Comment by falloutx
13 hours ago
Everyone says that but I don't see anyone cooking up the next photoshop and selling it at $3/month. Why are we not seeing more options of every tool? Most Saas companies are sales companies at their core rather than software companies. And those sales people are so good that they can sell a todo list for millions.
In the case of Photoshop it is the software itself that is becoming useless. In a few years, using photoshop will be viewed the same as developing physical film, a process from a by-gone era that is still possible, but impractical.
This is an extremely bold claim and I think that it completely overlooks how Photoshop is used by professionals in practice. Professional users want extremely fine grained and precise control over their tools to achieve the specific results that they want. AI "image editing" is incapable of providing anything remotely similar.
Yes, "professional users" need this. The problem is that the group of professional users who need that will shrink really fast in the next few years.
I've recently re-instated a Photoshop subscription and its now part of my core AI generated asset workflow. AI is fantastic at art direction but it needs minor adjustments to make it production ready. E.g putting real screenshots in with correct placement, smoothing, editing out artefacts etc. I can't imagine the lengths I'd have to go to to instruct an LLM to do these tasks with words.
Some of the LLM crowd is living in lala land.
How much of what you do with Photoshop could be done with open source tools instead (GIMP, ImageMagick, etc), versus how much do you really need Photoshop for?
One technique I’ve used for cleaning up AI-generated images, was a Python script driving ImageMagick-and an LLM helped write the Python script (although it took a few iterations, because the LLM’s first attempt didn’t actually work)
> I don't see anyone cooking up the next photoshop and selling it at $3/month.
That's not the situation we're talking about though. It's someone saying "hmm, I need to edit this picture. Can I get ChatGPT to do it?" where 3 years ago they would have had to buy Photoshop and learn how to use it.
Similarly, if they need a tool to batch-convert a thousand images, they're getting an LLM to construct the specific tool they need in a couple of hours and then running that, rather than buying a software product that can do it.
You don't need a whole dev team to build a one-off tool for a specific job, which is probably 90% of the demand for those software products. LLMs are becoming the general-purpose tool for a lot of use cases.
ChatGPT cant do the precise photoshop tasks, not even close, infact the quality of output is worse than quality of input almost always. Ofc we live in this low quality internet now, so you may already be used to terribly edited images by AI.
>You don't need a whole dev team to build a one-off tool for a specific job, which is probably 90% of the demand for those software products. LLMs are becoming the general-purpose tool for a lot of use cases.
No, all of these tools have 90+% revenue coming from B2B sales, consumers dont buy software products anyway. All of the software purchases are tax deductible so corporations buy even if they use very little of it.
>they're getting an LLM to construct the specific tool they need in a couple of hours and then running that
This is something I really hope takes off for the common person. ChatGPT is perfect for bespoke little programs that do one thing and can be discarded after use.
> bespoke little programs that do one thing and can be discarded after use.
That's my best-case scenario as well: LLMs are scripting languages for a broader audience. They just barely automate busywork, but are not a reliable foundation.
"Where is the output?" remains the giant elephant in the AI room. You can tell because people get mad when you ask that.
> Everyone says that but I don't see anyone cooking up the next photoshop and selling it at $3/month.
Yup, same reason you can't throw manpower at a software project and expect a proportional outcome (Brooks's Law). AI amplifies what's already there; it doesn't conjure taste or product vision out of thin air.
> Everyone says that but I don't see anyone cooking up the next photoshop and selling it at $3/month. Why are we not seeing more options of every tool?
I expect the markets are reflecting that soon there will be more competition.
It'll take time, and as LLMs improve, it'll take even less time.
> I expect the markets are reflecting that soon there will be more competition.
> It'll take time, and as LLMs improve, it'll take even less time.
People have written great software in ed(1). We have tools like uxn[0] written on potato computers and billions and years later, we still have to hope for AI output.
[0]: https://100r.co/site/uxn.html