If you were reading through Twitter (always Twitter, never X) last week, you may have come across the storm stirred up from this article RIP Design Agency : The anti-design agency manifesto. While the title is clickbait mastery, the gist of his article is pretty straightforward:
All things being equal, the efficiencies that AI can bring to workflows will give the agencies that adopt it an advantage over those that do not.
One of the most common questions that I see in the community around Generative AI is whether specific models can be used for professional/commercial work, and what claims of “safe for commercial use” actually mean. These questions, coupled with uncertainty over Copyright law and other licensing issues, have led to a lot of confusion when trying to understand implications of using specific models for projects.
This post provides a non-legal, US-centric overview of Generative AI and claims around commercial safety, and discusses factors to consider when determining whether a model can safely be used for any particular project. It is not meant to be an exhaustive discussion of the topics, but can hopefully serve as a jumping-off point for going deeper in any specific area.
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 2.5.
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. Thinking about it, what I really wanted to do is to embed a little LLM directly into the PNG, and have it tell me about itself when I need the info (things such as content, text, description, etc…).
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. While I definitely have some thoughts on that (I’ll save that for another post), I wanted to start with the basics and explore how and if Adobe tools could be integrated with AI tools. Questions like:
