OpenAI is Adobe

Few in the creative industries can work without relying on Adobe. It would be like an electrician without a toolbox, except an electrician owns their tools and doesn’t have to spend $60 a month for the privilege of opening it. 

Since it was founded in the 1980s, Adobe has slowly Pac-Man-glomped almost every weapon in the modern creative arsenal. Want to template something? Use InDesign. Want to draw something? There’s Photoshop. Want to film something? You won’t earn the big bucks without Premiere Pro or After Effects. Adobe has been the ultimate generative assistant — until now. For now we’ve been graced with the presence of OpenAI, and its threat to creativity is dire.

The job of the extensive Adobe suite was always to support an artist or filmmaker — vocations that increasingly demand dexterity across editing, designing, and filming — in working more quickly and making higher-quality work. In swoops OpenAI’s era-changing product, ChatGPT, which is not only ready to make creatives more efficient but is also capable of generating ideas for them. Adobe only ever brought you the software for creating your work. It was always up to you to bring the artistic genius, and you were expected to learn the requisite skills over time or through a degree. Now, the electrician get their toolbox from ChatGPT, but they can also get their yearslong electrical training.

With great power comes great copyright infringement. In exchange for the limitless pool of ideas ChatGPT seems to offer, creatives have been forced to donate their own innate skills, robbed of them by training datasets fed into rapacious large language models. Artists are rightly angry about this, and as Adobe amps up its own generative-AI efforts to tackle ChatGPT’s competition, users have protested against perceived invasions of their privacy and ownership as much as their creative process. This is likely to explode once OpenAI’s video tool, Sora, opens up to widespread adoption. Video specialists have been largely protected from AI generation, as deepfakes continue to look uncannily amateur and AI videos tank on social-media algorithms, but Sora may just disrupt that — as well as their careers.

None of this frustration or injustice will stop ChatGPT from becoming what Adobe has been for decades: an industry standard in the creative fields. Résumés of the past were decorated with an ever-increasing list of Adobe tools the applicant could count in their skill set, but I predict the CVs of the future will see generative-AI platforms like ChatGPT nudge them out of prime position. More and more tools with generative AI across more companies sounds like a competitive, diverse environment, until you realize that you’re paying $300 monthly in software subscriptions alone. Creatives who work for big organizations can put it on the company card, but the smart 22-year-old saddled with student loans will be priced out.

Whether we see new creative GPT monopolies or simply witness Adobe continue to run one, OpenAI threatens to rob creatives of their most important asset: originality.

Read the other arguments for OpenAI's future here.

Sophia Smith Galer is an award-winning journalist, author, and broadcaster.