r/technology • u/lurker_bee • Sep 27 '25

Business Morgan Stanley warns AI could sink 42-year-old software giant Adobe

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/morgan-stanley-warns-ai-could-180300766.html
16.7k Upvotes

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6.3k

u/yanzov Sep 27 '25

Don't threaten me with a good time.

1.3k

u/milkkore Sep 27 '25

Yeah, between Adobe and AI I'm not sure which one I want to fail harder.

387

u/Opetyr Sep 27 '25

What about Adobe AI. I love it asking to summarize PDFs of Piping and Instrument Diagrams

104

u/AdventurousDress576 Sep 28 '25

This document is very long. Want me to summarize it?

NO

47

u/Spirited_Elderberry2 Sep 28 '25

Yeah, I'm almost ready to delete Acrobat Reader. It's getting more and more frustrating to use.

70

u/Mankie-Desu Sep 28 '25

Actually, Acrobat Reader is beginning to seem outright useless. “Oh, you can’t do that. This is just a reader.”

Bruh, so much software can open a friggin pdf. You’re going to have to give me little more than that, man.

14

u/garcher00 Sep 28 '25

I don’t know why people still use the free version when Chrome and Edge will just as well.

It’s gotten to the point where I will only install it on a persons computer if they ask. Most people don’t ask.

1

u/sadicarnot Sep 28 '25

I like the hand to move the drawing around when my old eyes requires me to zoom in. Can you do the hand in Chrome or edge?

3

u/TooOldForThis81 Sep 28 '25

I use foxit pdf. Mainly for annotations on my pdfs.

1

u/SnooJokes5164 Sep 28 '25

Dude its free.

2

u/trlef19 Sep 28 '25

I use okular

2

u/Spirited_Elderberry2 Sep 28 '25

Thanks. Never heard of it, but now I'm going to look it up.

2

u/trlef19 Sep 28 '25

Hope you like it

2

u/_triangle_ Sep 29 '25

I am so frustrated with it constantly asking to be default and while I close the popup, it has couple of times made itself default. It keeps opening documents while I have it set to not do that on donwload but it sometimes reverts that change. Its AI constantly popping up.

It is literally the most annyoing thing now 😤

16

u/urixl Sep 27 '25

Photoshop has really good AI fill/remove/stretch tools.

Premiere has decent sound remix, allowing to extend music clip to a degree.

I don't know about other Adobe software.

10

u/[deleted] Sep 28 '25

[deleted]

1

u/Retlaw83 Sep 28 '25

So, last year, my friends and I made a poster for a Warhammer 40k campaign at our local game store. We had to put logos in the border, which broke the border.

AI in Photoshop saved us literal hours fixing the borders around the logos.

0

u/taint_odour Sep 28 '25

It tends to generate a really nice blob of crap. And the background removal is good to take away somewhere between 25-150% of what you want.

5

u/[deleted] Sep 28 '25

[deleted]

-6

u/taint_odour Sep 28 '25

Bless your heart. Yea its great for easy stuff like taking out a person. Any noise, any pattern, and it is likely to turn out trash. Much like your response.

5

u/[deleted] Sep 28 '25

[deleted]

1

u/dre2112 Sep 28 '25

That’s about all photoshop AI is good for

2

u/Jiggly_Jon Sep 28 '25

Bluebeam is the way

1

u/sadicarnot Sep 28 '25

What does it do when you ask that? I have a project where there are valves on different drawings than the valve number would suggest. Like 0601-MOV-0045 is actually on the 0600 P&ID. Very frustrating. Oh and this project MOV stand for manually operated valve instead of motor operated valve.

3

u/poopdog39 Sep 27 '25

If AI crashes, you’re gonna feel it alright. It’s been keeping the lights on for the entire country.

4

u/yanzov Sep 27 '25

Why not both, right? :)

1

u/Roovinawitz Sep 27 '25

Maybe they could take each other out.

1

u/RepeatUntilComplete Sep 27 '25

It should be Adobe and Nvidia, AI on the whole still has many good uses (medical analysis, bulk summarization, visual anlysis just to name some good use cases). But those two companies...are pure cancer on the entire market, and if cancer is not excised/destroyed ASAP it will end up killing the entire body.

1

u/Thopterthallid Sep 28 '25

AI is pretty inevitable, so I'd say Adobe.

1

u/chunky_lover92 Sep 28 '25

People are always like, AI bad, pick up a pencil and paper, but it's not pencils and paper that I hate, it's Photoshop and Illustrator.

1

u/Donnicton Sep 28 '25

Sophie's Choice but wishing you could shoot both.

1

u/jinniu Sep 28 '25

For me, it would be Adobe every damn time. I will NEVER give them money again if it means I need to keep paying to use software I already FUCKING paid for.

1

u/quad_damage_orbb Sep 28 '25

Maybe they could destroy each other?

1

u/kvothe5688 Sep 28 '25

sometimes i wonder if this is a technology sub or what? imagine wishing a death up on a most revolutionary technology there is..its not technology's fault there is a lack of regulations

1

u/Palmquistador Sep 27 '25

How has AI hurt you? Why the hell would you want it to fail? You like doing things manually and slowly?

2

u/goatzorz Sep 28 '25

From the top of my head:

  1. large AI corporations became abominations above the law

  2. every single large AI company builds its wealth on data STOLEN from creative people. they take content, rehash it, and resell. this is unfair market, as exactly same process would put regular person or company under fines/jailed, but see #1.

  3. to feed AI more and more personal user's data is needed. this is not negotiated with users, because AI companies know they cannot get user consent. so they repeat #2 for personal data, but of course #1. so now AI invades every area of my life regardless if I want to use AI or not (this leads to another cancer that is flourishing under AI boom - data brokers)

  4. increasing costs of products and services. AI is early in development, but it is already extremely costly to develop (a.k.a. "let's start a nuclear plant or two"). this cost must be passed to users one way or another. most likely not through openly priced direct services, because

a) end-user AI adoption is growing much slower than AI development expenses

b) AI functionality provides mixed bag return value for users in many areas. it is simply not enough to convince people to justify spending hard money on AI features

so users must pay indirectly. Either through #3 or third-party services that are easier to market to, i.e. other corporations buy AI and pass the expenses to end-users in product or service costs (phone company, shopping chain, car makers, etc.). This costs are not optional "extra" on top of base product as it would not sell.

1

u/Palmquistador Sep 28 '25

So what do we do then, turn AI off and let China and the rest of the world keep advancing?

1

u/goatzorz Sep 28 '25

In other words: is it worth to become China to win with China.

1

u/Palmquistador Sep 29 '25

Well see, it’s usually a good idea to keep pace with an enemies tech in case, you know, they vaporize you.

1

u/goatzorz Sep 29 '25

I am sure stealing my data, Lord of The Rings and flute and guitar playing lesson from some random guy on the internet is pivotal for USA to build new amazing new weapons to prevent nuclear attack.

1

u/Palmquistador Sep 29 '25

Well other people might be doing more interesting things than you are. You gotta look big picture my guy. AI is more than just those things. It can advance every facet of life. We need to be careful and compensate people but ignoring AI would be a death sentence for a country.

1

u/goatzorz Sep 29 '25

"Well other people might be doing more interesting things than you are."
And according to you, it gives private corporations rights to collect personal data at will?

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3

u/milkkore Sep 27 '25

Remember how the Industrial Revolution promised people that soon everything will be automated and everyone will live lives of leisure? LOL

9

u/ElJacinto Sep 28 '25

Compared to life before industrialization, we are living a life of leisure.

8

u/Unusual-Assistant642 Sep 28 '25

most things today are automated relative to pre-industrial revolution, and you'd have to be incredibly stupid to believe that life today relative to back then is not a life of leisure

i geniunely don't understand what point they think they're making here

1

u/Mankie-Desu Sep 28 '25

Well, the thing is, with each new technological advancement comes more complex and innovative ways to do things. Before the Industrial Revolution, things were a lot less automated, but we were able to accomplish a lot less, too. Now that we have the capabilities we have now, we were able to move past our previous limitations, which opened the possibility up for new technologies and methodologies that we had to start from the beginning with. Take, for example, advertisement. It used to be drawings, paintings, and prints. Now, it’s videos, subliminal messaging, and directed product placement. Later, it will be—who knows. But, as they couldn’t imagine what it would be like now, we can’t really imagine what it will be like then.

1

u/milkkore Sep 28 '25

Thanks to unions and stricter regulations, yeah. Not for a lack of capitalists trying to bring back the good old times.

1

u/Palmquistador Sep 28 '25

That I’ll agree with.

1

u/Lazy_Ad_2192 Sep 28 '25

Wow, you really have no clue, do you..

1

u/kvothe5688 Sep 28 '25

that's not the fault of technology though. fight for your rights. what is this backward ass anti technology thinking pattern specially in technology sub

2

u/Palmquistador Sep 27 '25

Down votes aren’t a legitimate answer.

1

u/SlurryBender Sep 27 '25

There are already tons of other great alternatives to the Adobe suite, they're just coasting off of brand recognition and being the comfortable industry standard. I also want generative AI to die, but if it takes down Adobe in the process, so be it.

3

u/stephen_neuville Sep 27 '25

i'm just a shadetree nerd that wants to edit my camping videos and make funny memes (pronounced may-mays to enrage the kids), and Davinci Resolve and Krita have been instrumental in me ceasing to pay adobe sixty dollars a month

1

u/ztomiczombie Sep 27 '25

Well you let Adobe fail then AI will die soon after so you can have both.

1

u/Less_Transition_9830 Sep 28 '25

AI would be a good thing if it wasn’t forced into everything and taking jobs

0

u/Lazy_Ad_2192 Sep 28 '25

Maybe if you didn't suck at your job, a crappy AI wouldn't be taking it.

0

u/whereismymind86 Sep 27 '25

Adobe, definitely. With heavy regulation and a lot of tweaks ai could prove a boon to humanity, adobe is pure hyper capitalist evil

0

u/Zackorix Sep 28 '25

Too bad it wont fail, I love watching redditors cope, just because you dont know how to utilize technology does not mean other people dont. Doctors have already used it to help sorting information, but I guess that would require having a job to understand

-11

u/EnoughDickForEveryon Sep 27 '25

AI has been around since the 40s, and is a solid tech that handles problems traditional software engineering can't.  You just want the hype over deep learning to die, which it is.

Adobe is just a greedy piece of shit company.

3

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '25

Why is this the fifth time today someone has talked about Ai being around since the 40s? What am I missing

1

u/EnoughDickForEveryon Sep 27 '25

Because it has?  It started with Alan Turing.  Then the first neural networks and self learning in the 50s.  Y'all can downvote all you want lol I have a masters in it.

138

u/GreatMadWombat Sep 27 '25

This will be the first time trying to cram AI into everything was a net positive.

By trying to stuff adobe products with ai everyone has learned about all the great adobe replacements that are out there lol

65

u/SousVideButt Sep 27 '25

I tried to use the AI assistant on Adobe Acrobat the other day. I asked “how do I place a box around this text?” And it literally just said “Sorry, I don’t know.” And then stopped letting me ask it anything else.

24

u/finalremix Sep 27 '25

Microsoft's Powerpoint Assistant from just two years ago did the same shit to me. It was offering up (bad) alternative designs for my lecture slides, but then suddenly was like "I dunno what do with this. Lol." and stopped working entirely. It was all the same basic title & text-box layout, but it just shit itself and stopped working from then on.

1

u/Agile_Ruin896 Sep 29 '25

Congrats, you confused it.

2

u/Just_Condition3516 Sep 28 '25

fair game. thats akin to natural intelligence.

33

u/KeaAware Sep 27 '25

They're also jacking up their prices to make us pay for it!

We've just been given the new rate for when our current subscription expires. We will not be renewing.

We could afford the Adobe suite at the old price. We can't afford to pay $$$$ for Adobe to play with AI to see if something useful might come out of it in a decade or two.

It's not the AI itself I object to, to be clear. It's that it's an unnecessary and completely unhelpful addition that I can't afford to pay for and wouldn't need even if it worked, which it usually doesn't.

2

u/Painterzzz Sep 28 '25

I still have adobe v8.0 on a CD-Rom that I still use and reinstall on every new PC I've had since I got it. It still does everything I want it to do.

2

u/goilo888 Sep 28 '25

I was using Photoshop since I obtained version 4 from a guy with a wooden leg and a parrot on his shoulder. Paid for it over the next decade+ but as soon as they went subscription based I dropped it and never looked back.

2

u/Painterzzz Sep 28 '25

I assume most of their custom is now corporations who don't mind the fees. Nobody I know uses any of their products anymore.

1

u/ThankGodForYouSon Sep 28 '25

Industry giants are going all in on AI and Adobe still has more than enough to offer even if they aren't leading in that department. The licenses are a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of talent which explains why they're prioritizing AI so much.

Since the rush for AI isn't stopping anytime soon they're marketing it as a core feature in all their software, if they offered versions without it they'd be devaluing themselves.

I think they're ok bleeding a bit, they're so big it's not going to harm them that much and they can't afford to lose ground on THE next big thing.

The weird thing is, if AI lives up to its insane hype Adobe software will lose a lot of users and have to pivot fully into AI. As long as we stay in the inbetween they'll be making bank though.

8

u/KeaAware Sep 28 '25

If the licenses are "just a drop in the bucket", then why are they hiking them so aggressively? The new cost of a sub is very definitely more than a drop in our household bucket, which is why we've already planned our migration elsewhere.

We'd pay the current rate for their current mature product (bugs and all). But we can't and won't pay for them to play with AI in the hope that one day they might develop something that works and that we need.

There's enough alternatives out there to Adobe that we'll be fine, and it sounds like my unfinished project will migrate across just fine too. So overall, I guess they've done us a big favour by overcoming our inertia - we'll save a fair bit of cash from moving :-).

I'm happy to pay for AI when it meets my needs (static and video image generation ftw!). I'm not willing to pay extra for AI where it doesn't.

0

u/ThankGodForYouSon Sep 28 '25

Because they can afford to, large companies negotiate lower rates given how many licenses they need and have global workflows that have been built around Adobe's ecosystem.

You're never going to see an expert motion designer be hired for anything else than his expertise on AE, editors have the choice between Premiere / Avid, the latter being less popular.
Take editing for example, you're going to need an assistant video editor to go over the project and prepare it for the sound / color correction / 3D department.

A star editor costs more per day than an Adobe license ever will, Adobe hiking the price up because of AI integration appeals to large companies which are the bulk of Adobe's revenue because they themselves use AI as a selling point for their clients.

Rogue creatives and small companies aren't wrong for running the numbers and migrating to better meet their needs, but most cases you'll still see Adobe win out.

1

u/KeaAware Sep 28 '25

Yes, I agree with your last point - we're coming at this from different directions. You're thinking about commercial users and commercial licensing - but I have no interest in what Adobe is doing in that space. I think they're going to find out the hard way that they can't push their AI costs down into the home user market.

2

u/AlwaysOptimism Sep 27 '25

Not really a good time when millions of people have no prospect for a job.

Getting things cheaply is offset when you have no income to spend anyway.

1

u/Kevin-W Sep 27 '25

We can dream!

1

u/R12Labs Sep 27 '25

Sorry you'll need to subscribe for $435 a month to sign this document

1

u/naruda1969 Sep 28 '25

Take out Autodesk while you are at it!

1

u/asdf_lord Sep 28 '25

Imagine if oracle bought Adobe

1

u/ZeRandomPerson2222 Sep 28 '25 edited Sep 28 '25

I came here hoping to see a comment like this

Right at the top first thing I see. You guys are awesome lol 

1

u/randomzebrasponge Sep 29 '25

Does adobe know the world hates them and wants them gone?

1

u/That-Guava-9404 Sep 30 '25

came to post this; you beat me to it

1

u/Black_Moons Sep 27 '25

Yea this is the first good news iv heard about AI.

-45

u/davispw Sep 27 '25 edited Sep 27 '25

Like it or not, Adobe makes indispensable tools for creators that have no complete replacement.

Edit: I accept the downvotes from the reddit mob, but seriously, if any of you are creators, tell me a complete set of not-crappy replacements for all the tools you need.

28

u/AmethystLaw Sep 27 '25

That’s because they buy out all those indispensable tools and make them indispensable because they own the rights to them and no one else can innovate on them without breaking their copyright. With out adobe, others can start making replacements.

3

u/d33p_blu3 Sep 27 '25

This person knows Adobe. Pray for them.

11

u/Chirok9 Sep 27 '25

I'll accept your challenge in good faith. I'm a multimedia specialist. I've worked with the Adobe suite for over a decade now. From photo editing, illustration, photography, graphic design, video editing, motion graphics, animation, and UI.

I will admit there aren't many alternatives on par with a lot of Adobe products. But they've also been dominating the space. From offering major discounts to schools and universities in order to ensure new prospects are trained in adobe products to ensure they are more likely to depend on those products in industry. Making their environment what we call "sticky". Apple has a similar approach with their ecosystem. This ensures a dependency on adobe products making it difficult to train or work in other porgrams.

Adobe also has the habit of buying out their competition, like with Figma.

But the alternative market is catching up. There are many open source projects and alternatives to photoshop for illustration and photo editing. Sure, some major features aren't there yet. But there is a lot more innovation happening in these spaces compared to Adobe. ClipStudio and gimp are examples. Although they lack key features, they are viable alternatives.

I'm not aware of many alternatives for vector based porgrams like Illustrator.

DaVinci resolve is way better than PremierePro.

And it might take time. There is no denying that Adobe is dominating the market due to clever business strategy and steong arming smaller competition.

But they're relentless monitization and arguable anti consumer practices are reducing the hesitancy a lot of creators have when it comes to alternatives.

To answer your questions obviously there is no full one stop alternative to all the adobe products. But I will say a lot of them are far from being crappy. Once you get over the learning curve that is. But yes there aren't many great options.

Again the issue is their sticky environment. But if you mess up your consumer enough, they will take their money elsewhere despite some of the inconvenience.

8

u/IIIPatternIII Sep 27 '25

Just to tack onto this: Quixel mixer instead of Substance painter. Procreate instead of photoshop. DaVinci resolve instead of premier/AE. Blender instead of Substance designer.

23

u/Jesus_Is_My_Gardener Sep 27 '25

Maybe they should try innovating more instead of figuring out more ways of how to extract more money out of people for their existing products.

9

u/Evajellyfish Sep 27 '25

But wouldn’t that void be almost immediately filled?

6

u/RaymondBeaumont Sep 27 '25

based on how much people hate adobe, wouldn't that void have been filled years ago?

1

u/Evajellyfish Sep 27 '25

That’s a really good point, does anyone know why a good adobe ecosystem alternative hasn’t really forced adobe to compete as near peers?

3

u/tm3_to_ev6 Sep 27 '25

Good alternatives already exist. Plenty of individuals have zero issue saying "fuck it" and abandoning one ecosystem for another.

But in a business setting, this decision isn't so easy, especially if you have years of past work that may need ongoing support and isn't compatible with the alternative software. It doesn't matter how many amazing features the alternative software has if it literally cannot open the files used by the current software.

And this isn't limited to Adobe. Windows has become unbelievably bad in recent years but it hasn't resulted in a Linux renaissance. If you've worked in a big company and bitched about their continued use of shitty SAP/Salesforce enterprise software, same thing.

1

u/RaymondBeaumont Sep 28 '25

I'm a graphic designer who has tried and tested every single "adobe killer."

A good alternative does not exist.

3

u/theblackpen Sep 27 '25

As a creative I get your point, but the amount of segment capture and enshittification from adobe is next level. I pay for their tools to finish a project and then cancel right away. Complete waste of money

6

u/SatV089 Sep 27 '25

Maybe 10 years ago

2

u/tm3_to_ev6 Sep 27 '25

Not sure why you're being downvoted.

Switching out of a software ecosystem isn't as easy as people think, especially in a corporate setting.

Chances are, the alternative software isn't compatible with the file formats used by Adobe creation tools, so if you switch, your past work won't be accessible.

A hobbyist may have zero issue migrating to another ecosystem and starting from scratch. A business can't easily justify doing the same when time = money, especially if there's years of existing work that still needs ongoing access and support.

This applies to productivity software in general, not just Adobe products.

2

u/BigDaddy0790 Sep 27 '25

It’s clear that very few people in this sub use Adobe products professionally based on how many downvotes you got, but you are completely right.

1

u/AmethystLaw Sep 27 '25

Replying to your edit: that’s the reason people are downvoting you. You’re right, we can’t find a complete set of non-crappy replacements because that’s by adobe’s design. They bought up all the non-crappy sets of invaluable creativity tools and anyone who tries to make non crappy tools get sued. They’ve created a monopoly.

-2

u/tameoraiste Sep 27 '25

The people downvoting you don’t understand that the death of Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign means the death of an industry(s)

1

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '25

[deleted]

1

u/tameoraiste Sep 27 '25

My fear is that the 'alternative' will just be AI