But to answer the question, it looks a lot like a Canva competitor.
Nano Banana alone obsoleted all of Photoshop. (And the Chinese versions of Nano Banana are even better!)
I'm most worried for my friends in creative though. I have some extremely talented friends at WPP and other agencies. Everyone is shaking in their boots.
Nobody's buying ads because of the economy, then these tools are nipping at their heels. They've already had one massive round of layoffs, and there's another one supposedly happening early next year.
Where are these millions of people going to go? These are six figure income earners.
There are five million marketing professionals in the US. If half of them lose their jobs, then what? What's lined up for them after this?
If AI fails, the economy goes boom.
If AI succeeds, the economy goes ... bigger boom?
I used to think the tools would wind up creating more work, especially in narrative creative work. Outside of A24 and indie/foreign films, Hollywood is so trite. These models drop Pixar/Disney VFX into the hands of every YouTuber - and that could be really cool when used by the right people. Like the Corridor Crew folks.
Maybe gaming and media will see a boost, but advertising and marketing folks are really going to get hit hard.
If the vision is diluted due to lack of control afforded by AI tools, then the tools won’t be used.
Many times in Hollywood have we seen directors spend unjustifiable amounts of money in the pursuit of creative control.
Hand camera tracking a dinosaur in Jurassic Park, developing a novel diffraction algorithm for THE ABYSS, hand-drawing 3-Dimensional computer animations for 2001, creating an entire scale model practically for a single fight scene in LOTR.
AI allows you to get anything. The best movies are a direct reflection of a particular vision. AI can’t provide this and I see no way to solve it.
A natural response is - well directors already outsource some creative control to VFX artists so why not to a machine instead.
Because an artist can control everything. Even if the artist is prompting a model, at the end of the day an artist can drill right down to the tooling itself (photoshop for example) and exactly achieve the vision.
I don’t see AI achieving this granularity while maintaining its utility. It’s a sliding scale of trading utility as a time saving device for control.
If you lean too far to the control side, well you might as well fire up photoshop. If you lean too much to the utility side, you sacrifice creative control.
When looked at under this lens the utility of AI generation is actually limited as it solves a non existent problem. One can think of it as an additional piece of tooling for use only as a generational tool where there is less need for control, such as for background characters.
The team at Red Barrels, for example, train a local model on their own artwork to automatically generate variant textures for map generation. Things such as this. No need to be doom and gloom about this stuff.
You should look at ComfyUI. Control is here, it's just not widely distributed.
Have you seen their announcements during Adobe Max? The AI features are mind blowing. Adobe is alive and well.
I wonder.
They're doing well with their existing customer base of digital creatives and related industries/professions.
Who may all be the buggy whip makers of the late 2020's.
Way too many of the people/companies who traditionally paid highly skilled and creative Photoshop users are rapidly moving away from doing that in favour of cheap GenAI slop.
I'm sure there are people in graphic design, illustration, videography, photography, UI/UX, 3D art, augmented reality, social media, creativity and design, collaboration and productivity, and education who are super excited about what Adobe is doing. I'm also sure almost all of those people are very concerned about their career choice and future (or are ignoring the reality of what's going on around them).
Sure, the top graphic designers in the world will still earn great money being highly creative for key clients. But the vast majority of people in those fields are not the top in their field, and the vast majority of clients those people invoice are going to consider cheap AI slop "good enough" for their businesses and use cases.
I have a 30+ year career in web related roles, working more or less closely with graphic designers, artists, illustrators, photographers, and other website development related professions. All of the ones I've remained friends with over that time are either deeply concerned about their career future, or have already jumped ship and become nurses, carpenters, teachers, caregivers, and even priests and drug dealers...
The short version is the copyright office says it is possible works by creative human authors using AI tools are partially copyrightable in many cases.
See also [1] mentioned in the framework linked by sibling comment, AI copyright is essentially a logical extension of this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
As a simple example, assume a specific LLM-based tool (like Google's own, or someone else's) happens to generate a social media mascot for you that looks a lot like the modern rendition of Mickey Mouse.
Let's see how long that creation flies as public domain because it came out of an AI (that almost certainly consumed a giant amount of content produced by Disney as part of its training).
xd
If I were an EvilGoogle manager, I'd have an enshittification playbook complete with a timeline and KPIs/OKRs mapped out - and probably already linked to individual engineer's promotion/RIF futures.
They know exactly who's using this tool and which company they're using it on behalf of.
In the short term I'd have those companies webpages using Pomelli generated content to rank highly, and for advertising on those pages to show higher then usual clickthrough rates - and probably gradually downrank non-Pomelli pages on their sites. Once it becomes well known that Pomelli generated content genuinely generates more revenue that other options (even though that's only because Google have their thumb on the scale), everybody is going to jump on the gravy train, and a sub-industry of Pomelli consultancies/agencies will show up, like specialist SEO firms did way back.
Gradually that new "Pomelli Content Optimisation" will capture a significant-enough slice of the web content generation pie, and Google will start to sell them "Pro" subscriptions and features, while at the same time reducing functionality and effectiveness of the tools individuals and end-user companies have access to - driving even more revenue into the PCO industry.
Eventually, when enough companies are fundamentally reliant on external PCO vendors, Google will ramp up the pricing of their tools.
(With any luck AGI will have turned us all into paperclips before that runbook plays out.)
If no one uses it, that means the market has proven, no audience for this kind of product. Google loses, everyone else loses.
If everyone who wants this sort of thing uses it, that's it, Google won, everyone else loses.
The outcome to sell to investors is the least believable: people will pay for some offering when a nearly identical one is available directly from Google for free. And anyway, they have the best generative creative tech, so how could anything be better than Google's?
WarOnPrivacy•5h ago
Their blog post has some detail: https://blog.google/technology/google-labs/pomelli/
Kagi said the "Key features and functionalities of Pomelli include:
thelifeofrishi•4h ago
esperent•1h ago
> founder @orshotapp
Maybe you should mention that when advertising your app?
echelon•3h ago
Seems like Google will kill a whole bunch of SaaS companies with this.
emmelaich•1h ago
dang•1h ago