5 Settembre 2023

by Ded Costruzioni

Adobe All-New Adobe Express With Firefly Brings Generative AI to Creators Worldwide

Generative AI: 7 Steps to Enterprise GenAI Growth in 2023

This fanciful image of a parachuting hippopotamus was created entirely with Adobe’s Firefly AI tool in Photoshop. Firefly, which I’ve been testing, has a monthly usage cap that’s meant to be liberal. And while the execs didn’t come out and explicitly address this at the Summit, it’s clear to me that Adobe has answered the question of “Just because we can, does it mean we should?” with caution.

Adobe didn’t announce any other partners who have agreed to respect the Do Not Train flag so far, but Costin said Adobe is in conversations with other model creators. There is also no confirmed release date for Firefly for Enterprise — only that it will launch sometime after Firefly comes out of beta. Of course, Adobe has the benefit of a massive built-in customer base; Creative Cloud has 600 million monthly active users while Experience Cloud has 12,000 customers, including 87% of the Fortune 100. Another issue Adobe has sought to address with Firefly is regarding the disinformation that has been fuelled by the public availability of generative AI tools. Consequently, Firefly includes Content Credentials by default, meaning every asset created using Firefly automatically includes creative attribution.

Business Uses for Generative AI

In the public versions of Adobe’s flagship apps, like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Express, Firefly’s full release is ready to go. When Adobe announced Firefly in March, the company emphasized its ethical approach to AI. While that decision has hurt the performance of Firefly, it has not affected the AI platform’s popularity. Top global brands including Accenture, IHG Hotels & Resorts, Mattel, NASCAR, NVIDIA, ServiceNow and Omnicom are already working with Adobe to explore how Firefly can help drive efficiencies, reduce costs and accelerate their content supply chains.

For example, the all-apps annual subscription increases from $55 to $60 per month, and a single-app subscription increases from $21 to $23 per month. Creators can also choose not to have their Yakov Livshits work train the AI models by using “do not train” tags on content. However, there’s no guarantee so far that the tag will travel with the image, or that other platforms will honor the tag.

Adobe pays stock art contributors for AI training imagery

While beta versions of Firefly have been free to use as often as someone wants without restriction, it requires using “Generative Credits” to create content now that Firefly is publicly available. In Illustrator, Firefly waves goodbye to the tedious task of manually recoloring artwork. In Express, users can create a huge variety of content in little time with minimal effort. Exponential Digital Solutions (10xDS) is a new age organization where traditional consulting converges with digital technologies and innovative solutions.

Firefly is smart enough to get the crab’s reflection mostly right, though if you look closely, imperfections are evident. “We don’t want anyone conserving [credits] or creating from a place of scarcity or feeling like they’re rationing,” said Deepa Subramaniam, vice president of marketing for Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription. With Generative Recolor in Adobe Illustrator, powered by Adobe Firefly, you can explore color palettes and themes with simple text prompts.

For enterprises, Express bridges workflows between creative professionals and marketers through integrations into Creative Cloud applications as well as Experience Manager, Adobe’s world-class CMS solution in Adobe Experience Cloud. Seamless integrations democratize creativity beyond design teams, and enable organizations to create, collaborate and deliver content velocity at scale. With Express and Firefly for Enterprise, any employee across an organization can generate beautiful, ready-to-share content. Since Firefly entered beta, over 2 billion images have been generated across various popular Adobe applications, including Firefly on the web, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Express. Firefly has also made its way to other popular apps, bringing AI innovations to the Premiere Pro and After Effects video editing software.

Yakov Livshits
Founder of the DevEducation project
A prolific businessman and investor, and the founder of several large companies in Israel, the USA and the UAE, Yakov’s corporation comprises over 2,000 employees all over the world. He graduated from the University of Oxford in the UK and Technion in Israel, before moving on to study complex systems science at NECSI in the USA. Yakov has a Masters in Software Development.

You’ll also be able to apply those effects to an image that’s already generated, rather than having to generate a new creation every time you want to update the effect. (You’ll still be able to type in custom options if you want to.) The text effect tool works in a similar way, with built-in options for the size of the effect and color of the background. The company is announcing a “family of creative generative AI models” today called Adobe Firefly and releasing the first two tools that take advantage of them. One of the tools works like DALL-E or Midjourney, allowing users to type in a prompt and have an image created in return.

With generative AI, computers identify the underlying pattern related to the input and produce similar content. Various techniques like Generative adversarial networks (GANs), Transformers (GPT-3, LaMDA, Wu-Dao) are used for the purpose. Generating new content based on source data, differentiating, and identifying which generated data is closer to the original are few of the key activities that happen.

I do not believe there is any need to fear AI replacing human creative talent in the immediate future. AI simply does not have the training, capabilities or emotional intelligence to operate without human interaction at this point, and especially for something as subjectively driven as visual design. What AI does have is the promise to boost productivity and increase the outputs co-generated by humans and machines. No, Adobe Stock credits can’t be used to generate content using Firefly-powered features. Generative credits provide priority processing of generative AI content across features powered by Firefly in the applications that you are entitled to. Adobe has announced that it is making its Firefly generative artificial intelligence (AI) available to enterprise customers to allow brands to deploy it across their organizations and custom train it with their own assets.

In 2021, alongside Arm, BBC, Intel, Microsoft and Truepic, it also launched a formal coalition for standards development called the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA). By combining capabilities in Adobe’s Sensei AI such as data analytics and behavior predictions with Firefly image generation, brands can make the AI “conversation” even richer, enabling them to extend and leverage the full view of the customer. Marketers can easily optimize journeys and identify new markets based on these “conversations” with and between the AI bots. Speaking as a former tech company CMO, I can tell you that rapidly creating variations of images or text to slightly tweak a campaign for a specific audience will make it much simpler to appeal to a particular market niche. Firefly will eventually be able to be trained on customers’ creative assets so that it can produce content based on a prescribed brand style and design language.

We are committed towards partnering with clients to help them realize their most important goals by harnessing a blend of automation, analytics, AI and all that’s “New” in the emerging exponential technologies. Generative AI can produce outputs that are difficult to trace back to the responsible parties, which in turn, can make it challenging to hold individuals or organizations accountable for fake news or deepfake videos generated by AI. AI Dungeon – this online adventure game uses a generative language model to create unique storylines based on player choices. Write With Transformer – allows end users to use Hugging Face’s transformer ML models to generate text, answer questions and complete sentences.

Many of the issues PetaPixel experienced with Adobe’s generative AI were problems that had been solved in previous updates to competitors. Hands, faces, and environments all lacked cohesion and believability since the AI was young and had a far more constricted training set. But only time will tell whether Adobe’s able to overcome the many hurdles (and competitors) standing in its way, least of which maintaining the costly compute necessary to continue developing and running new Firefly models. Legal and ethical roadblocks aside, Adobe has to make up for lost time — and mindshare, which is never an easy task in a hyper-competitive field. “With Firefly, everyone who creates content — regardless of their experience or talent — will be able to use their own words to generate content the way they dream it up,” Costin said.

We believe that Firefly can help people grow their creative confidence by removing barriers between creative vision and blank page. It puts hours back into the lives of creators at a moment when both the demand for content and the demands on their time have exploded. We want Firefly to realize the power of generative AI and amplify human creativity and intelligence without replacing the beauty and power of human imagination.

• Video Generation involves deep learning methods such as GANs and Video Diffusion to generate new videos by predicting frames based on previous frames.
• Adobe is also planning to make Firefly available via APIs on various platforms to enable customers to integrate into custom workflows and automations.
• Creators can also choose not to have their work train the AI models by using “do not train” tags on content.
• And AI startup Spawning, which has partnerships with platforms including ArtStation and Shutterstock, offers a tool that lets artists remove their images from datasets used to train AI models.

It monitors developments, recognition, and achievements made by Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and Analytics companies across the globe. Analytics Insight is an influential platform dedicated to insights, trends, and opinions from the world of data-driven technologies. I used Firefly in Photoshop first to expand the original image, left, with new trees and greenery, which it did capably. The fish I added next is less plausible, but Firefly blended it well with the background. Since joining The Verge in 2012, he’s published 5,000+ stories and is the founding editor of the creators desk.