Adobe's new image rotation tool is one of the most impressive AI tools seen

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 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

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Worth noting that I fortunately have distanced myself from Adobe for many years now, so my view may be outdated.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