David Wadhwani is president of digital media.
There has been a lot of interest in the recent news of generative artificial intelligence. Even though artificial intelligence has existed for a long time, marketers should keep an eye on the changing segment. The value of the global generative artificial intelligence market is expected to grow to $110.8 billion by the year 2030.
If you've missed it, Moor Insights & Strategy CEO and chief analyst Patrick Moorhead and I recently published analyses of Microsoft's introduction of its Copilot and the announcement of its generative artificial intelligence-assisted workspace.
A new family of generative artificial intelligence models called Firefly has been introduced by Adobe. Firefly is bringing generative artificial intelligence to Adobe's suite of apps and services to generate media content.
Adobe is taking a human-centered approach to artificial intelligence. Adobe doesn't want to replace the beauty and power of the human imagination. The bigger picture of this announcement for Adobe is what it means for the company, its customer brands and the creative community that has helped build Adobe.
There's a big picture.
Adobe was not going to be left out in the cold when it came to image generation because of Firefly. Adobe has been in the game of artificial intelligence for a while now, and it's separate from image creation. It is less sexy and headline-worthy than other machine learning implementations due to the fact that it computes in the background. Adobe has used artificial intelligence to drive insights and decisions within its marketing platforms.
The Bing image creator was announced this week by Microsoft. Images would come after text. The ethical complexity and copyright issues with text are not the same as with images. It makes sense that Adobe is in the lead. Adobe is synonymous with digital images.
Adobe is looking to increase collaboration between humans and computers.
People tend to fear that machines will replace humans in a variety of jobs. Adobe emphasizes a human-centered approach to artificial intelligence.
I don't think there is a need to fear artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence doesn't have the training, capabilities or emotional intelligence to operate without human interaction at this point. The promise of artificial intelligence is to boost productivity and increase output.
There is a need to do more with less.
The amount of data brands have about their customers has increased. The interactions are tested by marketers. It takes a lot of time to create this content. Two-thirds of brands expect their content demand to grow over the next two years, according to a recent Adobe study.
Adobe is looking to Firefly to help them work more efficiently. Creatives should be able to focus on higher value, more satisfying work because of this.
The web-only version of Firefly is not for commercial use. It isn't available on tablets or mobile at the moment. First, Firefly will be integrated into Adobe Experience Manager. Customers will eventually be able to use Firefly in their content creation processes. GA has not yet been set in stone.
Artificial intelligence will create the Firefly if you can imagine it.
Adobe is taking a measured approach to rolling out features, starting with text-to-image, to give the market for generative artificial intelligence a chance to settle down. The company wants to engage with the creative community in order to get feedback on the next iteration of the product. As Adobe works through the needs and concerns of users, brands and creators, the future of Firefly is not certain.
The company has an idea of what the GA release of Firefly will look like. It will allow users to experiment with concepts. In illustration, artwork and graphic design, Firefly can be used to generate custom brushes andtextures from commands or simple sketches. The process for each design will be easy to navigate for most users, thanks to Adobe's plan to make each design editable.
A text-to-edit video feature is being explored by Adobe. During a demo at the Summit, a static image of a field full of flowers was transformed into a picture during a winter storm. For its marketing and social media tools, Adobe imagines scenarios such as being able to uploaded a mood board to help with content creation.
The company is interested in the future with 3-D modeling. Firefly hopes to be able to turn simple 3-D compositions into realistic images that can be used to create new styles and variations of 3-D objects.
Firefly is a meaning for brands.
According to Adobe, Firefly's training data consists of Adobe stock images, publicly licensed content and public domain content that have expired. The purpose of this is to create artificial intelligence images and text effects that can be used for commercial purposes.
Firefly will be able to produce content based on brand style and design language once it is trained on customers' creative assets. It's similar to giving Firefly brand guidelines to follow. This is a dream for organizations with large creative functions. There is always a human in the middle of the action.
Similar to how Microsoft trains its Copilot on Graph, Adobe will train Firefly models on brand specific assets and other data within their apps. Personalization can be provided by making the artificial intelligence more contextually aware, but also by creating more confidence in what it will spit out. The way Firefly is designed, Adobe customers won't have to worry about intellectual property being shared with other people.
It is possible for brands to extend and leverage the full view of the customer by combining the capabilities of Adobe's Sensei artificial intelligence. Marketers can easily identify new markets with the help of the conversations they have with and between the bot. It will be simpler to appeal to a specific market niche if you quickly create variations of images or text for a specific audience.
When users download an artificial intelligence-generated image, Adobe displays its trustworthiness in the message.
Adobe will interact with Firefly.
As it did with Adobe Stock and Behance, Adobe plans to build generative artificial intelligence models to enable creators on the platform to monetize their talents. The CEO of Adobe said at the Summit that creators would eventually be paid for their work. They will use their work to train the models. The compensation won't kick in until after Firefly is out of the public eye. Adobe will hold off on releasing a compensation model until they have a better idea of Firefly's value-to-volume exchange and how much it will cost.
The creators can use "do not train" tags on their content if they don't want their work to be trained. There is no guarantee that the tag will travel or that other platforms will honor it. Adobe wants creators to have more control over their work.
Content credentials will be attached to Firefly's content to indicate the use of generative artificial intelligence. Adobe's flagship product, Photoshop, contributed to the world's ability to fool people with images, so it is now a big proponent of transparency and trust. The content authenticity initiative was launched in 2019. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) was launched in 2021.
While those initiatives are important and check a lot of "social good" boxes, what is more impressive is how engaged the Firefly team is with Adobe's creative community. There is fear among digital content creators that their jobs could be rendered obsolete by the use of artificial intelligence. Concerns have been raised about the training of models, artist compensation and more. In order to listen to feedback directly from the community and discuss potential solutions and scenarios, the Adobe Experience Cloud team held an event on Thursday after the Adobe Summit. From what I saw of the event, it was sincere and productive.
The image was created in Firefly and has a transparency tag.
My conclusion was drawn.
Adobe was accused of being late to the party. At the Summit, Adobe answered the question of "just because we can, does it mean we should?" with caution. The company is wise to tread carefully considering all the unknowns and dangers in the world of LLM.
There is a question of whether images produced using artificial intelligence can be copied. Adobe has a commitment to protect and compensate the creative community that helped build the company.
There was a lot of talk at the Summit about Firefly being a "copilot" to boost productivity. The conversation didn't give any details on how Adobe will help workers whose jobs may be affected by artificial intelligence. How it could help the company's creative community get the most value from their Firefly experience.
Adobe has the ability to pull off a rich generative artificial intelligence experience and has the principles and guidelines in place to do it in a responsible way. It is a long journey from where we are now to where we know we can get. He is correct about that.
I'm looking forward to seeing how Adobe navigates its relationship with its creative community while still serving its brands and enterprise customers with transformational artificial intelligence-driven experiences.
All research and tech industry analyst firms have received paid services from Moor Insights and Strategy. The services include research, analysis, advising, consulting, benchmarking, and video and speaking sponsorship. The company has paid business relationships with 88, A10 Networks, Advanced Micro Devices, Amazon, Ampere Computing, Anuta Networks, Applied Brain Research, Applied Micro, Apstra, Arm, and HPE.
Patrick Moorhead is an investor in several companies.
