Adobe, purveyor of fine software we simultaneously love and begrudge paying for, is apparently doubling down on the AI revolution. Not content with simply automating away graphic design jobs, they’re injecting AI ‘agents’ directly into Photoshop and Premiere Pro. Buckle up, creatives.
Agent Smith in Your Software
According to a recent blog post from Adobe’s CTO for digital media, Ely Greenfield, these AI agents aren’t just passive tools. They’re designed to actively recommend and even perform edits on your photos and videos. Think Clippy, but instead of suggesting you write a letter, it subtly adjusts your curves and crushes your blacks.
Photoshop’s “Creative Agent”: Edit Suggestions You Can’t Refuse (Maybe)
The Photoshop agent will apparently live in a new “Actions” panel, analyzing your images and spitting out context-aware edit suggestions. Removing unwanted background randos? Blurring backgrounds for that sweet, sweet faux-bokeh? Just click and poof, it’s done. Sounds suspiciously easy. Too easy, perhaps?
The user interaction is touted as ‘natural language.’ You can ask the agent to clean up an image or add a text box behind a person. One can only imagine the beautifully chaotic misunderstandings that will ensue.
Premiere Pro’s AI Agent: The Director’s (Half-Baked) Cut
Premiere Pro is getting in on the action too, building on Adobe’s existing Media Intelligence feature. This AI sidekick will supposedly assist in making rough cuts. So, instead of spending hours agonizing over shot selection, you can let the AI throw something together. Perfect for those days when creative inspiration is replaced by an overwhelming urge to watch cat videos. Adobe has also recently released Generative Extend, further proving the company’s dedication to embedding AI within their software.
Greenfield assures us that AI won’t replace human creativity. Which is reassuring, mostly. It’s just here to “make educated guesses with user input.” Right. Educated guesses made by algorithms trained on… well, who knows what. Let’s hope it doesn’t develop a penchant for lens flares and Comic Sans.
The Future of Editing: Collaboration or Capitulation?
The first Photoshop AI agent is slated for unveiling at Adobe’s Max event in London on April 24th. It’s easy to envision this as the future of editing, a seamless collaboration between human creativity and artificial intelligence. Or, perhaps, it’s the beginning of the end, where software makes all the decisions, and we just sit back and watch our jobs become obsolete. Place your bets, folks.
The Premiere Pro agent will eventually help editors refine shot choices, color, audio mixing, and more. This sounds an awful lot like it will be doing the editing work for you.
Adobe is pushing the narrative of enhanced workflow and democratized creative tools. The reality, as always, is likely more nuanced. These agents promise to streamline tedious tasks, but the risk is homogenization. Will we end up with a world where all photos and videos look vaguely the same, polished to a soulless sheen by the cold, calculating logic of an AI?
Only time will tell if these AI agents will become indispensable tools or just another way for Adobe to extract more money from our wallets while subtly eroding our creative souls. One thing’s for sure: the future of photo and video editing is about to get a whole lot weirder.
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