What Adobe v ArtCraft teaches us

Interesting point, overlooking the biggest part:

"It built a machine that turns valuable things into free things, and then pointed it at the businesses it needed to stay alive. That isn’t a revolution."

It is a revolution. Free models are out there. The "toll booths" (software companies) might not survive, but if that's the case, that is the revolution: Because something that you had to pay a massive "toll" for is now essentially free. That might not help the AI companies but it will be a revolution for everyone else that had to pay the tolls, likely making everything cheaper and everyone better off.

(Yes, everyone. Even a very poor person in a highly developed European country lives better than a mildly rich person before the industrial revolution, and I'd say the average person lives at the levels even royalty could barely dream of.)

Even if this bites the AI labs and they don't survive, building software is not going to become significantly more expensive than it currently is with free models that are being sold at cost (barring something major like a global nuclear war), mainly because you can always continue to run the existing models on existing hardware even if progress were to magically stop.

Does anyone actually use PhotoCraft? Is it really a complete replacement for Photoshop or is it basically a proof of concept?

I'm skeptical. It's not easy to capture all of the behavior of piece of professional software that has evolved for decades. There are already dozens of cheaper (and free) less-capable photoshop clones that haven't taken over the market.

I suspect the bigger issue with Adobe's business is that generative AI is quickly replacing the graphic artist. The replacement for Photoshop isn't PhotoCraft, it's a prompt.

The irony here is that the article, written solely by Claude, is also a volley at authors.

The substack popup to join and follow the author made me giggle: Why would I join that substack to read that "author" when I already have multiple free AIs that can give me the same take, but without all the waffle?

In the past, I might have signed up to read the author (I have signed up to a few authors before), but if all the author has to offer is basically already available to me for free, why would I join up?

> that money doesn’t migrate to the AI lab. It evaporates.

No, someone still has to pay the subscription. AI Labs don't care who uses the tokens and how. If Adobe goes under someone else is going to take their place. Suprise, surprise: they will also use tokens.

> It’s a very expensive way of shooting yourself in the foot and sending the bill to your investors. <CoreWeave bonds chart>

I'm not sure how CoreWeave bond chart is even remotely relevant here. They are not even an investor.

> They are just mining the asteroid, dumping the silver onto the market for $20, and watching the price of their own product plummet to zero.

The lab's own product is the model. How is someone building a weekend project going to plummet the value of their model? It's the opposite!

The article is wrong. Adobe charged rent to create profit to send to shareholders. Paying engineers was not the major cost center other than that it needed to _seem_ like it was, to justify the subscription price.

Ultimately Photoshop as an idea stopped creatively evolving and Adobe created a tenuous pricing scheme that disincentivized competition, locked in users, and made most customers resentful. What this taught many of us is that this is a cautionary tale.

Mind you Adobe could have made CC free, built a healthy ecosystem around it, and created a lot of value in network effects, standards, plugins, etc. But they chose the dark path and they deserve to pay for it.

just an aside on the Claude prompter responsible for this article, he labels himself as writing about how "feminism ruins tech", and he has written some pretty heinous things about women. Given that he approaches things with such a (male) software engineer exceptionalist point of view, I would take his writings with a grain of salt.

There are a few reasons I keep my CC subscription and one of them is that Photoshop is one of only two applications I know of that gives me the maximum control possible over prints I make on my inkjet —- and my fear is that they will throw away in a fit of FOMO.

What keeps Adobe up at night, for better or for worse, is not that somebody is going to make a product that imitates what Photoshop used to be but that somebody is going to come out with a much better tool for AI driven editing and generated images.

It’s hard to predict a future, there are so many ways it could play out.

If we assume that this is indeed true, that would mean AI companies will go bankrupt, leaving a lot of hardware to be rented for cheap. Isn’t it something that would benefit the community?

Or maybe they’ll find the next vertical and just move there now that “software is solved”

Large AI firms are hostile to their customers. Given their surveillance, censorship, blocks, deprecations, and bugs, it doesn't make sense for users to stick with them for a day longer than necessary.

For the record, I believe that the whole "building something as good as Photoshop" is BS, and a sort of retroactive justification of lock-in.

Yes, building something as complicated and locked in as Microsoft Word required a lot of work, and Microsoft has gained considerable money and power over it, but that doesn't mean that Word is necessarily good.

No different from "McDonald's hamburgers are objectively very good."

I hate that this article is talking about Photocraft killing Photoshop because of AI as though Ivan Kutskir didn't build Photopea years ago by hand. It was an amazing feat and Photopea is a great product and I don't want to see it dismissed immediately just cuz someone copied it over a weekend with Claude.

Let the time be the judge!

While I want to agree with much of this, the foundational flaw is that the Ai is not as capable as though author wants us to believe. Perhaps they are being intentionally hyperbolic about it.

Ai models are not up to the task of a complete replacement. Humans are still needed and I don't see this changing. The "news worthy" cases of open source replacement are not in fact usable alternatives, missing features or having serious bugs. Anyone who has pushed on the models and vibe coding knows they have their limits around problem complexity - and that it takes an experienced practitioner in the subject Ai is being applied to in order to get good results.

"Software engineers are the most expensive employees on Earth"

They are not. CEOs are.

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Claude is everywhere. It literally killed oldschool engineering. I don't even want to interact with people who use Claude anymore.

Props to the author, this is very well written. Makes a lot of sense.