Free Photoshop Comes to ChatGPT - DTNS 5162

0:03This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, December 10th, 2025. There's not much 2025 left, is there? We tell you what you need to know. We give you some context and help each other understand. Tom, there's 21 days left. Today, you can use Photoshop for free and chat GPT. Ooh, why would you use it any other way, I guess? I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Sarah Lane. Let's start with what you need to know with that big story. Chat GPT has been integrating apps into its service. We've talked about Canva, Spotify, Booking, Expedia, Figma, and now it is integrating three Adobe products at no extra charge. You'll be able to ask ChatGPT to edit image, create animations, manipulate PDFs, all using Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Express, and Adobe Acrobat.

0:52So let's dig into what each one of those does. With Photoshop, for example, you can upload an image and ask ChatGPT to adjust the contrast with Photoshop. You do have to say, because there is Canva and Figma, you have to say with Photoshop. It will then do that and show you sliders. So you can adjust brightness, contrast, and exposure more if you want. You can also do more complex things like apply a cartoon drawing style to the entire image, except for that egg on the table, if that's what you needed to do for some reason. You can also ask it to remove parts of the image, as you might expect, blur backgrounds, all that kind of stuff.

1:28You can ask for effects and get sliders and adjustments for those as well. 9to5Mac even says you could just say, apply effects to this image and get multiple options of different Photoshop effects that ChatGPT thinks might be cool. You can open any image in the web-based version of Photoshop as well. So you can keep using it to edit once you've created it in ChatGPT. Hmm, that's handy. I know, that's pretty cool. Like it'll just carry over all of its edits, right? For Adobe Express, you can ask for ideas for designs, choose a design, make adjustments for things like flyers and posters and birthday cards.

2:04You can also animate those designs and also open those images in the web version of Adobe Express. And Adobe Acrobat integration lets you use prompts to describe how you want to edit a PDF. You can extract text and tables, you can merge and reorder and it'll even give you a drag and drop interface within ChatGPT. So you don't even have to open it in another tab. All these are free to ChatGPT users on desktop web and iOS. If you're an Android ChatGPT user, you will be able to get the Adobe Express stuff right now. But Photoshop and Acrobat are still coming, although they say they're coming soon.

2:41Now, I use ChatGPT on macOS pretty regularly. That's just kind of the way that I use it. So I tried this out this morning, you know, photo of my dog at the dog park the other day, cute photo. And I said, apply effects in Photoshop. And it took a while. I'm on the free version of ChatGPT. So, you know, so there may be people who are always in line in front of me. Took a couple of minutes, but I got, and I was looking for the sliders and, you know, ways to manipulate it afterwards. That didn't give that to me. It gave me a highly HDR, you know, revised version of my original photo, which was cool looking, but just like too crazy.

3:25So then I said, you know, give me options in Photoshop. And it didn't. It didn't give me any options. It just brought down that HDR a little bit. So I'm not totally sure if some of the features are for paying customers and others are not. Or maybe it's just, you know, early days. Maybe it just hasn't launched yet. Yeah. Yeah, maybe I didn't ask the right way. I tried to do it exactly the way that The Verge told me to. Every time ChatGPT launches one of these things, as soon as I go try it, it's not there yet. It takes a day from when we get the news story to it actually showing up. So who knows?

3:58Maybe that's what it was. It is really significant to see Adobe, which has its own models, its Firefly models and all of that, deciding to work with OpenAI. One assumes somebody's getting paid here. I assume OpenAI is paying Adobe to bring this into ChatGPT. And just ongoing brand recognition, right? Yeah, sure. It's like if you're in ChatGPT and you're like, well, I need to use Photoshop, then you're more likely to use an Adobe product in the future. And maybe you decide that you like the Adobe product so much when you open it in the web version that you want to subscribe and use it all the time on your own and use their own models and all that.

4:37So it's probably some customer acquisition as well, like you say. It's definitely OpenAI's plan to get you to live inside ChatGPT someday. Obviously, there's a long way to go before you do that. But this is a big one to have Adobe in there because it's something a lot of people use for a lot of different reasons. Indeed. Well, in related news, Figma announced the ability to remove and isolate objects and expand images. The new features are available on Figma design and draw with plans to make them available in other Figma tools next year. No word on whether those will come to the version of Figma that is inside of ChatGPT, which I guess is another thing we'll have to start talking about, right?

5:18Yeah, it's like inception layers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, what layer am I on? Is it ChatGPT, is it Figma, or is it Figma within ChatGPT? No, I guess in the future, we'll be like, it's available on the web, mobile, desktop, and ChatGPT versions of the app. It will become a regular thing. Well, a regular thing that we like to do is thank all the folks that make our show possible. DTNS is made possible by you listening or watching right now. Thanks to Tim Deputy, Brandon Brooks, Johnny Hernandez, and everyone welcome our new patron, Devo. Welcome. Yay. Good to have you. There is more to talk about today.

5:59Let's get to the briefs. All right. So Instagram has added a setting called your algorithm that lets you customize which topics affect what Instagram shows you in your Reels feed. Each Reel will have an icon, two lines with hearts on them. If you tap that, then you see a sentence about what topics Instagram thinks you like the most. Under that will be a list of topics that you can choose to say you either want more or less of. You can also add topics. Maybe you're like, I love cats. Why isn't cats in here? that type of thing. TikTok has a similar feature called Manage Topics. So this is Instagram catching up with TikTok a little bit.

6:34The tool is rolling out in the US and will roll out globally in English for English speakers soon. Yeah, another Instagram catching up with TikTok, although TikTok is more limited than the one that Instagram is rolling out. You can't add your own topics. And the number of topics are a little more limited as well. Much like we just discussed with the ChatGPT, I went to Instagram and went to my Reels and didn't have this yet. so I haven't been able to try it. I don't know how useful that summary line is. That just seems to be them showing off what their LLM can do. But the ability to add my own topic is pretty cool.

7:08I like that. And the fact that the topics are customized to you, it's not just the same topics every time like it is on TikTok. Yeah, this feels like another iteration of, you know, like the thumbs up, thumbs down. Like, did you like that video? No. You know, did you like, you want to see more of this? Yes, that's great. And that will train an algorithm over time, not just Instagram, but lots of different platforms. But being able to say specifically, like, I want to see cat videos or I don't want to see cat videos, that gives you a little bit more control. Yeah, 7th dog probably would say fewer cat videos.

7:45Don't need those. More dog videos. Yeah, yeah. Rex is kind of a cat fan. So he's probably like fewer dogs because they're my challenger. more cats because I like them. That's why we need customization like this, right? Different personalities. That's right. The information reported that its sources told it that China's DeepSeek had used NVIDIA Blackwell chips that they smuggled into the country in order to train upcoming models. Blackwell chips, if you're like, wait, didn't they just approve chips from NVIDIA to be sold to China? Blackwell chips are not the NVIDIA chips that were approved for sale.

8:21Those are Hopper chips that were approved. So it's these more advanced Blackwell chips that are under discussion here. However, NVIDIA issued a statement saying, we haven't seen any substantiation or received tips of phantom data centers constructed to deceive us and our OEM partners, then deconstructed, smuggled, and reconstructed somewhere else. While such smuggling seems far-fetched, we pursue any tip we receive. So they're basically saying, yeah, that story the information told, pretty wacky. We haven't seen any evidence of it, but we'll keep looking into it. We'll look into it. Yeah. How would they tell?

8:59Well, there's another story that comes from Reuters saying NVIDIA has built location verification tech into its chips so it could detect where they were being used. And that would be useful if you wanted to, you know, say, see if DeepSeek was using B200 chips in China after smuggling them in. Gee, I wonder who could have leaked this story to Reuters. Anyway, supposedly NVIDIA can use the confidential computing capability in its chips and then measure the delay in communicating with NVIDIA servers to estimate the location. NVIDIA told Reuters, quote, we are in the process of implementing a new software service that empowers data center operators to monitor the health and inventory of their entire AI GPU fleet.

9:43A lot of conversation about whether this is a backdoor because NVIDIA chips would be reporting to their own servers in the US. It does sound like what they're describing is something you as the person installing the chips would have to turn on. You'd have to install some software to do this. And if that's the case and you were smuggling NVIDIA chips into China, you probably aren't going to install that software. So I'm not sure how useful it would be for that specific case. Can we talk about phantom data centers? Phantom data centers, I know, right? So, you know, I'm thinking like, what is this like a ghost kitchen?

10:16No, a ghost kitchen is not really, you know, made up of ghosts. It's just a place where you don't actually go to the restaurant and sit down and have a meal. You know, food is made and then distributed to a variety of other places. A phantom data center, if it was actually meant to deceive us, as NVIDIA says, did not happen, what does that look like? You would actually construct a data center and then as soon as NVIDIA executives walk away, you're like, okay, everybody, take it down. Take it down. Let's move. That's the idea. You build a data center. Maybe NVIDIA isn't there personally, but they verify like, oh, yeah, those chips we sold you are in this data center.

10:57here's pictures of the data center see it's all here it's all happening and then yeah as soon as they stop paying attention you break it all down and ship it to china at least that's that's what the information uh was saying might have happened nvidia is saying they haven't seen any evidence of that but you know maybe they got food yeah i mean i i i'm sure if this is not happening in a widespread widespread way i am sure uh somebody has tried this already you know it's certainly possible, right? It's not impossible for somebody to make happen. But like you say, probably not a widespread phenomenon.

11:32A study published in the journal Nature looked at British road safety data from 2014 through 2023 and found that pedestrian safety rates were statistically similar between electric and non-electric cars for the period between 2019 and 2023. That's when ownership became more widespread of EVs. The quieter operation, obviously of EVs, but also the heavier weight didn't seem to make pedestrian injuries any more severe, according to this. The authors point out that EVs are likely to have better safety sensors than regular vehicles as well. Yeah, and they are saying we need to study this more and try to control for that and say, okay, well, if you have similar safety sensors in non-EVs, then do you see more danger to pedestrians?

12:18But the good news is it didn't seem like once EVs became popular after 2019, suddenly a bunch of people were getting hit by them more often. So that's good. They did find a lift in EV-related pedestrian deaths in the entire period from 2014 to 2023. So I guess from 2014 to 2019, they were more dangerous for some reason. But I like that they pulled that out and said, look, once they became widespread, then you get better data, right? Because you don't have a couple of unusual occurrences waiting the data anymore. And it seems like maybe the better safety sensors and the inclusion of little noisemakers so you can hear them, maybe they've made a difference.

13:00Oh, yeah. I mean, that for me, as somebody who walks around a lot, especially with my dog, when the Prius was new and cool, it was the electric car to have, they used to frighten me because they'd come out of nowhere and they were silent. And now, you know, and I don't know how every single car manufacturer does this differently. But, you know, when a Tesla, because there are lots of Teslas in my neighborhood, when it's backing up, you know, it's not loud, but you know, it's there, you know, you know what's going on. It's a heads up. It's and I appreciate that. So I think that car manufacturers are just getting more hip to what actually works, you know, what's dangerous for no reason, you know, and how do we help that?

13:46And the other thing that Tesla is going to do is chime the driver. If it sees that there's a person standing there, it's going to go, hey, stop that a lot of cars do that as well. Yeah, my car, my car does. So there's, you know, there's, there's a lot more safety happening in general, which is a good thing. So I'm glad that they responsibly published this story and pointed that out and also responsibly said, hey, we should probably also still figure out like maybe there is a danger. And maybe if we understand that there is a higher danger, we make sure that we continue to develop these sensors and other ways of mitigating it.

14:18Yeah, exactly. I mean, listen, if a vehicle is going to hit you and it's heavier than the other vehicle, not good. But there's nothing you can really do about a heavy battery. So you have to, you know, come up with other solutions. There's now a published standard for how to manage the scraping of data for training generative models called really simple licensing, like RSS, but for licensing. RSL 1.0 is now an official published specification. You may have heard the news about this being announced in September by the RSL Collective, which is backed by a bunch of media organizations, including Yahoo, Ziff Davis, and O 'Reilly Media, supported by around 1 ,500 media organizations.

14:57Even if they're not members of the collective, they're implementing this standard. Infrastructure providers like Cloudflare, Akamai, and Fastly all support the standard. So there's a way for these sites to put it out there and let the indexers and crawlers know that it's there. When supported, the standard indicates what parts of a website can be accessed for training and if desired, what royalty to pay for it. It's a simple yes-no standard, but there's also some ways to put in like, oh, but if you have paid a royalty, then we'll say yes. If you haven't, we'll say no. It's constructed to be separate from the permissions that are used in the robots.txt file for search engine indexing.

15:36So if somebody wants to say to Bing, you can index my site for search, but not for training your generative models for Copilot, they could do that. However, at this point, no LLM companies have agreed to honor RSL yet. Some people thought, well, we need to get the standard published out there, and then we can start putting on the pressure for people to adopt it. I feel like that's the key point here. It is one of the key points. It is an LL company saying, you know what, this is a good idea. We're in, you know, sign a document, you know, we're on board. That would mean a lot and could, you know, offer, you know, sort of, you know, let other companies, leading the way for other companies to do the same.

16:22If no LLM company that is currently being used by lots of people is paying attention to this, then it's a great idea in theory, but it doesn't do much. What the LLM companies have said right now is you can tell us in Robots TXT whether we're allowed to do this or not, and we'll respect that. They have said they will respect companies that say don't scrape us for training. Uh, so really it's a, it's a matter of like, okay, then respect this protocol as well. I think the dragging in the feet is like, okay, that there's a royalty thing in there. How does that work? What if we've got a deal with a company, which open AI, Microsoft, a lot of them have deals with publishers.

17:05Anthropic has deals with publishers. Uh, you know, how do we make sure that that works in, in, in the way our deal was constructed, which was constructed prior to RSL 1.0. there's probably some negotiations going on around that stuff. Yeah. All right. Finally, some quick headlines. These are always good to know if you want to understand the news in the future, but they're quick. Bloomberg reports that Meta's pivot to AI doesn't include a pivot away from open models with a new closed model codenamed Avocado to launch in the spring. Ooh, put it on toast. Sounds good. YouTube TV announced that next year it will launch more than 10 genre-specific packages This is something DirecTV and Sling do as well.

17:48They said it'll include sports, news, kids, family, etc. It will cost less than the full service. You should be able to bundle a couple of them and still pay less than the full service. But they didn't give us any actual prices or release dates. They did say the sports package will include ESPN Unlimited. I gotta say, the only reason I really pay for YouTube TV is because of sports. And that's not even something that I use YouTube TV for every single day. that might be very attractive to me. Because to be honest, unless there's some, I don't know, some very non-specific offshoots that I might just stumble upon at some point, it's sports.

18:32So yeah, I think they're going to get a lot of sign-ups for that. Indeed. Google is now competing with OpenAI with a 399 rupee per month plan, that's less than$5, called AI Plus in India, which gives higher limits than the free version. Yeah, they have it in Indonesia already and a few other places. So this is them coming to India. We mentioned yesterday that the restrictions on social media accounts for those younger than 16 has begun in Australia. And I know you're probably as shocked as I am, Sarah. Signups at social media apps not covered by the law, like TikTok's LemonAid, photo sharing app Yope, Coverstar, have propelled them to the top of the app charts.

19:14Turns out kids want to be online. I guess they do. Yeah, doing social media. US-backed StarCloud says its satellite with an NVIDIA H100 chip trained and is running and querying responses from Google's Open Gemma model from orbit, the first time a model has been trained and operated in space. This is one of those test cases to making orbiting data centers a real thing, is you got to make sure these chips work in orbit with a radiation-filled environment and all of that. So a pretty big deal there. Amazon's$630 Kindle Scribe ColorSoft tablet that has a pen, color ink screen is now on sale. If you want to drop$630 on it, you can.

20:00The reviews are mixed. They basically say it's a niche device. Evan Blass, aka EvLeaks, shared a leaked Verizon certificate for the forthcoming Pixel 10a, which shows a 6.3-inch screen and 5 ,100 mAh battery. In an update to the Pixel Watch 4, users get double pinch and wrist turn features, among a few other updates. McDonald's pulled down a 45-second ad in the Netherlands after people mocked it for its use of generated video. They didn't like it. You can tell it's there. People are not going to like it. Shopify has launched a feature called Product Network, which lets merchants recommend products on other merchant storefronts.

20:44I think this is also called advertising. Is there anything more generic than Product Network? I guess it's just, you know, it's exactly what it is. We talked about the standardization of agents using MCP yesterday in the Agentic AI Foundation, but forgot to mention that it is part of the Linux Foundation as well. Ah, yeah. That changes a little bit what Jason and I were saying about it, to realize that it'll be under the administration of the Linux Foundation, which is a good thing, in my opinion. A startup called Operating Bluebird hopes to prove to the USPTO that X has abandoned the trademark for Twitter and tweet and grant it to Operating Bluebird, Operation Bluebird, and then it could be used to launch a new social network under that name.

21:28I mean, X has done a lot of work to get rid of the terms Twitter and tweets and retweet. I don't think X is going to let it go without a fee. I don't either. I don't either. But I think Operation Bluebird has a good argument here. Hey, you're not using it. You're not using it. Somebody else should. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Open AI has hired Slack CEO Denise Dresser to be its chief revenue officer to put AI to work for enterprise companies. Man, Open AI keeps hiring CEOs to run departments. That's that is an interesting thing to watch. They're going to heavy on enterprise stuff, too. Yeah, for sure. Well, folks, we mentioned yesterday, if you want to be on DTNS, we're having a special show Wednesday, December 24th at 1 p.m.

22:10Eastern, 10 a.m. Pacific, where we're going to share the tech we want for the holidays, as well as tech we've received as gifts in the past. If you'd like to be part of that episode, we have two ways to participate, pre-recorded or live. You can find out more by going to dailytechnewsshow.com slash LCH. That's dailytechnewsshow.com slash LCH for listener co-host. Get it?

22:38We like to end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives. Today, Damien has some thoughts about our interview over the weekend about the Flock surveillance cameras. Yeah, Damien wrote, I did learn something new about this. I had no idea that HOAs and private companies could install these. I still question where they are, decided to be located, but I cannot always blame the local government and think that maybe the apartment complex or property owners had them installed. Yeah, I don't think a lot of people realize that. Do keep in mind that if it's a public intersection and administrated by the city, your HOA can't put it there.

23:16But there are often private drives in condo complexes or gated communities that are actually not operated by the city and operated by the HOA. And in those cases, they might put in there. Well, if you are thinking about anything we talked about on the show or you have an insight to a story that might be upcoming, share it with us. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Big thanks to Damian for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You're the folks who keep us in business. If you're not a patron, why not become one? Give value from the show. Give a little value back.

23:52Patreon.com slash DTNS.

24:01The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.