Adobe unveils Firefly, a family of creative generative AI

Adobe introduced Firefly, a new family of creative, generative AI models that first focused on generating images and text effects. Firefly will bring even more precision, power, speed and ease directly into Creative Cloud, Document Cloud, Experience Cloud and Adobe Express workflows where content is created and modified. In addition, Firefly will be part of a series of new Adobe Sensei generative AI services across Adobe's clouds.

Adobe has over a decade-long history of AI innovation, delivering hundreds of intelligent capabilities through Adobe Sensei into applications that hundreds of millions 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. Furthermore, 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," says David Wadhwani, president of digital media business at 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 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, colour gradients and video transformations, with more incredible speed and ease than ever before. 

With Firefly, producing limitless content variations and making changes will be quick and straightforward. 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 that showcases how creators of all experience and skill levels can generate high-quality images and fantastic text effects. 

Adobe believes that the full power of technology can only be realised with great imagination to fuel it. Through the beta process, the company will engage with the creative community and customers as it evolves and integrates this transformational technology into its applications. The first applications that will benefit from Firefly integration will be Adobe Express, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.

Firefly will comprise multiple models tailored to serve customers with various skill sets and technical backgrounds, working across various use cases.

Adobe's first model, trained on Adobe Stock images, openly licensed content and public domain content where the 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' IPs.

Future Firefly models will leverage various assets, technology and training data from Adobe and others. As other models are implemented, Adobe will continue prioritising countering potential harmful bias.

Embarking on a customer-centric approach, Adobe is designing generative AI to support creators in benefiting from their skills and creativity.

Content is fuelling 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 five times 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 collateral, generating content in their personal style or brand language.

Adobe intends to build generative AI to enable 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.

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 free, open-source tools 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.

Adobe is also planning to make Firefly available via APIs on various platforms to enable customers to integrate into custom workflows and automation.