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Haters will say it’s…Firefly? Adobe is rolling out a new mobile app hub for its visual generation tools as it continues to revamp its creative software for the AI age.
The Firefly app will bring the company’s image and video generation models to iOS and Android in “a standalone experience,” the company announced last week. Adobe has also added more third-party models from the likes of Luma AI, Pika, and Runway to give users more options. And another new feature called Firefly Boards promises to make it easier to mock up mood boards for creative projects.
Adobe first unveiled its Firefly family of image models in the heady early days of the generative AI rush in spring 2023. More recently, it has turned Firefly into an all-in-one hub for AI-powered tools with image, video, audio, and vector generation, as well as third-party models from Google, OpenAI, and others.
But the company is facing a flood of competition in the creative tools market from all kinds of new AI startups, including Runway, Luma AI, and Pika—yes, the same ones Adobe’s platform now offers. One advantage it’s touted, in addition to its legacy standing, is the copyright safety of its models, which the company says are only trained on Adobe’s stock library, public domain works, or other permissioned content.
Just an idea: Zeke Koch, VP of product management for Adobe Firefly, told us that because those third-party models are not necessarily commercially safe, they’re mostly there for ideation purposes only. The platform labels assets with the model that created them, and Adobe partners must sign contracts to prevent them from training on user data, a pledge Adobe also makes itself, he said.
Koch told us it’s common for brands to use the array of models on offer to brainstorm and mock up concepts, then later redesign with a copyright-safe one. The alternative models do offer different aesthetics or strengths, like text generation or instruction-based editing.
“We’re finding a lot of times, people have internal agencies that come up with a campaign that’s all based around GenAI, and then right before they go to publish, their lawyers are like, ‘Hey, you can’t do this.’ So then they call us up and [say], ‘Hey, can you redo this in Firefly?’” Koch said.
Safety first: Amid a string of court battles between content creators and AI companies, the legality of AI trained on copyrighted material remains an open question. The fact that AI trained on non-permissioned works has become commonplace doesn’t mean businesses aren’t concerned about commercial safety, Koch said; if anything, they’ve gotten more skittish.
Professional creators and marketers are using generative AI, but it’s mostly for ideation—playing around with images and ideas that clients won’t ever actually see.
“The need for commercial safety, as people use it for production, is actually going up, but also just the comfort in using it for ideation, even when it’s not commercially safe, is also broadening,” Koch said.