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Worth noting that I fortunately have distanced myself from Adobe for many years now, so my view may be outdated.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.
I think this is a great comment and that you absolutely nailed it. It’s a shame that it’s now buried under a flagged response, but still I wanted to make sure you knew (since it was directed at me) that I read it and appreciated it.
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.
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.