Sorry-not-sorry to be a bit provocative, but seriously, to highlight one of one million examples:
Testing fence removal on my son’s photo using @NanoBanana, @ChatGPTapp, and @bfl_ml.
They’re all impressive, but Nano tried to put jet engines on this prop plane, so I’m giving this round to ChatGPT. pic.twitter.com/DOvZQLT5H5
— John Nack (@jnack) December 23, 2025
And in a slightly more demanding case:
For Christmas my wife requested a portrait of our coked-up puppy—so say hello to my little friend: pic.twitter.com/uyFfc7ZDzU
— John Nack (@jnack) December 25, 2025
For the latter, I used Photoshop to remove a couple of artifacts from the initial Scarface-to-puppy Nano Banana generation, and to resize the image to fit onto a canvas—but geez, there’s almost no world where I’d now think to start in PS, as I would’ve for the last three decades.
Back in 2002, just after Photoshop godfather Mark Hamburg left the project in order to start what became Lightroom, he talked about how listening too closely to existing customers could backfire: they’ll always give you an endless list of nerdy feature requests, but in addressing those, you’ll get sucked up the complexity curve & end up focusing on increasingly niche value.
Meanwhile disruptive competitors will simply discard “must-have” features (in the case of Lightroom, layers), as those had often proved to be irreducibly complex. iOS did this to macOS not by making the file system easier to navigate, but by simply omitting normal file system access—and only later grudgingly allowing some of it.
Steve Jobs famously talked about personal computers vs. mobile devices in terms of cars vs. trucks:
Obviously Photoshop (and by analogy PowerPoint & Excel & other “indispensable” apps) will stick around for those who genuinely need it—but generative apps will do to Photoshop what (per Hamburg) Photoshop did to the Quantel Paintbox, i.e. shove it up into the tip of the complexity/usage pyramid.
Adobe will continue to gamely resist this by trying to make PS easier to use, which is fine (except of course where clumsy new affordances get in pros’ way, necessitating a whole new “quiet mode” just to STFU!). And—more excitingly to guys like me—they’ll keep incorporating genuinely transformative new AI tech, from image transformation to interactive lighting control & more.
Still, everyone sees what’s unfolding, and “You cannot stop it, you can only hope to contain it.” Where we’re going, we won’t need roads.