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.

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.