bitL

Sorry, the message was probably obfuscated in my original post. I didn't mean that generative AI would replace art producers, just individual tools and it didn't occur to me at the time of typing it that most people would associate it with replacing art producers (as the tooling aspect was "obvious" to me).

I presume that the technician had at least one PhD. I had a colleague who worked at Los Alamos with a top PhD and he was basically driving around placing and collecting data from some sensors all day long.

> You could be the former CEO of Adobe with a PhD in ML concentrating in image generation and a wing dedicated to your artwork at the Met and still be too out of touch with current image manipulation tooling to make useful predictions about it.

This was a good one, I love it!

My SWengineering background tells me that many of the tools Adobe has are tedious to replace but doable by many algorithmically gifted folks. Some need some investment to get to pro level like color calibration and correction. Some need camera manufacturer support like initial sensor RAW processing. The ones that were causing awe like their famous patented content aware fill based on complicated differential equations was out of reach for most. So were their precise selection/masking tools and a few more. Now we suddenly can select objects/background/hair fairly easily and reliably using ClipSeg or Segment Anything, removing the masking obstacle. To fill/replace content, we simply select the area and let stable diffusion hallucinate options until we are happy. To simulate puppet tool, we can use ControlNet with stable diffusion though implementing ARAP is also fairly easy. So a dedicated company that wants to get to the parity with Adobe in their most advanced tooling suddenly has a clear road ahead. If they improve UX by e.g. voice or gesture control (plenty of places where Adobe tools are difficult to use for no reason) and do some decent image format compatibility, they can really make a dent in Adobe's market share.

This might sound self-aggrandizing, but given infinite time and energy I alone could replicate most of the CS6 functionality of PS at the same or better quality (and I did create some powerful tools for one of their competitors) and know a few folks capable of the same.

Thanks for ad hominem. I never said 'Adobe became "irrelevant" "years ago"'. I also didn't say anyone can replace Adobe easily, but outlined a path how a motivated company can replace their offering. If somebody offers better UX (and there are many options to do better than PS), lowering the switching costs in required training, then it can happen fairly quickly. Beside being a former pro photo/cinematographer, I also worked for one Adobe competitor and invented a bunch of new geometric and image processing algorithms, then went on to study Deep Learning at Stanford, so maybe I know what I am talking about, or maybe I am just a fallacious idiot who has no clue.

My business background tells me Adobe Photoshop is going to be commoditized because their main advantage in retouching, content filling and masking can be now done by any 10-year old with a beefier GPU at the same or better quality. Even ridiculously bad GIMP can now get the same state-of-art tools Adobe has so inevitably its value proposition will be only appealing to existing "legacy" customers and dropping everywhere else.

You are missing the point. It's fairly easy to replace Photoshop's layering, color correction, filters etc. by a regular software engineering. Where Adobe had extra edge was their retouching, masking and content filling ability. That is now going to be possible to incorporate anywhere by stable diffusion et al. Now Adobe will still have foothold in "legacy" projects with proprietary formats but all the new entrants will have no need to use it. Suddenly folks in Affinity/Serif can add those missing features and continue carving out more from Adobe's market share the way Japan went from crappy manufacturing in the 60s to bleeding edge tech in 80s.

Photoshop will be eaten by generative AI in the next few years. Lightroom is still the best, Illustrator is in a duopoly with CorelDRAW. I used to be a pro photo/cinematographer and I can replace most of my Photoshop needs with stable diffusion + ControlNet + ClipSeg. DaVinci with plugins made After Effect irrelevant for my needs as well. Certainly Adobe still has momentum but their future after they switched from engineering/art company to rentier monopoly company doesn't look that rosy.

From Wikipedia about ARM:

"The company was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple, and VLSI Technology."

All latest node tech from TSMC was co-financed by Apple who in turn had the first-user right.

That's in theory; in practice countries often look the other way or delay actions when they see fit. I guess Ireland is running out of money they planned to get and are now trigger happy on Meta.

There are plugins for DaVinci that can obliterate the need to ever touch AE though it's not out of the box.

You can kinda view ARM and TSMC as their babies. They founded ARM and financed all the node tech in TSMC that made TSMC competitive.

As somebody who went through the MBA education for defensive reasons (i.e. acquiring skills to protect me from managerial BS), I would say you can extend it to most business jobs excluding accountants and quants.

DaVinci Resolve is eating their lunch in cinematography, nobody cares about Premiere or AfterEffects anymore.