Reality? What reality?
Soon, it seems, everything from brand assets to corporate videos to illustrations will be created differently using Adobe's creative and business apps and its Firefly generative AI tool. You can literally talk to paint (or make a video).
If you can say it, you can draw it
At Adobe Summit, the company also announced Adobe Express for Enterprise, a new tool for creating, sharing, and collaborating on high-quality branded content such as media assets, social media posts, and more. It's set to introduce generative AI tools to Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere Pro, and its customer experience tools. And launched a new content creation tool for business users.
For many users, the most interesting set of announcements concerns the company's intentions regarding the increase of artificial intelligence (AI) in its creative products.
AI is not new at Adobe. Its powerful Sensei platform powers powerful tools like Neural Filters in Photoshop, but the new Firefly tools promise to raise this game very high.
The company says its tools will allow creatives to speak for themselves to create images, videos, illustrations, and 3D images using Firefly. You'll create vectors, brushes, textures, graphic designs, videos, and social media posts. You can run 3D models, create brand assets, and probably more.
In the future, Adobe hopes to add more contextual intelligence to its machine.
The company also said it hopes to empower people with creative ideas to fill gaps in drawing or technical skills by offering the full power of creative applications in a visual form. It's unclear if the software will run faster on Mac, thanks to the inclusion of dedicated on-chip machine learning resources in the Neural Engine.
Creativity at the speed of speech
“Generative AI is the next evolution of AI-powered creativity and productivity, transforming the conversation between the creator and the computer into something more natural, intuitive and powerful,” said David Wadhwani, president of Digital Media Business at Adobe, it's a statement.
Adobe has been pretty open about how Firefly came together.
- You used images from the Adobe Stock photo catalog, to which you own a license.
- He did not use images without a license of any kind.
The news explains why Adobe founded the Content Authenticity Initiative four years ago. And in support of the initiative, it will introduce a "Do Not Train" tag that creatives can add to their work to prevent it from being analyzed by the AI. (He kind of reminds me of Steve Jobs, who said, "Great artists steal," except this time Adobe says, "Great artists don't steal.")
Although they can use AI.
Towards an ethical AI?
There are so many concerns around AI, and to his credit, Adobe has been brave enough to address them. To support this work, it has defined an AI ethics framework and operates a formal review process within its engineering teams to try to ensure that the AI it injects into its products reflects business needs and human values.
A blog post on the company's site points out some of the challenges that still surround AI, particularly the biases inherent in AI models. And he vows to continually test the models he builds to check "for safety and bias internally and provide those results to our engineering team to fix any issues."
Committing to "responsibly" creative generative AI development, the company said: "Our mission is to give creators every advantage, not just creatively, but practically. As Firefly evolves, we will continue to work closely with the creative community to develop technology that supports and enhances the creative process.
Adobe will integrate Firefly directly into its industry-leading tools and services, so users can integrate it into existing workflows. The company says it's also working on adding pop-up image generation to the software.
But we have to regulate these things.
As generative AI seems to be exploding into broader awareness at a rate faster than the proliferation of the Internet itself, Adobe's warning that all stakeholders must work together to develop these technologies responsibly demands to be heeded. “As generative AI evolves, it will bring new challenges and it is imperative that industry, government and the community work together to solve them,” the company said.
"By sharing best practices and adhering to standards for responsibly developing generative AI, we can unlock the limitless possibilities it offers and build a more trusted digital space."
It's also worth noting that Adobe's leap into the now extremely hot space of generative AI is happening today. Since Adobe and Apple have long worked together on augmented reality within Project Aero; Could Apple have been quietly developing its own implementations of these exciting (if terrifying) new technologies in secret for some time?
All eyes will be on WWDC to find out.
Adobe is currently testing Firefly in beta. If you want to know what it can do, you can join the beta here.
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