AI Selection Tools in Affinity Photo 2.6
The latest release from Affinity Photo 2.6 has created something of a shockwave in the photographic community. The AI Selection tools in Affinity Photo 2.6 are extraordinary in three senses. Firstly, they do not upload your images to Affinity so your IP remains your IP and you won’t find it being used to train AI models. Secondly they work rather better than the AI selection tools introduced by Adobe last year.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the. tools are designed to support and enhance the photographer, not replace them!
Let me expand on these three points.
IP Theft is running riot in photography, where AI algorithms are trained on photographs scraped from social media. As a result, several photographers have found their work obviously and clearly copied into images produced by AI. This is not ok. The companies developing AI are without exception, designed to profit. In no universe is it right that they should be able to steal our work and recycle it for their own gain. Kudos to Affinity for devising an AI powered tool that doesn’t steal our work.
The second point is an interesting one. Adobe with all of their resources devised AI Selection tools a year or eighteen months ago and Affinity’s work better. They are more or less identical in function, but for my money, Affinity have done a better job which is remarkable given the difference in size of these two companies.
Thirdly, and time will tell whether this sticks as a policy, but Affinity’s use of AI has been targeted towards making the tools wok better rather than taking over the photographer’s creative input. This is exactly as it should be, nobody wants a world where every photograph looks the same.
I’m very pleasantly surprised by Affinity’s achievements with machine learning, the tools work. There have been occasional crashes but they will be ironed out in subsequent releases I’m sure. The only hint of sand in the ointment is Affinity’s decision not to support the older Intel based Macs. While this is entirely understandable from the technical perspective it is an irritant for many older Mac users. The reality is that supporting two platforms is costly in terms of research, coding and testing and it is inevitable that these older computers will be redundant sooner rather than later. I have an Intel powered Mac mini myself so I’m directly affected, but this is what technology does these days!
More detail about Refining Selections in Affinity Photo 2.6
