This week Adobe decided, out of nowhere, to kill their 2D animation product (Animate, which is based on Flash) to focus on AI. I'm already seeing animators post that Adobe killed their entire career.

Although that feels a bit exaggerated, I feel it's not far from the truth. If there were, say, 3 closed source animation software that could do professional animation in total, and they just all decided to just kill the product one day, it would actually kill the entire industry. Animators would have no software to actually create animation with. They would have to wait until someone makes one, which would take years for feature parity, and why would anyone make one when the existing software thought such product wasn't a good idea to begin with?

I feel this isn't much different with AI. It's a rush to make people depend on a software that literally can't run on a personal computer. Adobe probably loves it because the user can't pirate the AI. If people forget how to use image editing software and start depending entirely on AI to do the job, that means they will forever be slaves to developers who can host and setup the AI on the cloud.

Imagine if people forgot how to format a document in Word and they depended on Copilot to do this.

Imagine if people forgot how to code.

Now I think you touched the perfect point on why this is being shoved through our throats, and why I'm very reticent in using it.

This is not about big increases of productivity, this is whole thing about selling dependence on privately controlled, closed source tools. To concentrate even more power in the hands of a very few, morally questionable people.

Sounds like a good startup idea. Make software for animators and slap AI on it.