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721 points ralusek | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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ryandrake ◴[] No.41870217[source]
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."

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emmanueloga_ ◴[] No.41870780[source]
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!

--

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

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1. mesh ◴[] No.41871004[source]
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)

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2. derefr ◴[] No.41871117[source]
> 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?

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3. bythreads ◴[] No.41873003[source]
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

4. mesh ◴[] No.41875774[source]
That should read "is NOW one of the top 5 used features in Photoshop".