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Worth noting that I fortunately have distanced myself from Adobe for many years now, so my view may be outdated.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.
> I also think “AI art” can be harmful to artists and more often than not produces uninteresting flawed garbage at an unacceptable energy cost.
All of this is orthogonal to Adobe's business practices. You should expect them to operate the way they do given their market share and the limited number of alternatives. I personally have almost moved completely to Affinity products, but I expect that Adobe should be better placed to execute products and for Affinity to be playing catchup to some extent.
The HN guidelines rightfully urge us to make substantive comments that advance the discussion and avoid shallow dismissals.
I like this reasoning. If something is new then it must be the future of humanity. People scoffed at Concorde for being “wasteful” and “flawed” but look at the company today
Discussion should assume good faith and responses should become more substantive, not less, as the conversation goes on.