Photoshop's wild AI tool creates city skylines of the future

Apparently, it was Skyscraper Appreciation Day this past week. To mark the occasion, Adobe shared a series of intriguing works imagining the future skylines of several UK cities. And they were all made using the new Photoshop Generative Fill tool.

Generative Fill is powered by Adobe Firefly, one of our choices as the best AI art generator. We've already seen it used to radically transform images, but this project suggests an interesting possible use for architecture.

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We've already seen people using Photoshop Generative Fill to make all kinds of rapid transformations to images, often completing the kinds of compositions that would previously take hours of work at lightning speed. For this skyscraper project, Adobe challenged Photoshop creator Andrea Astarita to use the tool to imagine what the skylines of five major cities in the UK could look like in the year 2100.

The creative software company noted that with the approval of a new 935-feet skyscraper to be built in London by 2029, iconic skylines look set to radically transform as advances in technology make it possible to build taller futuristic buildings. Whether that's a positive thing may be a matter for debate, because we can see that in Astarita's imaginings, some of the cities look notably darker as new skyscrapers on the skyline block out the sun. Here's a look at Astarita's visions, before and after.

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We've already seen the power of Generative Fill for photo restoration. Astarita's project demonstrates another possible use case, which could allow architects to more quickly test out how ideas for new buildings might look, and the impact they could have on their surroundings. It's a scary thought that more and more city dwellers may spend a lot of their time in permanent twilight if skylines do continue to rise upwards.