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points by hn_submit 3 days ago | 0 comments

This entire A.I. hype is going to get many people burned, especially those whom are investing for their pensions.

And everyone is playing along. It seems to me half the internet is filled with false recommendations and overly optimistic outcomes of their software projects.

And even if the claims are true what use will we have for hundreds of Microsoft Office clones? This A.I. boom might benefit some but will be the undoing of many valuable ISVs like Microsoft and Adobe with potentially trillions of stock market value lost.

[–] aeve890 3 days ago

Adobe? How so? I didn't know Adobe was a big player in the AI boom

[–] EA 3 days ago

Adobe's applications (Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, etc.) have been "cloned" using AI coding tools. There are near feature-complete freeware versions of Adobe software. OP is saying that traditional Adobe customers have freeware alternatives and thus Adobe's revenues will decline rather than increase due to AI. Also, AI tools can often generate that movie or edit that photo via a prompt, rather that some .exe.

[–] omnimus 3 days ago

People are using Adobe for completely different reasons. They are so established in creative industry that everything rotates around their software including it's bugs and quirks. Schools teach only Adobe. When you go to high end printers they have processes prepared for output from Adobe software. There is whole market of specialized software plugins for Adobe. For the industry professionals it's just shared ground and cost of doing business.

The AI clones won't easily change that unless they were exact 1to1. If it was that easy to get rid of Adobe the monopoly won't be there anymore as things like Affinity have existed for a while and are free. Affinity is in many ways even better version of Adobe suite, faster, more stable, allowing to be more creative. But the friction is extreme, because if you need to collaborate or be in any way part of the industry then Adobe is expected so you need it anyway.

[–] tripledry 3 days ago

Question, how viable are these tools and are they maintained?

I genuinely want to know if this is mostly hype or are they actually good. I don't think trying myself would really give a better picture as I'm not a user of said software.

Anyone who tried to replace photoshop with these AI clones successfully?

[–] desterothx 3 days ago

From what I've seen, very buggy currently, and unknown how well they will be maintained. They're definitely not at a stage where adobe should be worried about their revenue, and there are foss alternatives for most adobe tools, that are better than these reverse engineered ones. But if they continue maintaining them and fixing the bugs, who knows, maybe adobe really loses some part of their customer base (although a lot of their individual tools have already been moved to the cloud, thus they can't be reverse engineered anyway)

[–] maupin 3 days ago

By all reports they are not good and have quite a few bugs. But the thing about open source is that, if maintained, it almost always improves. And with the bar for maintenance so low due to AI, we are entering a very interesting time for software.

And by interesting I mean scary, if you sell software.

[–] freecodeio 3 days ago

call me snarky but I don't think a gigantic amount of AI slop is maintainable by any means unless you just throw every token you got and hope for the best

[–] martin-t 3 days ago

I can't believe decompiling from ASM to a higher level lang using a matrix multiplicator should be legally any different from other decompilers.

Nor should using the work of hundreds of millions of people to find useful weights for the matrices without paying them be legal.

[–] suddenlybananas 3 days ago

https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/issues?q=is%3Aissue+... It's also a buggy mess

[–] mattm 3 days ago

To be fair, I'm sure Adobe Photoshop has a long list of bugs as well.