Creativity in name, not so much in practice

Whilst I have long since stopped using Lightroom and other Adobe products, I do still take a keen interest in what is going on at Adobe and more particularly what they are working on. So I have been attending the virtual aspects of adobe’s big MAX conference for the last few years.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen described how the company is determined to develop "AI for social good” in his keynote address. They are certainly using AI within many of their tools. Creating a wealth of “one-click”, “fix-it”, “make it better” tools within their existing suites of applications. For sure it will take a lot of tedious hack work out of making visual images and video, but I don’t think this is going to re-assure the real creatives worried about the rise of AI art.

One really obvious theme is everything is moving to video (or at least animated images) and the general idea of creativity is all about building a social media space, going viral, capturing the hearts and mind in a few second, possible in a 2D becoming meta 3D style, design assets and brand kit consistency, again with that “single click” aspect dominating. Sounds like a lot of the sameness, everyone clicking on the same few links and expecting originally and creativity may actually result with more and more of the same!

The hyped “new” tool Adobe Express has a lot of the look and feel of Canva, perhaps with nicer integration with other adobe tools (so you need to pay more rent), The photographic enhancements in lightroom and photoshop are mainly not new and exciting, being offered in a number of other pieces of software, just not integrated so again you have to spend more renting it all. The sneaks segment usually my favourite to see what new technology might be coming up was a disappointment. Perhaps with the exception of project blink (for AI-powered video editing on the web)

I did like the short presentation by Relu Ou on "the myths and realities about Artifical Intelligence", Particularly his closing remark “Please let your imagination direct how you use these tools.”