Adobe doesn't believe AI can replace human creativity. At least, the company really wants you to think that.
During my time at its Adobe Max annual creative conference last month, the message came up in every interview, on the showroom floor, during demos and literally within the first 10 minutes of the two keynotes. It's a smart message to deliver in front of a group of over 10,000 professional creators, who tend to view generative AI as anywhere from mildly annoying to an existential threat to their livelihood and the creative industry overall.
Adobe's CEO, Shantanu Narayen, took the stage and led the keynote with this message.
Generative AI is one of the most controversial topics in the industry, and professional creators have been pointing out all the reasons why AI cannot meaningfully replace them for years now. Even with Adobe's thoughtfully crafted caveat that AI isn't here to replace creators, the company is diving into the deep end with a plan for integrating AI across all its products. In the future Adobe is imagining, AI won't be a dirty word; it'll be the newest tool in professionals' arsenals. It's an idealistic future, to be sure, but it's one Adobe is committed to bringing to life, even if it's a steep uphill climb.
Generative AI at Adobe took off in 2023 with the introduction of its Firefly image generator and popular tools like generative fill in Photoshop. Its path here hasn't been totally error-free -- an unclear terms of service update this summer left people worried Adobe could scan every one of their projects, for one. Now, Adobe hopes to introduce a new kind of AI alongside its text-to-image tech, which is most popular in other AI products. The next generation of Adobe AI is focused on generative editing.
Adobe wants to use AI to supercharge the editing process rather than take over the entire creation journey. It's being selective about how it integrates AI, using it to solve common editing issues that require a lot of manual editing to fix. By focusing on these quality-of-life updates, Adobe is hoping to endear its creators with generative AI.
For some creators, Adobe's focus on convenience and problem-solving -- along with its safety protocols -- is great news. But many artists still have serious concerns about how generative AI is trained and used, and how its enormous impact on the creative industry is shaping it now and for years to come. And Adobe's commitment to AI only reignites those worries.
What's working for Adobe and AI
Adobe unveiled over 100 innovations in Creative Cloud at Max, and AI powers many of them. But it's more than behind-the-scenes technical upgrades -- Adobe is trying to use generative AI to eliminate creators' biggest pains. In Premiere Pro, video editors missing a few frames can use generative extend to create new clips and smooth out transitions. Photoshop's upgraded removal tool can erase distracting wires and cables in the background of a photograph within minutes. Illustrator's objects on path feature makes it easier to adjust elements aligned on a central arc or path. Lightroom's generative remove has better object detection and selection to remove photobombers and other intrusive elements.
Part of the appeal of Adobe's updates is that they are legitimate use cases for generative AI for professionals. This is markedly different from most AI art programs that are targeted at amateurs and non-artists -- professional photographers and illustrators can create better images than an AI image generator, after all. But simple edits like removing wires are annoying and eat up creators' time. Making it quicker to fix those kinds of errors is the goal of Adobe's AI, Stephen Nielson, senior director of product manager for Photoshop, told me.
"The stuff that was boring and tedious, we're like, let's speed that stuff up and make that easy so that you can spend more time being creative," said Nielson.
One of the first AI tools released was generative fill in Photoshop, which lets creators fill specific shapes or areas with AI-generated imagery. Now, generative fill is one of the most popular Photoshop tools, on par with the crop tool. Of the 11 billion images created using Adobe's AI model Firefly, 7 billion of them were generated in Photoshop. Put another way, an average of 23 million images a day are made using generative fill, Nielson said.
Deepa Subramaniam, vice president of Creative Cloud product marketing, said in an interview that this high usage proved Adobe was on the right track. "This stuff has really resonated well with customers so far," she said. "[It] really shows us that we're addressing something that our customers are really struggling with."
For some creators, that is true. "I think Adobe has done such a great job of integrating new tools to make the process easier," said Angel Acevedo, graphic designer and director of the apparel company God is a designer. "We saw stuff that's gonna streamline the whole process and make you a little bit more efficient and productive."
Adobe also hopes that by building this AI for professionals, it won't raise the typical red flags that other AI programs do. If it's integrated well, creators might be more inclined to take advantage of it, said Alexandru Costin, vice president of generative AI at Adobe.
"When we infuse existing workflows with gen AI, [creators] don't even care or know; they just love it. It does some more Adobe magic," said Costin. "It does make [creators] more open to use it because they see it's designed for them, and it's helping them, versus potentially disrupting them."
Creators also told me that they were pleased with the safeguards Adobe was trying to implement around AI. Adobe's AI models are only trained on Adobe Stock and other publicly licensed databases, not on users' content or pulled from the open web. Firefly is commercially safe, meaning creators own the images they generate and can use them in business. Firefly's upcoming video generation capabilities will make it the first publicly available commercially safe video model.
Adobe is also investing in better ways to help differentiate content created by AI, which is one of the biggest issues with AI-generated content. Recently Adobe launched a new Content Authenticity app for artists to create content credentials, a kind of digital signature that lets artists invisibly sign their work and disclose any AI used.
"It's important for images to be explicit in that they are AI-generated," said Erin Fong, a fine artist who uses Adobe for her marketing. "Information travels so fast these days … some people probably don't know AI can generate things like that."
Content credentials also let creators indicate that they don't want their work used to train AI models, a feature that garnered loud cheers in the keynote as creators continue to be concerned about protecting their work from data-hungry AI companies.
Still, AI concerns persist
Even though Adobe creators are excited about specific AI tools, they still have serious concerns about AI's overall impact on the industry.
"I think that people will see AI as a good starting point, but then as things look all the same over and over again, I think that people would be very fatigued with how it looks," said Natalie Andrewson, an illustrator and printmaker. "There's not going to be any fresh stuff."
This concern stems from the idea that eventually, AI-generated content will make up a large portion of training data, and the results will be AI slop -- wonky, erroneous or unusable images. The self-perpetuating cycle would eventually render the tools useless, and the quality of the results would be degraded. It's especially worrisome for artists who feel their unique styles are already being co-opted by generators, resulting in ongoing lawsuits over copyright infringement concerns.
It's a kind of balancing act, Acevedo said. If it makes your work faster, it's great. But you have to trust that the company isn't "taking stuff from other people and reappropriating it," said Acevedo.
"AI tools can either be used for evil or to steal stuff, but it can also be used for good, to make your process a lot more efficient," said Acevedo. "Some [AI] things are game changers, but I understand that with generative AI, it's controversial. There are other companies that are being a little suspicious as to how they're pulling stuff."
Another big concern with generative AI is potential job loss. There's no shortage of experts arguing about whether AI is capable of producing art, but artists have already lost jobs in favor of AI, especially in entry-level or freelance positions. Job experts predict that AI is likely to reduce the number of overall job opportunities as it gets better at automating more menial tasks. The concern for creatives is seeing their work potentially lumped in with those tasks.
Andrewson said she's also concerned about the role AI is playing in whether people choose to pursue art professionally. Art schools like the one she attended often come with high price tags, and the small art jobs she found to pay back her student loans "don't really exist anymore," she said.
"I'm hearing a lot of young people decide they're not going to be artists because it just doesn't feel like they can make a living from it anymore, which is such a bummer," she said. The possibility of "losing a generation of artists," as she put it, is worrisome.
Committing to AI and its chaos
The rapid adoption of generative AI has certainly created chaos inside and outside of the creative industry. Adobe has tried to mitigate some of the confusion and concerns that come with gen AI, but it clearly believes this is the way of the future.
"Generative AI is here, whether you like it or not. And it's not going away; it's only going to increase," said Nielson.
When a company like Adobe, the industry standard, makes that decision, it only makes that technology all the more ubiquitous and inevitable. Adobe sets the tone: By integrating gen AI into its products, even as strategically as it is, Adobe is ensuring that AI will be part of the future. Creators will have to master this new digital AI literacy, Costin said. The unspoken "or else" is that non-AI-savvy creators will be left behind.
No matter the path forward, Fong emphasizes the importance of remembering where AI-generated content comes from.
"We wouldn't have all of this AI everything if there weren't actual artists who were designing and uploading images, or if there weren't actual copywriters' writing to feed these models," said Fong. "It's really important to acknowledge that where the basis comes from is real people and their real ideas."