I heavily dislike Adobe and think they’re a rotten company with predatory practices. I also think “AI art” can be harmful to artists and more often than not produces uninteresting flawed garbage at an unacceptable energy cost.

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Worth noting that I fortunately have distanced myself from Adobe for many years now, so my view may be outdated.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.

You can have both!

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)

Moreover, when one looks at the chronology with which features were rolled out, all the computationally hard things which would save sufficient time/effort that folks would be willing to pay for them (and which competitors were unlikely to be able to implement) were held back until Adobe rolled out its subscription pricing model --- then and only then did the _really_ good stuff start trickling out, at a pace to ensure that companies kept up their monthly payments.

Is there no alternative to Photoshop? Affinity or Pixelator don't cut it?

Nvidia needs to continue selling chips like crazy, all companies in the US need to do their fair share to contribute!...

Somebody's putting "AI expert" on their resume

Mine has as well, but it's pretty useful. It's really just a search engine though, but it's indexed confluence and all other internal sites and i've found it pretty useful for everything.

"click link that for whatever reason doesn't give you a permanent link you can bookmark for later"

Sounds like engagement hacking?

While the press lumps it all together as "AI", you have to differentiate LLMs (driven by big tech and big money) from unrelated image/video types of generative models and approaches like diffusion, NeRF, Gaussian splatting, etc, which have their roots in academia.

On the plus side, for Adobe, is that they have a fairly stable & predictable SaaS revenue stream so as long as their R&D and product hosting costs don't exceed their subscription base, they're ok. This is wildly different from -- for example -- the hyperscalers, who have to build and invest far in advance of a market [for new services especially].

> What's wrong with trying out 100 different AI features across your product suite, and then seeing which ones "stick"?

For users? Almost everything is wrong with that.

There are no users looking for wild churn in their user interface, no users crossing their fingers that the feature that stuck for them gets pruned because it didn't hit adoption targets overall, no users hoping for popups and nags interrupting their workflow to promote some new garbage that was rushed out and barely considered.

Users want to know what their tool does, learn how to use it, and get back to their own business. They can welcome compelling new features, of course, but they generally want them to be introduced in a coherent way, they want to be able to rely on the feature being there for as long as their own use of those features persists, and they want to be able to step into and explore these new features on their own pace and without disturbance to their practiced workflow.

> What's wrong with trying out 100 different AI features across your product suite, and then seeing which ones "stick"?

Even the biggest tech companies have limited engineering bandwidth to allocate to projects. What's wrong with those 100 experiments is the opportunity cost: they suck all the oxygen out of the room and could be shifting the company's focus away from fixing real user problems. There are many other problems that don't require AI to solve, and companies are starving these problems in favor of AI experiments.

It would be better to sort each potential project by ROI, or customer need, or profit, or some other meaningful metric, and do the highest ranked ones. Instead, we're sorting first by "does it use AI" and focusing on those.

So it's ok for all of us to become lab rats for these companies?

Force-feeding 100s of different AI features (90% of which are useless at best) to users is what's wrong with the approach.

"But Google does it. If we do it, we will be like Google".

Were you in my meeting about 40 minutes ago? Because that's almost exactly what was said.

If the big tech companies wanted to be really evil, they could invent a nonsense tech that doesn't work, then watch as all the small upstart competitors bankrupt themselves to replicate it.

If the lore is to be believed, Southwest (a airline that has made its business only the 737) saw the a320 neo and basically told Boeing "give us a new 737 or we go to airbus." they did what the client wanted, to their detriment.

"If I asked people what they wanted they would've said faster horses," or whatever Henry Ford is falsely accused of saying.

And Boeing?

Been doing both. Just look at their asset store as of late. Complete mess if you work professionally.

At the same time, apparently their generative autofill is top notch. It's just a shame the industry decided to mix together ML tools with generative art, so that it's hard to tell which from which on a casual glance