[danaris]

> Photoshop will be eaten by generative AI in the next few years.

This is a laughable idea.

Even if professional artists want to use generative AI in their workflow, it won't be by replacing a tool like Photoshop. It will be by enhancing it.

And if you think the entire art profession will be "eaten by generative AI", then you clearly know very little about human nature.

People will always want to create art. People will always want to see and own art.

Even if some of that latter desire is satisfied by generative AI in the future, I guarantee you not all of it will be. For one thing, there will also always be people who feel that the human touch is more important—that AI art isn't "real" art—and thus, in a world where AI-generated art is ubiquitous, human-created art will become even more prized.

[bitL]

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.

[danaris]

I mean, this is a very different version of "being eaten by generative AI" than what it sounded like you meant. This sounds much more like "Adobe will lose their moat and be outcompeted by other art programs (because generative AI is becoming ubiquitous)".

There are a lot of people out there saying things like "soon there won't be any more programmers/artists/writers because we'll be able to get generative AI to do all that stuff" (with, often, an implication of "screw those lazy/hippie art kids" from those talking about the latter two). This is very much what it sounded like you were saying.

[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).