Adobe enters AI fray

Digital creativity software company Adobe has unveiled Firefly, a new family of creative generative AI models. Initially, it is focused on the generation of images and text effects. 

Adobe says it will bring more precision, power, speed and ease into its online platforms, Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, Experience Cloud and Adobe Express.

Adobe has long established itself in AI innovation through Adobe Sensei, which brings machine learning to creative workflows. It includes features like Neural Filters in Photoshop, Content Aware Fill in After Effects, Attribution AI in Adobe Experience Platform and Liquid Mode in Acrobat.

Adobe has over a decade-long history of AI innovation, delivering hundreds of intelligent capabilities through Adobe Sensei into applications that hundreds of millions of people rely upon. Features like Neural Filters in Photoshop, Content Aware Fill in After Effects, Attribution AI in Adobe Experience Platform and Liquid Mode in Acrobat empower Adobe customers to create, edit, measure, optimise and review billions of pieces of content with power, precision, speed and ease. These innovations are developed and deployed in alignment with Adobe’s AI ethics principles of accountability, responsibility and transparency.

“Generative AI is the next evolution of AI-driven creativity and productivity, transforming the conversation between creator and computer into something more natural, intuitive and powerful,” said David Wadhwani, president, Digital Media Business, Adobe. “With Firefly, Adobe will bring generative AI-powered ‘creative ingredients’ directly into customers’ workflows, increasing productivity and creative expression for all creators from high-end creative professionals to the long tail of the creator economy.”

Adobe provided the following information:

Adobe is designing Firefly to give all creators superpowers to work at the speed of their imaginations. With Firefly, everyone who creates content – regardless of their experience or skill – will be able to use their own words to generate content the way they dream it up, from images, audio, vectors, videos and 3D to creative ingredients, like brushes, color gradients and video transformations, with greater speed and ease than ever before. With Firefly, producing limitless variations of content and making changes, again and again — all on brand — will be quick and simple. Adobe will also integrate Firefly directly into its industry leading tools and services, so users can effortlessly leverage the power of generative AI within their existing workflows.

Adobe also launched a beta for Firefly today that showcases how creators of all experience and skill levels can generate high quality images and amazing text effects. Adobe believes that the full power of technology cannot be realised without great imagination to fuel it. Through the beta process, the company will engage with the creative community and customers as it evolves this transformational technology and begins integrating it into its applications. The first applications that will benefit from Firefly integration will be Adobe Express, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.

High-Quality Images Designed to Be Safe for Commercial Use

Firefly will be made up of multiple models, tailored to serve customers with a wide array of skillsets and technical backgrounds, working across a variety of different use cases. Adobe’s first model, trained on Adobe Stock images, openly licensed content and public domain content where copyright has expired, will focus on images and text effects and is designed to generate content safe for commercial use. Adobe Stock’s hundreds of millions of professional-grade, licensed images are among the highest quality in the market and help ensure Firefly won’t generate content based on other people’s or brands’ IP. Future Firefly models will leverage a variety of assets, technology and training data from Adobe and others. As other models are implemented, Adobe will continue to prioritise countering potential harmful bias.

A Customer-Centric Approach

Adobe is designing generative AI to support creators in benefitting from their skills and creativity:

• Helping creators work more efficiently: Content is fueling the global economy and creativity and design have never been more valued. In a recent Adobe study 88% of brands said content demand at least doubled over the last year and two-thirds expect it to grow 5x over the next two years. Adobe is leveraging generative AI to ease this burden with solutions for working faster, smarter and with greater convenience – including the ability for customers to train Firefly with their own collateral, generating content in their personal style or brand language.
• Compensating creators: Adobe’s intent is to build generative AI in a way that enables customers to monetise their talents, much like Adobe has done with Adobe Stock and Behance. Adobe is developing a compensation model for Adobe Stock contributors and will share details once Firefly is out of beta.
• Advocating for open standards: Adobe founded the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) to create a global standard for trusted digital content attribution. With more than 900 members worldwide, the role of CAI has never been more important. Adobe is pushing for open industry standards using CAI’s open-source tools that are free and actively developed through the non-profit Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). These goals include a universal “Do Not Train” Content Credentials tag in the image’s Content Credential for creators to request that their content isn’t used to train models. The Content Credentials tag will remain associated with the content wherever it is used, published or stored. In addition, AI generated content will be tagged accordingly.
• Firefly ecosystem: Adobe is also planning to make Firefly available via APIs on various platforms to enable customers to integrate into custom workflows and automations.