There already a bunch of good open source alternatives but some reason everyone wants to stay with adobe

I agree with one exception.

The AI denoising in Lightroom is absolutely spectacular, and I can't find anything in league with it in open source. I'm sure that will change soon, though.

i love gimp, but the trouble you need to go through to make text with outline is just painful. ive done it that way for years now and i recently learned on photoshop its just a toggle :c

They're gonna keep coming after hardware ownership and jacking up prices like they've been working on. Even if you get an Intel Arc Pro card that's moderately affordable, you're gonna need a reBAR / Above 4G decoding compatible mobo to handle it, along with all the other system components that are already unaffordable for most.

They're gonna buy up platforms like they did with Hugging Face to stop as much proliferation of the open-weight models as they can. And enshittify them ala every other thing they own

No more tinfoil hats and excuses, this shit is happening and is gonna keep happening. If revenue can go up, they're gonna make it go up at any cost.

The final cost may be deadly.

Edit: for the record, I agree with you.

Corporate theft engines being used to drink those same corporations milkshakes feels like karmic justice. This time, I will withold my objections and fetch some popcorn.

I'm 99.9% sure that Adobe and all other big tech companies are using LLMs to generate code. So it's slop either way, but one is at least free and open source

Of course the established alternatives like Krita, Gimp, Inkscape and others are even better, no questions there

I think it's worth reminding people where the general left wing FOSS conscious was before AI. Every week we'd see an article that was the antithesis of ownership, from celebrating the end of Disney copyright to loopholes in trademarks and the like, it was the heart of a lot of content.

There is a fantastic foreword foreword in The Picture of Dorian Gray from Oscar Wilde about art for art's sake that I think about a lot, which really boils down to a litany for art for art's sake, (and by extension education for education's sake), that is overlooked in favour of being for the sake of profit or capital.

I am of the opinion that in response to AI, we have drifted from a left wing overall movement that rejected ownership in this way, to a protective, defensive style that is largely that stance of a neo-luddide, without any awareness of what ended that era, which was an insufficient boycott and misspent manpower.

I want to say, I'm someone who is overall against AI, I'm not sure how to prove it, any any time I try to explain points like this, people claim AI wrote my comment.

AI is evil, and has enormous destructive capacity, but making the walled garden of large capitalist software irrelevant in favour of FOSS solutions is a huge win, even in regards to being a result of AI.

I'd rather the water, electrical and creative debt that is incurred by AI is paid off by programs like this, than see companies like Adobe operate, particularly considering they literally changed their TOS to train their internal AI on user data.

Either way, your data is being used to train AI, regardless of if you use Photoshop or Photocraft, but one is FOSS, and openly made with that data.

You are not going to get a 10-year graphic designer to exclaim "Oh, wow, it's called GIMP? I've never heard of it before, thank you!"

Yes but the Adobecucks have proven time and again they'd rather take ungreased Adobe pole than learn an alternative.

Anecdotal: I have wanted to replay a game that was a core part of my childhood. It was only really popular in Scandinavia. Nothing I’ve tried in the past many years worked (to be fair, it was also beyond my skillset). Couple days ago I just gave AI the task to make the game work under wine. Couple hours later and I’m playing it on Linux without issue. Even discovered and patched two bugs related to video decoding in wine to make it work. I would not find anyone else with the interest to make this game work I think!

My perspective is, I'm happy the tool is being used to harm the financial interests of these awful companies. Adobe is who kicked off the whole subscription craze that swept through every other industry. These greedy assholes even steal all your personal works to feed to their AI machine as a prerequisite for using their tools.