We were sipping our morning ice long black when the alerts started. Adobe had done something it’s been hinting at for years. Photoshop had entered ChatGPT. Not as a side experiment and not as a novelty demo, but as a fully embedded feature framed as progress for creatives.
On the surface, it sounds familiar. Another AI announcement dressed up as empowerment. Spend a little longer with it and a different feeling creeps in. Less like a breakthrough and more like another step in a disappointing pattern Adobe can’t seem to break.
Design, Reduced to Prompts
Adobe’s headline is clear. Design becomes conversational. You describe what you want, Photoshop does the work. Remove a background. Adjust colour. Refine contrast. The instruction comes first, the tool disappears.
That framing sounds elegant, but it also raises a question. If design becomes language-driven, what exactly is being valued? Years of visual training, taste development, and problem solving don’t translate neatly into prompts. For experienced designers, distilling a refined process into a few lines of text is not liberating. It’s reductive.
A familiar counterargument, and one we do resonate with at Open All Hours, is that taste ultimately wins. Knowing what works, guided by human judgement, experience, and instinct, is what separates good work from forgettable output. If elements of artificial intelligence help you reach the result you stand behind, that isn’t the issue. AI can sit within a process without defining it.
But there is something about this particular update that feels like a step beyond assistance, and closer to substitution.
Ethical AI, Still Unanswered
Adobe continues to talk about ethical AI, but the core tension remains unresolved. By absorbing enormous volumes of creative work, is our work fuelling the development of this technology? Work made by designers, photographers, illustrators, and artists who were never meaningfully asked for consent.
As tools like this become more embedded, the distance between creator and dataset grows wider. How do creatives ensure their work is not being repurposed to train systems that eventually undercut their own value? This partnership doesn’t bring clarity. It adds scale.
A Strategic Move, Not a Cultural One
It’s hard to ignore the timing. Affinity making moves. Canva pushing further into professional territory. This announcement feels more like a defensive response.
That’s a business decision, not a creative one. And the problem is Adobe keeps presenting these moves as if they are gifts to the community, while many designers experience them as erosion and disrespect.
Levelling the Field
There is nuance here: this does move towards levelling the playing field. People without the training to use traditional design tools can now execute ideas that previously lived only in their heads. Prompts give non-designers a way in, and that will genuinely unlock output that would otherwise never be made.
But for editors and designers who have spent years refining their process, this shift feels far less useful. High-level creative work is rarely a single decision. It’s a sequence of small, considered choices built on experience, reference, and judgement. Distilling that into a handful of prompts is not only difficult, it often misrepresents how the work is actually done.
The reality is that most professional processes don’t translate cleanly into language. They live in instinct, iteration, and visual nuance. When a tool assumes your workflow can be summarised so simply, it raises an uncomfortable question. Is this genuinely built to support complex, high-level creative work, or is it prioritising speed and accessibility at the expense of the depth that professional projects demand?
The Familiar Adobe Problem
Regardless of where you land, this announcement carries a familiar tone-deafness. Adobe is developing a habit of celebrating efficiency while overlooking craft, of championing speed while quietly devaluing skill.
This partnership doesn’t feel like Photoshop learning to listen. It feels like Adobe once again prioritising scale over trust, automation over respect, and optics over the lived reality of creative work. The tools aren’t evil. But when the same company keeps making moves that leave its core users feeling sidelined, frustration becomes inevitable.
For designers, this isn’t just another feature update. It’s another reminder to ask who these tools are really being built for.
What’s your take?
Shot of the good stuff.
