For years, AI in creative software has felt like a tug‑of‑war between two extremes: the “AI will replace artists” panic and the “AI is just a fancy filter” disappointment. But the new locally run AI agents inside Photoshop, made possible with RTX Spark? They land somewhere far more interesting... and, dare I say, actually useful.
Not because they’re magical, but because they’re practical.
An AI feature that doesn't break the creative flow
Most AI tools promise speed, but they often demand a whole new workflow, a new app, or a new mental model. Creatives don’t want that. Creatives want to stay in Photoshop, stay in their groove, and stop wrestling with the technical busywork that interrupts the fun part.
The demo I saw at NVIDIA's RTX Spark showcase at IFA in Berlin showed a sketch of a robot turned photoreal using a beach photo as a main reference, with smaller reference photos and images to inform the model on all the individual elements of the robot, including the colour, texture of the metal, shape and type of 'eyes' and more. It wasn’t impressive because it was flashy. It was impressive because it respected the artist’s process. In fact, the demo was presented by the artist herself. The agent didn’t overwrite the sketch, reinterpret the brief, or decide the robot should be a cat now. It simply did the heavy lifting the artist didn’t want to do.
That’s the first time in a while I’ve seen AI behave like a collaborator at an advanced level, instead of a chaos gremlin.
Local AI is a feature creatives have been begging for
Let’s be honest: the creative community has trust issues with cloud AI. And for good reason. Too many models have been trained on artists’ work without permission, and too many “helpful” features quietly upload your assets to servers you’ve never heard of.
This demo didn’t do that. Everything ran locally on a (rather beefy, admittedly) RTX workstation with 128GB of unified memory. No cloud. No mystery training. No “your PSD is now part of a dataset in Utah”.
The presenter said it plainly during the demo: “My creative data stays on my machine.”
That alone makes this one of the most creator‑friendly AI features we’ve seen in years.
Iteration at (nearly) the speed of imagination
The real magic wasn’t the photoreal robot. Rather it was how quickly the artist could riff on it.
“Change the theme to nightlife.” Boom: neon nightlife in ten seconds.
“New camera angle.” Hey presto: a generated 3D model you can spin around.
“Make a video between these angles.” In under a minute: a workflow that used to require three different apps.
Sure, one version had cars floating in the ocean. Generative AI still loves a bit of surrealism. But when the entire workflow takes 90 seconds, you can afford to laugh, delete, and try again.
This is the kind of speed that encourages experimentation instead of punishing it.
The real reason this matters, is that these AI agents inside Photoshop aren’t about replacing artists. They’re introduced in an aim to reduce friction. They’re about letting creatives stay in the zone longer, about giving you a superpowered assistant who doesn’t get tired, doesn’t misplace files, and (hopefully) doesn’t ask what the brief was again.
If Adobe plays this right - and importantly, keeps the local‑first approach - AI agents could become the most meaningful workflow upgrade Photoshop has had in a long time.
Not because they’re clever, but because they finally understand what creatives actually need.
