I'm making some big assumptions about Adobe's product ideation process, but: This seems like the "right" way to approach developing AI products: Find a user need that can't easily be solved with traditional methods and algorithms, decide that AI is appropriate for that thing, and then build an AI system to solve it.
Rather than what many BigTech companies are currently doing: "Wall Street says we need to 'Use AI Somehow'. Let's invest in AI and Find Things To Do with AI. Later, we'll worry about somehow matching these things with user needs."
I would interpret it that they're getting the same push from Wall Street and the same investor-hype-driven product leadership as every other tech firm, but this time they have the good fortune to specialize in one of the few verticals (image editing) where generative AI currently has superhuman performance.
This is a testable claim: where were Adobe in previous hype cycles? Googles "Adobe Blockchain"...looks like they were all about blockchains in 2018 [0], then NFTs and "more sustainable blockchains" in 2022 [1].
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!
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.
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.
What’s the goal of your comment? You’re making a straw man argument which in no way relates to my point and ridicules the opinions of people not on this thread. That makes for uninteresting and needlessly divisive conversation.
The HN guidelines rightfully urge us to make substantive comments that advance the discussion and avoid shallow dismissals.
I think they are actually agreeing with you. Just, in a somewhat unpleasant and sarcastic manner. They aren’t strawmanning your argument, right? They are strawmanning the argument against it.
> They aren’t strawmanning your argument, right? They are strawmanning the argument against it.
Yes, that’s the impression I got out of it too. I disapprove either way. I’d sooner defend a good argument against my point than a bad argument in favour of it.
I come to HN for reasoned, thoughtful, curious discussion.
I think what has happened (and I’ve been hit by this in the past, it is very annoying) is: You included the bit in the beginning about being generally skeptical of AI art in some forms to signal that you are somebody with a nuanced opinion, who believes that the thing can be bad at times. Then, you go on to describe that this isn’t one of those times.
Unfortunately, this gets you some comments that want to disagree with that less specific, initial aside. I’m not sure if people just read the first paragraph and respond entirely based on that, without realizing that it is not the main point of the rest of the post. Or if they just don’t want to give up the ground that you did in the beginning, at all, so they knowingly ignore the rest of the post.
I don’t really know what to do about this sort of thing. It seems like… generally nice to be able to start a post with something that says basically: look I’ve thought about this and it isn’t an uninformed reflexive take. But I’m trying to give up on that sort of thing. It isn’t really logically part of the argument, and it ends with people arguing in a direction that I’m not really interested in defending against in this context.
But it does seem a shame, because, while it isn’t logically part of the argument, it is nice to know beforehand how firm somebody’s stance is.
that's three comments so far (now four) discussing if the comment in question adequately adds to the discussion. If you ask me, hyperbole and sarcasm have a place in nearly any exchange of ideas, but maybe I just haven't drank the right kool-aid for this space.
I think another, perhaps more relevant reference could be the replacement of hand-painted cells with computer-generated frames for animation. It replaced one kind of artist with another. Nobody got all that worked up about it, in the long run.
There are plenty of sarcastic, hyperbolic, dismissive, etc comments on this site. I don’t think you need to gulp down the koolaid or anything.
But the discussion is a little better if we take a little sip every now and then, perhaps even slightly performatively. The “ground-state” of big open Internet discussion sites like this is dismissive and cheap, so it is good to have active pushback occasionally.
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
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
That approach makes sense for very specific domain-tethered technologies. But for AI I think letting it loose and allowing people to find their own use cases is an appropriate way to go. I've found valuable use cases with ChatGPT in the first months of its public release that I honestly think we still wouldn't have if it went through a traditional product cycle.
My company has decided to update its hr page to use AI for reasons unknown.
So instead of the old workflow:
"visit HR page" → "click link that for whatever reason doesn't give you a permanent link you can bookmark for later"
it's now:
"visit HR page" → "do AI search for the same link which is suggested as the first option" → "wait 10-60 seconds for it to finally return something" → "click link that for whatever reason doesn't give you a permanent link you can bookmark for later"
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.
I think this is a weird SAML pattern I've seen before where e.g. Okta generates a URL that's like https://somevendor.com/SAML/somesignedbase64payload to do SSO, which is sort of the inverse of the more common approach of the page you're logging into sending you to the Auth provider after seeing your email domain.
This is certainly a great immediately useful tool but also a relatively small ROI, both the return and the investment. Big tech is aiming for a much bigger return on a clearly bigger investment. That’s going to potentially look like a lot of useless stuff in the meantime. Also, if it wasn’t for big tech and big investments, there wouldn’t even be these tools / models at this level of sophistication for others to be using for applications like this one.
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.
Not at all - Transformer was invented by a bunch of former Google employees (while at Google), primarily Jakob Uszkoreit and Noam Shazeer. Of course as with anything it builds on what had gone before, but it's really quite a novel architecture.
The scientific impact of the transformer paper is large, but in my opinion the novelty is vastly overstated. The primary novelty is adapting the (already existing) dot-product attention mechanism to be multi-headed. And frankly, the single-head -> multi-head evolution wasn't particularly novel -- it's the same trick the computer vision community applied to convolutions 5 years earlier, yielding the widely-adopted grouped convolution. The lasting contribution of the Transformer paper is really just ordering the existing architectural primitives (attention layers, feedforward layers, normalization, residuals) in a nice, reusable block. In my opinion, the most impactful contributions in the lineage of modern attention-based LLMs are the introduction of dot-product attention (Bahdanau et al, 2015) and the first attention-based sequence-to-sequence model (Graves, 2013). Both of these are from academic labs.
As a side note, a similar phenomenon occurred with the Adam optimizer, where the ratio of public/scientific attribution to novelty is disproportionately large (the Adam optimizer is very minor modification of the RMSProp + momentum optimization algorithm presented in the same Graves, 2013 paper mentioned above)
At least, the Transformer didn't. The abstract idea of a language model goes way back though within the field of linguistics, and people were building simplistic "N-gram" models before ever using neural nets, then using other types of neural net such as LSTMs and CNNs(!) before Google invented the Transformer (primarily with the goal of fully utilizing the parallelism available from GPUs - which couldn't be done with a recurrent model like LSTM).
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].
I don't think it's a Big Tech problem. Big Tech can come up with moronic ideas and be fine because they have unlimited cash. It's the smaller companies that need to count pennies who decide to flush the money down the AI Boondoggle Toilet.
"But Google does it. If we do it, we will be like Google".
"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.
Isn't this what AI is all about? Don't kid yourself, most companies, even some big ones, will bankrupt themselves chasing AI and the few remaining will get the spoils.
This feels extremely ungenerous to the Big Tech companies.
What's wrong with trying out 100 different AI features across your product suite, and then seeing which ones "stick"? You figure out the 10 that users find really valuable, another 10 that will be super-valuable with improvement, and eventually drop the other 80.
Especially when if Microsoft tries something and Google doesn't, that suddenly gives Microsoft a huge lead in a particular product, and Google is left behind because they didn't experiment enough. Because you're right -- Google investors wouldn't like that, and would be totally justified.
The fact is, it's often hard to tell which features users will find valuable in advance. And when being 6 or 12 months late to the party can be the difference between your product maintaining its competitive lead vs. going the way of WordPerfect or Lotus 123 -- then the smart, rational, strategic thing to do is to build as many features as possible around the technology, and then see what works.
I would suggest that if Adobe is being slower with rolling out AI features, it might be more because of their extreme monopoly position in a lot of their products, thanks to the stickiness of their file formats. That they simply don't need to compete as much, which is bad.
> 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.
Think about the other side though -- if the tool you've learned and rely on goes out of business because they didn't innovate fast enough, it's a whole lot worse for you now that you have to learn an entirely new tool.
And I haven't seen any "wild churn" at all -- like I said in another comment, a few informative popups and a magic wand icon in a toolbar? It's not exactly high on the list of disruptions. I can still continue to use my software the exact same way I have been -- it's not replacing workflows.
But it's way worse if the product you rely on gets discontinued.
The presence or absence of some subtle new magic wand icon that shows up in the toolbar is neither making nor breaking anyone's business. And even if it comes to be a compelling feature in my competitor's product, I've got plenty of time to update my product with something comparable. At least if I've done a good job building something useful for my customers in the first place.
Generative ML technologies may dramatically change a lot of our products over time, but there's no great hole they're filling and there's basically no moat besides capital requirements that keeps competitors from catching up with each other as features prove themselves out. They just open a few new doors that people will gradually explore.
Anxiously spamming features simply betrays a lack of confidence in one's own product as it stands, directly frustrates professional users, and soaks up tons capital that almost certainly has other places it could be going.
> The presence or absence of some subtle new magic wand icon that shows up in the toolbar is neither making nor breaking anyone's business.
Sounds like famous last words to me.
The corporate landscape is filled with the corpses of companies that thought they didn't need to rush to adapt to new technologies. That they'd have time to react if something really did take off in the end.
Just think of how Kodak bided its time to see if newfangled digital photography would actually take off and when... and then it was too late.
You're comparing being 3 months behind on a supplementary software feature that's tucked among dozens of icons on the toolbar with making a hard decision about pivoting your entire megalithic industrial, research, sales, and distribution infrastructure to a radically new technology.
The discussion you started is about spamming features to see what sticks, as set against making deliberate, selective product decisions as you confidently observe your market.
It's possible that a company that ideologically sets itself against delivering any generative AI features ever might miss where the industry is going over the next 10 or 20 years. But we were never talking about that, were we?
Digital photography started out as a supplementary toy as well. And we are starting to witness a gigantic computational infrastructure pivot with GPU's and NPU's and whatnot. Google and Amazon are literally signing nuclear power plant agreements to power it. AI is a radically new technology.
Do you remember two years ago when ChatGPT came out, and people here on HN were confidently declaring it was the end of Google Search, unless Google proved they could respond immediately? And Google released Gemini less than six months later to demonstrate that Search wasn't going to go the way of Kodak, and it still took people a while to calm down after that?
And the AI revolution is moving a lot faster than the digital photography revolution. We're not talking about "the next 10 or 20 years". You seem to be severely underestimating the power of competition and technological progress, and the ability for it to put you out of business.
You're suggesting the correct approach is "deliberate, selective product decisions as you confidently observe your market." What happens when your deliberation is too slow, your selectivity turns out to be wrong, and your confidence is ill-founded? Well, the company that was willing to experiment with a lot more features is more likely to build the winning features and take over the market while you were busy deliberating.
I'm surprised to be having this conversation on HN, where the start-up ethos reigns supreme. The whole idea of the tech world is to try new things and fail fast, because it's better for everyone in the long run. That's what the big corporations are doing with AI features. Isn't that the kind of thing that tech entrepreneurs are supposed to celebrate?
Startups during their earliest stages are encouraged to throw spaghetti at the wall specifically because they don't yet have a customers to offend. They have nothing to lose from failing fast.
In the 2010's more mature companies explored adopting this same model, especially those that had themselves been founded the decade prior. What came out of it was a lot of spaghetti making a mess all over the walls, and the floors, and the ceiling. There were half-baked ideas everywhere, and a few genuine revolutions, but the quality of pretty much everything tanked.
Optimistically, we now seem to be at the starr of a pendulum swing back from that, but with little time to scrape off all the spaghetti that continues to drag everything down.
> I'm surprised to be having this conversation on HN, where the start-up ethos reigns supreme.
Many of us are sick to death of the startup ethos. We want tools that work consistently and aren't constantly changing because someone at the company got bored.
No, it's way worse if the product I rely on does as you suggest and keeps adding new features just to see what will stick. I hate that sort of behavior with a passion and it is the sort of thing which will make me never do business with a company again.
> 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.
Every consumer is a "lab rat" for every company at all times, if that's how you want to think about it.
Each of our decisions to buy or not buy a product, to use or not use a feature, influences the future design of our products.
And thank goodness, because that's the process by which products improve. It's capitalism at work.
Mature technologies don't need as much experimentation because they're mature. But whenever you get new technologies, yes all these new applications battle each other out in the market in a kind of survival-of-the-fittest. If you want to call consumers "lab rats", I guess that's your choice.
But the point is -- yes, it's not only OK -- it's something to be celebrated!
It's not "force-feeding". You usually get a little popup highlighting the new feature that you close and never see again.
It's not that hard to ignore a new "magic wand" button in the toolbar or something.
I personally hardly use any of the features, but neither do I feel "force-fed" in the slightest. Aside from the introductory popups (which are interesting), they don't get in my way at all.
It's popups. It's emails. It's constant nudges towards changes in workflows. Most importantly, it's accelerated the slurping of data and aggressive terms of service by an order of magnitude. Sure, in theory everyone wanted your data before, but now everyone wants all your data all the time. They want to upload it to their servers. They want to train products on it. And they want to ban you from using their product if you don't agree.
Yeah but sometimes, they just f it up. Like the PS crop tool was aok then they introduced the move the background instead of the crop rectangle way of cropping which is still to this day a terrible experience.
Also, Lightroom is one of the worst camera tools out there. It's only known because ADOBE...
The video is much better than the linked page. The video shows the dynamic multi-angle character rotation and other object rotations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=63
Regardless of whether these are adobe employees or not, I’d argue that a feature like this warrants such a response.
It makes me miss Apple’s old keynote style that they’ve abandoned in favor of the bland, sanitized, over-polished and pre-recorded video keynotes.
I’m honestly over so much of the corporate cynicism and Blind-indification that’s turned what was once a necessary precautionary stance to this demonization or ridicule of people who happen to love their work and where they do it.
This is Adobe Max, which is a huge event held by Adobe for creators.
This session is "Sneaks" which is held every year, and has a fun, casual atmosphere. i.e. it has a theme, has a celebrity co-host, lots of jokes, food and drink served, etc...
Its basically a bunch of people who are creative, and are having fun nerding out on the tech...
Of course there is. Just like there's an Apple Cult, Android Cult, Facebook Cult, Sportsball team cult, blah blah blah. Any group that is large enough to attract that many users/followers/fans will naturally have a subset that is more gungho than the rest.
I'm not sure about this particular event, but companies often have employees who worked on the products in the crowd during launches to provide even more crowd noise.
There’s millions of Adobe product users out there. Almost all the design tool developers have keynote events.
As an aside, I hate that people like yourself describe fans of anything they don’t personally understand as cults. It’s an antagonistic framing of a question designed to remove any good faith discussion.
I think cult is really fitting for a massive group of customers who are locked in by a monopolist. Maybe eve; worse than a cult, because there's just the one,
Not bad, but what's up with the audience? Is there an Adobe cult or something?
There are conferences for Adobe customers to teach them how to use Adobe tools. I think there was recently an Adobe Max conference in Los Angeles. It could have been filed there.
It's an immense feature. Illustrators love it. Of course they're enthusiastic about it. Man, there's nothing like this. You draw 2D vector art and then rotate it in 3D space. What the heck, that's freaking crazy. I'd be hooting and hollering. How can you not be losing your mind over this. It would accelerate so many processes.
My wife's an artist and says they had a shitty version of this but this is crazy.
I find that Adobe is really pulling away from open source software with all this AI stuff. A few years ago it could be argued that GIMP, Inkscape, and Darktable could do almost everything that Photoshop, Illustrator, and Lightroom could, albeit with a jankier user interface.
But now none of the open source software can compete with AI generative fill, AI denoising, and now AI rotation.
In some way, having followed the open source image generation scene for a while, it feels a little bit like it's opposite?
Most of the ai image generation stuff I've seen from adobe feels late to party in terms of what you can do with open source tools. Where they do compete however is with tight integration, and I guess that's what matters the most to users in the end.
There are plugins for gimp that let you do image generation, inpainting and other things.
As far as what the post shows, it looks very much like current models that generate novel viewpoints of an object, but for illustrations. It might be doable to fine tune this for illustrations and simply vectorise the new viewpoint again. Though this will destroy any structure previously held in the object.
All I'm saying is that we have the tech to do even more than what adobe is doing, we just haven't put it nicely together yet.
The more I spend time as a software developer, the more strongly I believe that UX is 80% of what makes a tool good, and that a lot of programmers really just don’t get that.
There are also the programmers that do get that, but just don't have the ability to change it. I'm no artist, but I can tell you when something looks bad. I'm constantly playing with CSS to learn new things to make things look better. I'm now in that category of "it looks like someone tried but just didn't achieve, but better than most" level of design.
Programmers making things for other programmers will always be forgiven as long as it works. Programmers making things for the general population will not be forgiven to the same extent if at all. As soon as someone releases something that is polished, it will be used even if it doesn't work as well.
They might do it anyway though. I have the "all apps" subscription but it's not actually everything they make any more, all their "Substance 3D" tools are another $50/mo. I can easily see this feature getting most of its functionality locked behind that extra subscription the way Illustrator's new 3d tools just give you a tiny handful of materials without that.
Oh for sure, their implementation is slicks and they're somewhat of a monopolist. The whole "free to educational institutions" really worked well for them and MS.
I don't doubt they will put prices up, just boring they don't need to.
I was just thinking similarly. I don't need any of these AI features and I'm certainly not about to start giving Adobe money, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't jealous.
Not yet, but I imagine soon they will. Closed source is moving to video and open source is catching up to static images with incredible pace. I won't be suprised if not only GIMP integrates something like a couple of general stable diffusion models but pirated copies of photoshop find a way to hook up a local generative model instead of the online stuff.
"But now none of the open source software can compete with AI generative fill, AI denoising, and now AI rotation."
This is a common pattern across many fields. The truly top-end companies are always running ahead of open source.
But that doesn't mean it's a permanent situation. It just means you're looking at it from a point in time where the commercials got there, and open source hasn't yet. Open source will get there, and then Adobe will be ahead on something else.
I've played a bit with "comfyui" over the past few days, a bizarre name for an AI image generation power tool. (And other things, but I have no experience there to know how good it is at those.) It drips with power. The open source world is not generally behind on raw capability. As is often the case, open source's deficiency for generative fill for instance is that A: it offers too much control, too many knobs (e.g., "which of several dozen models would you like to start with?"), and while that's awesome if you know what you're doing, it is not yet at the "circle this and click 'remove'" yet, and B: the motivation and firepower to integrate this all into a slick package is not there. I can definitely do an AI generative fill with open source software, but I'll be exporting an image into comfyui, either building my own generative fill program or grabbing some rando's program online who may or may not be using compatible models or require me to install additional bespoke functionality into comfyui, doing my work, and re-exporting it. The job is done, but it's much more complicated, and most people don't care about the other extra capabilities this workflow yields so for them it's just cost.
It's a very normal pattern in the open source world. Nothing about the current situation particularly gives me cause to worry specially about it.
To be concrete, here's a YouTube video that's to the more advanced side of what you can do in the open source world, which is probably still ultimately simplistic compared to what some people do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijqXnW_9gzc That entire series is worth a look, and there's more it doesn't cover. You can get incredible control over these tools in the open source world, but it involves listening to some guy on YouTube trying to explain why you might to sometimes use a thing called "dpmpp_2m_sde_gpu"... not exactly normie-friendly.
Can't speak for PS vs GIMP but I used to use Illustrator a fair bit and Inkscape was nowhere near it in terms of both features and useability. Now that was 15 years ago, so it may have caught up.
I'm not convinced. The flows are a little less convenient right now, but that's basically it.
Ex - I can absolutely get exactly this same rotation feature using open toolchains, they just haven't been nicely consolidated into a pretty package yet.
So to recreate the same thing adobe is doing here I currently have to:
> A few years ago it could be argued that GIMP, Inkscape, and Darktable
To a Linux user, yes. To a professional, it was always a cruel joke, it was never close, even a few years ago. It's like saying Notepad++ is a functional IDE, or Kdenlive is a functional replacement for DaVinci Resolve.
I cannot stress this enough: Actual professionals do not think GIMP is a viable replacement, in any way, and never have.
I would also like to add (as a separate comment though, this will be controversial):
Some would say that GIMP, Inkscape, and Darktable aren't really competitive yet because they haven't had enough investment. If we invested in them enough, and managed them well, they could be like Blender.
GIMP has been in development since 1995. Photopea was initially released in 2013, has been solely developed by one person, and is a far-and-away better Photoshop competitor. The projects themselves are mismanaged. GIMP should (frankly) be abandoned and completely reset, in my opinion, as being a failed attempt at salvaging old code forever. Wisdom is knowing when to keep pushing - and when to give up.
This is the true power of generative AI, enabling new functionality for the user with simple UX while doing all the heavy lifting in the background. Prompting as a UX should be abstracted away from the user.
I spent so many hours trying to do rotations with a pirated copy of Flash as a kid, and I never really got the hang of it, and it always bothered me how deceptively hard rotation was; when I would show my parents my work, they would do their very best to try and act excited but I could tell that they weren't really impressed with the effort because it doesn't seem that hard, at least to a lot of people.
Ok that's VERY impressive, now give me the possibility of exporting it as an .stl to 3D print and then we'll be talking. Just imagine drawing something in 2D and be able to print it as a fully 3D object, it gives me chills just by thinking about it.
As someone who currently works in GenAI and analytics but paid their way through college doing design (for print media) and still keeps around old copies of Illustrator and Fireworks (running under Wine) as well as using Affinity Suite, this is STUPEFYINGLY more impressive than any LLM.
Still not enough to make me pay for Adobe Creative Suite (I just dabble these days), but the target demographic will be all over it.
There are actually multiple open source ML models for 2d to 3d which is clearly what they are doing. The difference with most of them is that this is vectors.
There might actually be a similar open source model already.
But I think to create it you would build it from a database of 3d assets that you could render from many angles. Probably quite similar to the way the 2d to 3d works. I don't know maybe the typical 2d to 3d models will work out of the box or with some kind of smoothing or parameterization. Maybe if you have a large database of parameterized 3d models then you combine that with rendering in 2d from different angles then you can basically use the existing 2d to 3d model.
This looks very cool.
I really hope the results are not overly cherry-picked like Adobe's first version of the text-to-vector generation that only worked particularly well for the showcased art styles.
Well, when is so big bad company going to bully us into using their tools to convert 3D sculpts into flawlessly animatable models? I'll submit to their abuse and surrender my lunch money to them. Though not if it is Adobe, I still have some self-love.
How very strange, my partner was mocking up a room for our home just a few hours ago, and I asked whether an AI tool existed to rotate the incorrect angle of a sofa in a photo being used within the mock up - and here it is on hackernews just an hour later, just that tool..
Edit/ apparently I misunderstood it's only possible with vectors - getting close though to the reality mentioned!
Not a graphic designer, so I can't speak for their reasons, only for mine. First, I had a photoshop subscription and when I cancelled they wanted to fine me for cancelling. Then they bought the Substance suite and made it subscription only and very expensive (unless you buy the Steam version, whose price they doubled). That also hurt me, when I could barely afford those tools
I'm better off now, but I have a long memory and prefer to vote with my wallet by paying multiples to any competitor...which generally speaking is better for me and everybody else, since competition is the mother of innovation.
Apropo, Marmoset Toolbag 5 is out; it comes with a permanent license, it has a huge materials library, and the interface is very snappy and it doesn't feel like it has been programmed using Electron. You don't need to pay for Substance Painter this year.
Ah, and Adobe's latest exploit was a confusing TOS that more or less stated they would use your work that you edited locally with their software to train their AI models. I think they walked that one back when the wave of outrage hit them.
Completely agree. I thought this was going to be some underwhelming nonsense, but that is legit impressive and something even a non-artist could benefit from.
This is basically like taking your 2D drawing to an artist and saying "draw this for me from different angles." Only now the artist is a computer, and probably costs you a lot less than paying a real artist every time you want to do this.
Animators are even more out of a job I guess, but really have been for quite some time I think, almost no animation is entirely hand-drawn anymore.
A large amount of animation made in Japan is still initially animated by hand on paper, actually! The anime industry is remarkably conservative, technologically, which makes it all the more impressive that its animation production output dwarfs that of most other places, including ones that have largely switched over to 3D or puppet rigging for animation productions...
I was going to write how this would be cool in a kids drawing app but the thought that they might never feel the need to draw something from a different angle. I wonder what other activities have been lost to time and technology.
Why might a kid not want to draw something from a different angle? In my introduction to drawing course I was asked to draw my non-dominant hand every day for a week, each time from a slightly different angle.
I am sure this is the right time for hobbysts to make your own movies, and animations.
I personally started programming, in part, to make simple animations like the ones you see in Scratch, and it’s incredible how accessible the tools are today for anyone looking to bring their ideas to life.
This is great -- I'm always amazed how effective classical algorithms are at doing so-called "neural tasks". What's strange is how few SIGGRAPH tech ever makes it out as a consumer product
A version of this was available in Photoshop for a long time, but I think the feature was deprecated and removed completely this year. I had used it for a few things here and there, but dedicated 3D tools were much better if you were working in that space.
one thing is you can't be lazy when drawing the initial vector like a car for example, you can't just draw from the top and expect it to generate a side shot after rotating. You need to draw maybe an isometric version first.
People have been using 3D models for 2D graphics for at least a decade. 3D models rotate, by default.
This demo shows generating a 3D model from a simple 2D shape. It'll fall flat on its face trying to 3D model anything non-trivial which begs the question - who cares?
Also, you'll want to animate the 3D model - which this doesn't do, so you'll soon be back to your usual 3D toolkit anyway.
This is in a wholly 2D program. The input is implied to be one completely flat vector drawing, which Illustrator turns into a 3d model, and renders back into flat vectors at multiple rotations, with no further work on the part of the artist.
(I say "implied" because that's all they're showing in the video presentation, there may be additional setup involved that they're skipping. This is inside Illustrator though, which has a long history of 3d extensions being very awkwardly shoved into a corner of its toolset.)
Rather than what many BigTech companies are currently doing: "Wall Street says we need to 'Use AI Somehow'. Let's invest in AI and Find Things To Do with AI. Later, we'll worry about somehow matching these things with user needs."
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