"Skip the photoshoot"
...is apparently what Adobe is telling people.
Just a reminder that there are alternatives. There's even excellent free software (which could become fabulous with more users and more support).
The title of the article says "Adobe throws photographers under the bus again".
This is laughable. Adobe isn't throwing anyone under any bus. Adobe is a publicly traded company which has a fiduciary duty to make the business decisions that will increase shareholder value.
Adobe has determined, and rightly so, that A.I. is going to completely and utterly transform the landscape of...well...everything. They have a fiduciary duty to understand the products they make and how they fit (profitably) into the current landscape and next year, or two years down the road, or ten years.
A.I. is going to put A LOT of people out of jobs.
It's changing how we perform tasks. Some tasks will become delegatable to the AI. That allows a person more time to perform other tasks. Some jobs will no longer be needed. New jobs will be created.
It is going to make a world as different from our current one as today's world is from the year 1900. Kids right now are going to live in a massively different technological world then anything adults today have experienced, or can possibly even imagine.
I am not saying it will be better, or worse. But it will change what we now do in ways we simply cannot imagine. A.I. is that transformative.
Technology impacts how we accomplish everyday tasks. To illustrate, staying in touch with family was done via handwritten letters transported by horse 200 years ago, over the phone 100 years ago, by reconnecting with family on summer road trips 50 years ago, and on our smartphones using Facebook & Zoom, today.
How will AI impact the simple act of staying in touch with family? It could potentially automate the process. "Alexa, tell Facebook to post five recent photos with captions." The plus side of that is we'll be able to initiate the process of sharing updates on our way out the door to work. The potential downside of that is being personally removed from selecting and captioning the photos to be shared. Will automation make the act impersonal in a way people will notice?
Here's a different example, "Alexa, tell Zoom to schedule a chat with Mom & Dad." Zoom compares calendars, schedules the chat, and issues reminders. It automates and simplifies the logistical task of making the chat happen and allows the people to focus just on the interaction; the family time that makes a person's day, better.
I imagine a not too distant future in which AI helps people plan their daily commutes in a manner that makes travel time as efficient as possible. Just by scheduling departure times and routes intelligently, AI could reduce the time people spend stuck in traffic. Setting aside for a moment the benefits of using AI to facilitate an evolution in corporate culture that empowers employees to work remotely, AI has the potential to make the urban commute less stressful.
So Adobe is rightly planning for a scenario when the already relatively small (compared to the worlds population) group of 'pro users' or 'serious users' that use some of its products are no longer a viable, profitable group to serve.
Is it possible Adobe saw this coming years ago and that was a factor in renaming Lightroom to Lightroom
Classic?
A.I. is going to put a lot of photographers out of business. Adobe is correct to anticipate this and plan their products accordingly.
Bigger picture, image making is and will continue to be impacted by AI. Adobe isn't in the photo software business. They're in the visual storytelling business; the human connection business. It doesn't matter what visual element a person needs to tell their story, Adobe has a product for that.
Again, Adobe is legally obligated to make the decisions that will maintain profitability and viability as a corporate entity. Board members can actually be sued if found to have made harmful choices for a company. They are making the correct business decision to keep themselves solvent for the long term.
Adobe, like all businesses, also has an obligation to conduct itself ethically. Profit is an important and appropriate motivating factor. But not profit at any cost. There are legal and ethical boundaries that, if crossed, can lead to penalties.
Here's a line of text from the "About Adobe" page on their website:
Adobe offers groundbreaking technology that empowers everyone, everywhere to imagine, create, and bring any digital experience to life.
There's that word again, empowers. It implies a goal of making customers stronger and more capable, given the authority to control their lives. The underlying message is that Adobe's mission is to do good in the world. We can debate their success - or lack thereof - in achieving that goal all the live long day. But it is implied in their mission statement.
It's a mission that, if accomplished, comes with desired outcomes. They'll make the world a better place
and be highly profitable as a result. The two are connected.
I say this as an Adobe paid user. I can say that their A.I. Denoise function is incredible in Lightroom. Adobe is not throwing anybody under the bus.
A.I. is going to throw everybody under the bus. Buckle up.
I would phrase it as AI, like all new technologies, is disruptive. It's ethically neutral. It's a tool that a person uses for good or ill. Yes, there are tasks a person performs today that will be delegatable to AI. Image-making is among those tasks.
If we go back in time a couple of generations to a time when the personal computer was becoming a common household "appliance", one of the outcomes of that technological revolution was a significant growth in digital photography. It's been just over a decade since the peak of the dedicated digital camera industry.
Cameras have been desirable as tools for making realistic images documenting real people, places, events, and things. That acknowledged, cameras have not been necessary to that task. Cameras were technology that made the task easier and more objective, more authentic.
AI automates the task so photorealism in image-making can be achieved rapidly and easily by anybody. A consequence is that the resulting image is less authentic. It may look realistic but shares this important distinction in common with a painting or sketch: an AI-generated image is a rendering of a subject that may or may not exist in the real world. If the subject is real, the accuracy and objectivity of the rendering are still limited.
A photo is an image of someone, someplace, something, or some event that exists in the real world. Light from the subject is projected on a medium that responds by making an image of that real thing. While there is human involvement in the making of a photo, there is also a level of authenticity and objectively that a painting, sketch or AI-generated image does not possess.
This doesn't make other visual media less than photography. Nor does it make them better. They're simply different. They're different methods of image-making.
Photography is already a niche practice. While Adobe has been growing its dominance - and profitability - as a manufacturer of software used by photographers, the market size has always been small. How much more niche will photography get? Will digital practitioners become as small in number as film photographers?
Lightroom Classic (LrC), while developed to be a digital darkroom, isn't limited to processing only photos. LrC can be used to process most image files. Even those generated by - gulp - AI. As long as there is a market for cameras used by image-makers who do photography, I'm confident Adobe and others will offer products for the processing and editing of those images.
