Adobe announced this month that it would release new Photoshop features incorporating agentic AI editing of images. The lines continues to blur. Soon, there won’t be much of a line at all. 

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“Firefly is the hub for all things Adobe AI, with integrations across other popular Creative Cloud apps such as Photoshop, Acrobat and Premiere Pro. The new Firefly AI assistant is agentic, which means that it can perform tasks with minimal human oversight. You can upload a batch of photos and have the AI edit them for you, automatically adjusting the lighting and cropping, for example. One way to think about it is as a new school AI tool that you can use to do old-school, or non-generative, editing. “After all, the LLMs have the benefit of (presumably) having been trained on all the great art of the world. Not sure how, as editors, we’re going to be able to compete with that. 

I still think that a human-captured image “in the moment at the place” has an intrinsic value that is distinct from an AI-generated image, certainly to this human. AI-edited doesn’t inherently detract from that value. But I do know that when I am editing, my goal and my emotions are all about reliving the time when I captured the image. So, even if AI editing is very good, it doesn’t replicate the pleasure of the process. It might be better. But it’s not a 1:1 replicant. Like home brewed beer, part of the joy is the process, not just the product.