Reality? Which reality?
Soon, apparently, everything from brand assets to corporate videos to artwork will be created differently using Adobe’s creative and business apps and its generative AI tool Firefly. You can literally talk to paint (or make video).
If you can say it, you can draw it
The company also announced at Adobe Summit Adobe Express for Enterprise, a new tool for creating, sharing and collaborating on high-quality branded content such as multimedia assets, social posts and more. It is about to introduce generative AI tools in Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere Pro and the customer experience tools. And it rolled out a new content creation tool for business users.
For many users, the most interesting announcements relate to the company’s intentions regarding artificial intelligence (AI) augmentation within its creative products.
AI is not new to Adobe. The powerful Sensei platform powers powerful tools like the Neural Filters in Photoshop, but the new Firefly tools promise to take this game to the next level.
The company explains that its tools will allow creative types to have their say to create images, videos, illustrations and 3D graphics with Firefly. It creates vectors, brushes, textures, graphics, videos and social media posts. It 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 it will enable people with creative ideas to bridge any gap in technical or drawing skills by offering all the power of creative apps in a visual form. It is not clear whether the software runs faster on Macsthanks 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 creator and computer into something more natural, intuitive, and powerful,” said David Wadhwani, president of Adobe’s Digital Media Business, said in a statement.
Adobe has been quite open about how it trained Firefly.
- It used images in Adobe’s stock photo catalog, which it licensed.
- It did not use unlicensed images of any kind.
The news makes it clear 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 the AI from analyzing it. (This reminds me a bit of Steve Jobs, who famously said “Great artists steal” – except this time Adobe says “Great artists do not to steal.”)
Although they can use AI.
Towards an ethical AI?
There are so many concerns about AI, and Adobe has had the courage to address some of them. To support this work, it has established an AI ethics framework and applies a formal review process within its technical teams to ensure that the AI it pumps into its products reflects the company’s needs and human values .
A blog post on the company’s site lists some of the challenges still surrounding AI, particularly around inherent bias within AI models. And it’s committed to constantly testing the models it creates to check for “safety and bias internally and provide those results to our engineering team to troubleshoot any issues.”
Promise his commitment to “responsibly” develop creative generative AI, the company said: “Our mission is to bring creators every benefit – not just creative, but practical. As Firefly evolves, we will continue to work closely with the creative community to build technology it supports and improves the creative process.”
Adobe will integrate Firefly directly into its leading tools and services, allowing users to incorporate it into existing workflows. The company also says it is working on adding context-aware image generation to the software.
But we have to regulate this kind of thing
As generative AI appears to be exploding into wider consciousness faster than the internet itself, Adobe’s warning that all stakeholders must work together to develop these technologies responsibly needs to be heard. “As it continues to evolve, generative AI will bring new challenges and it is imperative that industry, government and community work together to solve them,” the company said.
“By sharing best practices and adhering to standards to develop generative AI responsibly, we can unlock the limitless possibilities it offers and build a more trusted digital space.”
It’s also interesting that Adobe’s leap into the now wildly hot generative AI space is happening today. Given that Adobe and Apple have long been collaborating on augmented reality within Project Aero; Has Apple perhaps been quietly developing its own implementations of these exciting (albeit terrifying) new technologies for some time in secret?
All eyes will be on WWDC to find out.
Adobe is currently beta testing Firefly. If you want to know what it can do, you can join the beta here.
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