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Posted by birriel 11/1/2025

Pomelli(blog.google)
https://labs.google.com/pomelli/about/
291 points | 170 commentspage 4
louisashbourne 11/6/2025|
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louisashbourne 11/5/2025||
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seraphinaweiss 11/6/2025|
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dietr1ch 11/2/2025||
> Pomelli by Google Labs is currently not available in your region.

xd

Razengan 11/2/2025||
Fucking region gating in this day and age.

Sometimes even with a US account some things flop when you try to use them while traveling. You'd think the richass CEOs travel a lot so they would notice this problem but then you realize they never use their own products and have meat intelligence do all their shit for them anyway.

aatd86 11/2/2025||
xD you're delivery made me laugh. But I think it is a combination of getting the product out of the gates as fast as possible, test on the main market, and also deal with foreign currencies, legislation and pricing later.
logoji 11/2/2025||
Same, do you think this will work with vpn?
unangst 11/2/2025||
“Pomelli is desktop only for now. Please switch to a computer to continue.” It would be nice if there was at least a screenshot for mobile users so they could determine if this was actually worth a second visit.
skoskie 11/2/2025|
There’s a video right on the landing page that shows it in use. Played fine on mobile for me.

But to answer the question, it looks a lot like a Canva competitor.

echelon 11/2/2025||
AI is going to kill Canva, Figma, and Adobe. Without a doubt.

Nano Banana alone obsoleted all of Photoshop. (And the Chinese versions of Nano Banana are even better!)

I'm most worried for my friends in creative though. I have some extremely talented friends at WPP and other agencies. Everyone is shaking in their boots.

Nobody's buying ads because of the economy, then these tools are nipping at their heels. They've already had one massive round of layoffs, and there's another one supposedly happening early next year.

Where are these millions of people going to go? These are six figure income earners.

There are five million marketing professionals in the US. If half of them lose their jobs, then what? What's lined up for them after this?

If AI fails, the economy goes boom.

If AI succeeds, the economy goes ... bigger boom?

I used to think the tools would wind up creating more work, especially in narrative creative work. Outside of A24 and indie/foreign films, Hollywood is so trite. These models drop Pixar/Disney VFX into the hands of every YouTuber - and that could be really cool when used by the right people. Like the Corridor Crew folks.

Maybe gaming and media will see a boost, but advertising and marketing folks are really going to get hit hard.

wizzledonker 11/2/2025|||
The reason most creative media is good is because you see the vision of a creative team or individual.

If the vision is diluted due to lack of control afforded by AI tools, then the tools won’t be used.

Many times in Hollywood have we seen directors spend unjustifiable amounts of money in the pursuit of creative control.

Hand camera tracking a dinosaur in Jurassic Park, developing a novel diffraction algorithm for THE ABYSS, hand-drawing 3-Dimensional computer animations for 2001, creating an entire scale model practically for a single fight scene in LOTR.

AI allows you to get anything. The best movies are a direct reflection of a particular vision. AI can’t provide this and I see no way to solve it.

A natural response is - well directors already outsource some creative control to VFX artists so why not to a machine instead.

Because an artist can control everything. Even if the artist is prompting a model, at the end of the day an artist can drill right down to the tooling itself (photoshop for example) and exactly achieve the vision.

I don’t see AI achieving this granularity while maintaining its utility. It’s a sliding scale of trading utility as a time saving device for control.

If you lean too far to the control side, well you might as well fire up photoshop. If you lean too much to the utility side, you sacrifice creative control.

When looked at under this lens the utility of AI generation is actually limited as it solves a non existent problem. One can think of it as an additional piece of tooling for use only as a generational tool where there is less need for control, such as for background characters.

The team at Red Barrels, for example, train a local model on their own artwork to automatically generate variant textures for map generation. Things such as this. No need to be doom and gloom about this stuff.

echelon 11/2/2025||
> lack of control afforded by AI

You should look at ComfyUI.

Control is here, it's just not widely distributed or easy to use.

If you're patient, you can fully control the set, blocking, angles. You can position your characters, relight them, precisely control props, etc. You have unlimited control over everything. It's just a mess right now.

goshx 11/2/2025|||
> and Adobe

Have you seen their announcements during Adobe Max? The AI features are mind blowing. Adobe is alive and well.

bigiain 11/2/2025|||
> Adobe is alive and well.

I wonder.

They're doing well with their existing customer base of digital creatives and related industries/professions.

Who may all be the buggy whip makers of the late 2020's.

Way too many of the people/companies who traditionally paid highly skilled and creative Photoshop users are rapidly moving away from doing that in favour of cheap GenAI slop.

I'm sure there are people in graphic design, illustration, videography, photography, UI/UX, 3D art, augmented reality, social media, creativity and design, collaboration and productivity, and education who are super excited about what Adobe is doing. I'm also sure almost all of those people are very concerned about their career choice and future (or are ignoring the reality of what's going on around them).

Sure, the top graphic designers in the world will still earn great money being highly creative for key clients. But the vast majority of people in those fields are not the top in their field, and the vast majority of clients those people invoice are going to consider cheap AI slop "good enough" for their businesses and use cases.

I have a 30+ year career in web related roles, working more or less closely with graphic designers, artists, illustrators, photographers, and other website development related professions. All of the ones I've remained friends with over that time are either deeply concerned about their career future, or have already jumped ship and become nurses, carpenters, teachers, caregivers, and even priests and drug dealers...

creato 11/2/2025||
> All of the ones I've remained friends with over that time are either deeply concerned about their career future, or have already jumped ship and become nurses, carpenters, teachers, caregivers, and even priests and drug dealers...

Aside from the last one, that kinda sounds like a win for society.

echelon 11/2/2025|||
> The AI features are mind blowing.

It doesn't look like they developed any models. The 3d relighting and 3d manipulation are all 3rd party models given a UI.

Avicebron 11/2/2025||
[edit: there is a bug] where it doesn't render LaTeX from the scraped website when injecting it into the campaign materials..
ugh123 11/2/2025|
Sounds like a bug?
overfeed 11/2/2025||
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tomhow 11/7/2025||
This is really where the flamewar began. Re-reading https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45791773, I don't think it was as hostile and judgmental as you assumed. The parent commenter didn't think it was, and replied in a normal, conversational way. It was only from this comment onwards that the subthread became so toxic.

Even if that user had been as bad as you assumed, it's still not OK to respond in a hostile and escalatory way.

The guidelines ask us in several different ways to avoid this kind of commenting:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer.

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.

Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45791773 and marked it off topic.

wholinator2 11/3/2025|||
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overfeed 11/5/2025||
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soulofmischief 11/5/2025|||
I asked OP a question, they calmly answered it, and the conversation was over.

Meanwhile, you and this other user have done nothing but the equivalent of throwing a tantrum in a public place, making insensitive insinuations that blew right back in your face, attempting to derail the conversation, and doubling down instead of treating this as a learning moment. I hate to break it to you, but this is wildly off-topic and the conversation never had anything to do with you.

jrflowers 11/5/2025|||
> Never thought I'd see the day someone would dare accuse me of selling out on a Y-fucking-Combinator discussion board.

This has been, without a close second, the funniest thread I’ve ever seen on this website. The poster that started this whole thread cited the rules after telling me to fuck off

overfeed 11/5/2025|||
I'm still not certain if it's intentional trolling, or high levels of lacking self-awareness and a lack of imagination in parsing their own sentence.
tomhow 11/7/2025|||
It was a shit-show of a thread of the worst kind on HN. I know you didn't start it, and I agree the commenter you were replying to started things with a generic ideological tangent. But we need everyone here to have enough restraint and poise to refrain from escalating and perpetuating flamewars.

It doesn't matter who starts something, everyone who plays a role in continuing it has some responsibility for it, and some of your comments were needlessly abusive. Commenting like that doesn't make things better on HN, and indeed they make things much worse.

When you see comments on HN that seem harmful to the health of the community, the first thing to do is flag them and if they're particularly bad, you should email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can take a look. We can very easily address such issues quickly, well before they turn into hellish flamewars like this.

jrflowers 11/7/2025||
>It was a shit-show of a thread of the worst kind on HN.

I agree. I was purposely very clear in my initial post in the hope that we could avoid any misunderstanding, but that clearly didn’t work out the way I’d have liked. While I tried to stick to discussing one specific thing I did let my replies get a bit loosey-goosey in response to what felt like somewhat confusing hostility.

I won’t be interacting with that user again, and I’ll email you guys next time I run into an interaction like that.

soulofmischief 11/2/2025||
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overfeed 11/2/2025||
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soulofmischief 11/2/2025||
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jrflowers 11/3/2025||
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mfru 11/3/2025|||
"I read the words you said in the worst possible way" is not the logical statement you want it to be

"also you are weird, like so weird, like look at how weird you are" is kinda just rude, seems really weird to reprimand someone for a fantasy you summoned

jrflowers 11/4/2025||
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soulofmischief 11/4/2025||
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jrflowers 11/4/2025||
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soulofmischief 11/3/2025||||
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jrflowers 11/4/2025||
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soulofmischief 11/4/2025||
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jrflowers 11/4/2025||
This conversation started with you bringing up your life-or-death principles in detail when you saw somebody mention using a rag to avoid burning themself with a cast iron pan and then asked for feedback on that post

I’m kind of bummed you edited out the “kindly fuck off” from a few minutes ago. It seemed honest.

soulofmischief 11/4/2025||
Following the guidelines, I edited out a swipe. Multiple people have been honest about how awful you're being, but maybe you need a moderator to step in and give you tips on how to have a mature discussion?

This conversation started with you butting into another conversation I am having with another user, that user also having butt into a conversation I was having with yet another user. Your posts cannot be more off-topic. Your need to seek attention and make this about you, to flamebait and ignore nearly every HN guideline speaks for itself.

jrflowers 11/5/2025||
You asked for feedback on a downvoted post, I gave it, and then you told me to fuck off.

I’m not sure what outcome you wanted here, but there isn’t really any amount of attacking me that will make other people agree that seeing “leather pan handle covers” and posting 200 words about how your conscience wouldn’t allow you to be involved in the leather pan handle cover business isn’t shaming.

It’s a factually correct read. If you look at this thread, nobody is here saying “actually it is totally normal and not shaming to bring up how you live and die by principles that make it impossible to countenance selling leather pan handle covers in response to seeing somebody mention leather pan handle covers”. No amount of painting yourself as a victim of “having your question answered” is going to make other people change their correct interpretation of the post that you asked for feedback about.

It’s like you asked a question, didn’t like the answer, and then decided that it’s against the rules to answer the question that you asked.

soulofmischief 11/5/2025||
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wholinator2 11/3/2025|||
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jrflowers 11/4/2025||
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AlexeyBelov 11/5/2025||
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jrflowers 11/5/2025|||
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nikodunk 11/2/2025||
Hot take from an AI skeptic: between this, Nano Banana and generative AI integrated into Gmail for repetitive emails, I’m starting to actually use Google’s AI for tasks I hate most.

Google appears to have their AI product game together!

Atomic_Torrfisk 11/2/2025|
This is just going to breed mistrust, possibly end up hurting businesses. Generally speaking, there are two categories of marketing when it comes to the products I buy.

The first is the quality mass produced products like laptops, cereals, frozen pizzas, etc which have enough revenue that they can hire human marketing to come up with unique content, packaging and ads. The other category, is _high_ quality locally produced goods, like cheese, meats, and some clothing (for example) which do not have enough revenue to hire dedicated marketing staff, but instead use informal marketing. Marketing beyond simple ads in the later case barely matters since there is a lot of trust that the product is quality.

Now there are a lot of garbage products out there, mostly from dollar/discount shops, drop shippers, online shops, and sometimes supermarkets. Margins on these cheap products is usually thin, so if they can save a few bucks with Pomelli they will probably use it.

I'd argue that most people today have become very sensitive and well trained to sniff out poor quality products, its easy to get ripped off. Cues of poor quality could be the design of the packaging including language and fonts, the weight and feel of the product or the brand name when it comes to amazon products sold by Mosptnspg, DSPEAE , Sdarming or whatever lol.

Is the cue to poor quality not going to become Pomelli-style designs? People are already sensitizing themselves to genAI content, and Pomelli is unlikely to produce designs time after time again which are unique enough to bypass a good eye.