Do you know (beware!) what your Assistant is doing?

[jdvoracek]

Until recently I have left the Assistant enabled. When the Assistant takes an action, it flashes (briefly) a (very small) message box which you may or may not notice. Not all Assistant actions are benign. This has happened to me a few times, and I finally diagnosed the cause because I had chosen File>Save History With Document. I would notice a layer group with live filters and/or masks and/or adjustments I might want to later change would be gone, replaced by a single pixel layer. Backtracking, I found an Assistant action to Rasterize when I selected the blur brush. Now that is fine, but I would have duplicated the group before I rasterized it in case I wanted to go back and make changes. Your results and needs will vary, but you might want to be aware of this.

[thomaso]

I agree. Although it is caused by the user's Assistant setting "Rasterize layer and …" it feels strange & risky that clicking with a certain tool + rasterize can be a 1-click process whereas Undo requires 2 clicks (or key actions).

A related issue was logged as a potential bug for V1, but never fixed. This even describes that Undo does not fully undo and not fully restore the previous state of the selected layer:

[hambandana]

I just came here because WHAT THE HELL IS THIS ASSISTANT.

I did not agree to this, I did not consent to this, and the AI c**p is why I LEFT adobe. Guess I'm done with Affinity too.

[R C-R]

23 minutes ago, hambandana said:

I just came here because WHAT THE HELL IS THIS ASSISTANT.

In https://affinity.help/photo2/en-US.lproj/pages/Workspace/preferences.html scroll down to about 3/4 of the way through the help topic, where you can read all about it & its options, as well as how to disable it if you don't want it to assist you at all.

[Alfred]

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

scroll down to about 3/4 of the way through the help topic

Near the top of the page there is a ‘Show settings for:’ dropdown list where ‘All categories’ is selected by default. Choose ‘Assistant’ from the list to make the assistant options visible immediately below the dropdown.

[GarryP]

5 hours ago, hambandana said:

I just came here because WHAT THE HELL IS THIS ASSISTANT.

I did not agree to this, I did not consent to this, and the AI c**p is why I LEFT adobe.

There is no way for you to give or withhold consent to having the Assistant because there’s no reasonable (in my opinion) reason that you might want to not consent to having it, in the same way as you probably wouldn’t want to consider giving or withholding your consent to having a Zoom Tool, or the Export Dialog, or being able to draw rectangles, etc.

The Assistant hasn’t got (as far as I know) any machine learning capabilities. What it does is so simple that I would be very surprised that it needed machine learning to do what it does.

It’s simply a set of options that let you tell the software to automatically do some basic things for you if those things help you with your particular workflow.

For example, when you are using the Paint Brush Tool you need to have a raster layer selected to be able to use it, so one Assistant option is for the software to automatically create a new Pixel Layer when you start to use the tool if one is not already selected.

It is not spying on you or anything like that, it’s just a set of basic ‘helper functionalities’.

As has been mentioned above, you can easily switch the Assistant OFF is you want to.

P.S. The title of this thread is, in my opinion, quite ‘click-bait-y’ and should be changed.

[Alfred]

5 minutes ago, GarryP said:

P.S. The title of this thread is, in my opinion, quite ‘click-bait-y’ and should be changed.

In what sense, Garry? Every topic starter wants other users to read their thread!

What suggestions can you offer for an alternative title?

[GarryP]

15 minutes ago, Alfred said:

In what sense, Garry? Every topic starter wants other users to read their thread!

What suggestions can you offer for an alternative title?

How about: “Some observations about the Assistant which may need your consideration”

I know that’s not posed as a question but the content of the original post doesn’t pose a question either.

I think it’s the “beware!” thing that’s ‘bothering’ me mostly.

The Assistant is simply doing what the software does by default, or what the user has told it to do if they change the settings from the defaults.

It’s maybe something for users to be aware of, but I don’t think they need to “beware!” of it, like it was some monster hiding under a bridge.

This is just my opinion, and if Serif are okay with the title then that’s fine by me as it’s their website.

It's not that big of a deal to me, I just thought I'd mention it in passing (hence in postscript).

[Bound by Beans]

8 hours ago, hambandana said:

I just came here because WHAT THE HELL IS THIS ASSISTANT.

I did not agree to this, I did not consent to this, and the AI c**p is why I LEFT adobe. Guess I'm done with Affinity too.

Assistant is in no way AI; it's old-school mechanical rules implemented by Serif either to make something easier or (relatedly) to patch usability gaps. Unfortunately, the assistant is opt-out and can mess up your work, as we saw here.

But it’s not AI at all. You can see for yourselves in its settings how mechanically it operates—entirely predictable.

I've disabled most of it.