Editorial Note: Opinions and thoughts are the author’s own and not those of AFROTECH™.
AI has changed the way that creatives work across audio, text, and video. It has given people access to a knowledge base and skill set that you previously had to put years of experience into in order to get anything out of it. Now we have AI tools that give people the power to do what they need to do in a matter of minutes. While these tools may be taking center stage now, technology has been changing the creative process for years.
Adobe was founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, who both previously worked at Xerox and wanted to take an all-digital approach to printing and publishing. Their first product was called PostScript, a page description language that made it so people could have consistent quality when printing documents, no matter the system. In 1987, they introduced their first creative-focused product called Adobe Illustrator. Adobe Illustrator was, and still is today, a vector-based program that helps graphic designers and artists bring their image ideas to life. Innovation at Adobe did not only come from inside of the company but outside of it as well. In 1995, Adobe went on to purchase Photoshop, which was created by brothers Thomas and John Knoll and has become an integral part of Adobe’s product suite, according to the University Record. The brothers’ goal for Photoshop was to find an easy way to manipulate and edit images, but over the years it has evolved to be used for much more. With Photoshop, people can also do graphic design, digital illustration, and web design as well. Tools like these from Adobe and Photoshop were some of the first mass-market creative tools that lowered the barrier to creation for those who have a creative spark in them but not necessarily the skill set to bring their ideas to life. While Adobe and Photoshop opened up opportunities for creatives to create, other companies were making it easier for anyone to design apps and websites.
Marvel was founded in 2013 by Brendan Moore, Murat Mutlu, and Jonathan Siao while they were living in London, per The Tech Portal. Their goal was to lower the barrier of entry into prototyping software products with a specific focus on mobile. What led to their growth was that they made it easy to make clickable wireframes using their own design tool via sketches and mockups, as well as files from Photoshop. Their product was desktop-based and was primarily used by individuals looking to work on things vs. teams working collaboratively, which all changed when Figma came on the scene.
Figma was founded in 2012 by Dylan Field and Evan Wallace after working on meme generation and drone software ideas during their time studying computer science at Brown University, but they ultimately settled on making design more collaborative. They did not launch publicly until September 2016, preferring to build in private, but when they did release to the world, Figma was met with quick adoption from the design community. Figma has grown to become the default design tool in tech across startups, big tech companies, and the Fortune 500, used by their product, engineering, and design teams.
In December 2023, The Verge reported that Adobe, which had previously intended to purchase Figma for $20 billion, was calling the deal off due to regulatory pressure and had to pay Figma a $1 billion breakup fee. While that was an unfortunate turn of events for Figma, CNBC reported that Figma intends to go public and has filed for its IPO.
The barrier between having a creative idea and having something creative you can show people has been coming down for years, and the launch of Google’s filmmaking tool, called Flow, powered by its Veo 3 video-generation model continues to bring it down even further. What’s game-changing about Veo 3 is that the videos can also generate audio that matches the video you have created, and it can be tweaked by whoever is working on the video. That has led to an explosion of AI-generated videos across the internet and especially on TikTok.
We have gone from technology giving people with creative skills easier ways to express them all the way to not necessarily needing skills at all, just the ability to write sentences. Technologies like Veo 3 will likely make people second-guess whether they need to hire someone for a video they want to create, or if they can just use AI instead. This line of thinking, I see mainly happening in the world of advertising across small and medium-sized companies; for larger companies, I do not see them relying on AI-generated video as much. However, the amount of work to go around for early career out-of-network creatives will be impacted when people can get the smaller jobs done with AI and the rest of the work will go to their networks.
