There has been a lot of excitement over the past week or so with the release of Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash image model (Nano Banana). The model provides some of the best quality and ways to control the output (maybe the best we have seen thus far).
As usually happens with any big generative AI model release, a fresh wave of clickbaity “Photoshop is dead” posts has followed. This week was no different, though the claims were louder and more frequent, on par with the level of excitement around Gemini 2.
This post proposes a framework for thinking about AI and its impact on the creative industry.
I work at Adobe, but these views are my own.
Over the past three years, the conversation around AI in the creative community has centered almost entirely on generative AI (specifically image and video generation). For many creators, generative AI feels threatening because it appears to automate work that was once theirs alone. At the same time, many models are trained on unlicensed content, raising ethical, legal, and fairness concerns.
Adobe has been doing a lot of work over the past year and a half, integrating generative AI functionality inside their tools, with things like Generative Fill in Photoshop, Generative Remove in Lightroom and Generative Extend in Premiere Pro. However, the world of AI is much larger than just Generative AI and video/image generation. Specifically, agentic AI and more general-purpose AI with MCP (such as Claude / ChatGPT) provide a much larger opportunity to help creatives across their entire workflow.
One of the advantages of working on the community team at Adobe is I get to help solve real world problems for super creative people (inside and outside Adobe). Chatting with my team this week, we had a discussion about how big of a hassle it is managing and searching screenshots. I thought this might be a fun project to tackle over the weekend.
My first thought was to just throw the image and the search at AI and have it give me the results, but that would be slow, and would not work at all if you are searching lots of screenshots.
As I expect most people in the tech industry have been doing, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about AI and its impact. As I work with the community for Adobe, I’ve specifically been thinking about how it will affect the creative industry, and its implications for Adobe and Adobe’s creative tools.
Adobe makes industry leading creative tools such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere Pro, and I have been curious about exploring how / if these tools fit in within an AI first world.
Since I was in college, I have been an avid reader of The Economist. I read (and listen) to it cover to cover every week, and essentially have a set schedule for it through the week to ensure I get through it, and keep time for additional reading.
However, over the past couple of years, The Economist has made it more and more difficult to consume the content in a flexible manner.
