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Comment by emmanueloga_

14 hours ago

I think you're being a bit too generous with Adobe here :-). I shared this before, but it's worth resharing [1]. It covers the experience of a professional artist using Adobe tools.

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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1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lthVYUB8JLs

25 comments

emmanueloga_

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latexr  13 hours ago

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Worth noting that I fortunately have distanced myself from Adobe for many years now, so my view may be outdated.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

  • throwaway2037  5 hours ago 

        > I also think “AI art” can be harmful to artists and more often than not produces uninteresting flawed garbage at an unacceptable energy cost.

    What do you think about Midjourney? The (2D) results are pretty incredible.

    • numpad0  35 minutes ago

      That is where opinions actually diverge between pro-AI and anti-AI clusters - they look gorgeous and human-indistinguishable if you aren't trained with tons of images, or extremely disturbing and obvious if you were. It's like how CGIs and special effects from the past would look terrible today.

      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.

  • zerkten  12 hours ago

    Whether they avail of it, or not, Adobe have the possibility of accessing feedback and iterating on it for a lot of core design markets. I have a similar view to yours, but there is a segment of the AI community who feel that they are disrupting Adobe as much as other companies. In most cases, these companies have access to the domain experience which will enable AI and it won't work the other way around.

    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.

  • qerti  12 hours ago

    [flagged]

    • jrflowers  11 hours ago

      > I think the keyboard can be harmful to scribes

      I like this reasoning. If something is new then it must be the future of humanity. People scoffed at Concorde for being “wasteful” and “flawed” but look at the company today

    • latexr  12 hours ago

      You’re focusing on an irrelevant part of the comment and making a straw man out of it. Your account has very little content so you may be unfamiliar with the HN guidelines, in which case I urge you to refer to them before proceeding.

      Discussion should assume good faith and responses should become more substantive, not less, as the conversation goes on.

      https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mesh  13 hours ago

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)

  • derefr  13 hours ago

    > is not one of the top 5 used features in Photoshop

    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?

    • bythreads  10 hours ago

      You're super wrong. Pro here working with this stuff for decades.

      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

  • mesh  3 hours ago

    That should read "is NOW one of the top 5 used features in Photoshop".

WillAdams  12 hours ago

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.