One of the Animation Chefs has joined Adobe’s artificial intelligence division.

That sentence lands differently in our family than it might in most.

Adobe has been part of our creative lives for decades. We have edited in Premiere, composited in After Effects, drawn and designed in Illustrator, and spent more hours inside Photoshop than is probably advisable for the human spine.

These were not simply programs we used. They were part of the workshop.

Animation Chefs grew up in a world Adobe helped create: a world where a child could shoot a film at a kitchen table, edit it on a laptop, add sound, construct effects and publish it without ever needing access to a television studio, a film laboratory or a man in a brown coat guarding an expensive machine.

And now one of those Animation Chefs is working at Adobe, on the front line of the next great change.

There is something wonderfully circular about that.

A child who learned to make things using tools that democratized creativity is now helping shape tools that may democratize it again—or disrupt it so completely that we will need a new word for what comes afterward.

I first used Photoshop in 1989, before it had layers, before it had a proper manual and before I knew what a histogram was.

Our college lab was loaded with Adobe and Macs.

I learned by experimenting, failing, undoing what little could be undone and occasionally producing something so unexpectedly dreadful that it became educational.

I was not a photographer, but Photoshop taught me about dodging, burning, retouching, resolution and the mysterious practices darkroom technicians had previously shared among themselves beneath red lights.

It was magical.

It proposed a different relationship between people and machines.

We knew it would change almost everything involving printing, images, graphics and illustration.

Adobe was the reason I bought my first Mac out of college.

Most computers of the period behaved as though human beings were an afterthought.

You typed commands.

You memorized codes.

You stared at a blinking cursor.

The IBM PC was powerful, dependable and intensely serious. It gave the impression that it had been designed by accountants and programmers who wished to discourage the unqualified public from touching anything.

The Apple II had already opened extraordinary doors for schools, hobbyists and developers. But the Macintosh introduced something more theatrical.

It had windows.

It had icons.

It had folders, menus, a trash can and elegant fonts with no conceivable business appearing in a spreadsheet.

And it had a mouse, which initially resembled an expensive bar of soap supplied to distract executives from the keyboard.

But that mouse changed everything.

You no longer had to explain every action to the machine in its language.

You could point.

Pointing is among humanity’s oldest technologies. We point at food, danger, suspicious plumbing and which sibling is picking their nose.

The Macintosh brought this ancient human interface into computing.

Then came the pen and tablet, and we returned to something older still: drawing with a digital piece of charcoal, painting with light.

The machine had become visual, intuitive and almost friendly. It seemed designed not merely for calculation, but for imagination.

Creative professionals did not buy expensive computers simply because the icons were charming. Designers, photographers, illustrators and publishers needed the machine to earn its keep.

They needed to produce real work, meet impossible deadlines and communicate with printers who had already telephoned three times.

This is where Adobe entered the story.

Apple built the stage. Adobe gave creative people a reason to perform on it.

PostScript translated what appeared on the screen into professional printed output. Alongside the LaserWriter, Aldus PageMaker and later QuarkXPress, it transformed the Macintosh from an intriguing appliance into the central nervous system of desktop publishing.

“Desktop publishing” now sounds as quaint as “electronic mail” or “horseless carriage.”

It became so successful that desktop publishing simply became publishing.

The revolution ate its own label.

Illustrator then turned the Macintosh into a precision drawing instrument. Illustrator 88 (meaning 1988) allowed designers to create artwork that could be enlarged from a postage stamp to the side of a building without becoming a pixelated mess.

EPS files carried that artwork between programs and output systems while preserving its mathematical dignity.

This was not simply a better way to draw.

It removed whole sections of the production chain.

Before Illustrator, designers depended on photostat shops to enlarge, reduce, reverse and reproduce artwork. This involved specialist cameras, chemicals, couriers and waiting.

There was an enormous amount of waiting in the old creative economy.

You sent out a logo in the morning and hoped it might return by lunch, slightly larger and smelling faintly of a laboratory.

Illustrator turned a manual multi-step journey into a command key.

The photostat operator had not lost talent. The trip had lost necessity.

That is often how industries disappear. A new tool removes one intermediate step, then another, until an entire trade is standing beside the road holding equipment no one needs.

From the future, this looks like progress.

From the photostat operator’s kitchen table, with a mortgage and children approaching college, it feels rather different.

Photoshop did something similar to the darkroom.

For more than a century, photography involved enlargers, trays, masks, chemicals and carefully controlled light. Dodging and burning were physical acts. Retouching required dexterity and the emotional stability of a bomb-disposal technician.

Photoshop moved the process onto the screen.

You could adjust, mask, composite and experiment at a desk, without ventilation and with considerably less risk of poisoning.

The darkroom did not vanish overnight.

Neither did film.

But the direction was unmistakable.

Illustrator removed the photostat shop. Photoshop removed the darkroom.

Premiere, After Effects and related tools helped drive another upheaval. Video editing, motion graphics, compositing and interactive media moved out of specialized facilities and onto ordinary computers.

“Desktop publishing” became publishing.

“New media” became media.

Technologies lose their dramatic names when they become ordinary.

And so we arrive at artificial intelligence.

We still call it AI because it feels new enough to require a warning label.

In ten years, will we still call it artificial intelligence?

Perhaps it will simply become intelligence.

Or assistance.

Or infrastructure.

Or Tuesday.

Today we speak of AI writing, AI art, AI video, AI search and AI assistants. Eventually, AI may disappear into the tools themselves.

And we will complain when it takes four seconds.

But AI is different from Illustrator and Photoshop in one profound respect.

Illustrator automated portions of drawing.

Photoshop automated portions of image processing.

Premiere and After Effects automated enormous portions of post-production.

Generative AI begins automating the production of possibilities.

It can suggest the logo, illustration, scene, edit, storyboard, soundtrack, voiceover, campaign and headline before anyone has finished making the coffee.

This is where the analogy becomes uncomfortable.

The fear is no longer simply that a machine will eliminate a process, a darkroom or a trip across town.

The fear is that it will eliminate the person.

Not one repetitive task, but the illustrator.

Not one production step, but the editor.

Not one rough draft, but the writer.

And beyond employment lies the larger fear that increasingly capable systems may spread deception, concentrate power, make lethal decisions or pursue goals that are disastrously misaligned with human interests.

People are not foolish to be concerned.

Some jobs will disappear.

Many will be reorganized.

Some companies will try to remove people from creative work not because the results are better, but because machines do not request health insurance or object to working through lunch.

Optimism cannot consist of standing on a platform and shouting “Adapt!” at people who believe the platform itself is being dismantled.

The fear must be acknowledged.

But fear is not a strategy.

Human beings have never been passive recipients of technology. We are adapters, meddlers, saboteurs and enthusiastic voiders of warranties.

We turned office computers into animation studios.

We turned phones into cameras, cinemas, maps, newspapers and devices for photographing lunch.

We take tools built for one purpose and bend them toward another.

That is what Animation Chefs has always done.

We used professional creative software not to make children imitate professionals, but to help them discover that their own drawings, voices, timing, mistakes and peculiar ideas were worth putting on screen.

The software mattered.

But the children mattered more.

That distinction may become even more important in the AI era.

AI can offer hundreds of answers, but abundance is not wisdom.

It can generate options, but options are not judgment.

It can imitate style, but style without purpose is a hat on a vacuum cleaner.

The creative advantage is shifting from execution alone toward intention, selection, direction and meaning.

What should be made?

Who is it for?

Who benefits?

Who may be harmed?

What is original?

What is meaningful?

These are not software questions.

They are human questions.

Every technological revolution turns yesterday’s difficult craft into tomorrow’s button.

The question is not simply how to preserve every task exactly as it was.

It is:

What becomes possible when the old task no longer consumes the afternoon?

The Macintosh did not destroy creativity.

Adobe did not destroy design, photography or filmmaking.

It removed barriers, intermediate steps and several rooms filled with alarming liquids.

AI will remove barriers too. It will disrupt livelihoods and produce an Everest of mediocre content large enough to affect content weather systems.

But it may also give extraordinary creative power to people who never considered themselves illustrators, editors, filmmakers, designers or writers.

The danger is not only that machines may become more capable.

It is that people may become less engaged.

That we stop observing, drawing, questioning, experimenting and developing taste because the machine can produce something adequate before we have formed an opinion.

We must adapt, but adaptation does not mean surrender.

It means learning where human judgment matters more, keeping people accountable, and refusing to confuse frictionless production with worthwhile creation.

And this is why having one of our own at Adobe feels so significant.

Our hope is that he is not arriving there as a stranger to creativity or as someone who believes the tool is the art.

He comes from a tradition of making films frame by frame, solving problems with whatever was available, and understanding that technology is most powerful when it helps a person express something distinctly their own.

He has used Photoshop, Premiere and After Effects not as ends in themselves, but as instruments.

Now he is helping shape what those instruments may become.

There is pride in that.

There is also responsibility.

Because the next generation of Adobe tools will not merely affect how images are adjusted or films are edited. They will have to justify even using Adobe tools when new tools can turn their buttons into prompts that make buttons obsolete.

The photostat gave way to Illustrator.

The darkroom gave way to Photoshop.

The editing suite gave way to Premiere and After Effects.

Desktop publishing became publishing.

New media became media.

Artificial intelligence may eventually become intelligence woven quietly through everything.

But human agency must not become the next intermediate step to be removed.

The essential questions remain ours:

What are we trying to say?

Why are we saying it?

Who needs to hear it?

And is the thing the machine produced actually any good?

Those questions survived the mouse.

They survived PostScript.

They survived Photoshop.

They will survive AI, provided we continue insisting that people remain present to ask them.

And now, wonderfully and perhaps a little improbably, one of the Animation Chefs is inside Adobe helping decide what happens next.

Bon Animate!