Generative AI has taken the world by storm in the past year. Tech companies have been falling over themselves — from Microsoft and Salesforce to Google — to keep up with the competition. It is not hard to see why: OpenAI’s revolutionary multimodal GPT-4 has given us a glimpse of the task-oriented efficiency that large language models (LLMs) can offer users.
Adobe is the latest software giant to enter the fray, looking to continue the theme of “doing more with less” by giving the marketing content industry its AI-powered shot in the arm with Firefly, its generative AI text-to-image creator — which, critically, is safe for commercial use. The company announced new generative AI services across Adobe Experience Cloud, its customer experience management platform, at the Adobe Summit 2023 in Las Vegas last month.
As the digital economy expands, Adobe’s digital experience president Anil Chakravarthy says the “business imperative” of profitable growth will come from connecting the complete end-to-end customer experience, from acquisition to engagement and retention. He believes the market has seen a generational shift in consumer behaviour in a digital-first direction, creating challenges and opportunities for brand marketers.
“The brands that manage to meet these demands will build a massive competitive advantage over the next few years,” says Chakravarthy. “By focusing on experiences that are fully digital, or digitally-enabled, [brands] will be able to do more with less.”
He adds that as content becomes the critical foundation of next-generation digital experiences, Adobe’s innovations can create profitable growth while maintaining the cost efficiency that businesses require with the help of generative AI — all without negating the role of creative minds in the marketing process.
Chakravarty continues: “Our latest Adobe Experience Cloud innovations uniquely connect customer experience creation and management, empowering brands to efficiently scale, unify and personalise digital experiences across surfaces, and achieve sustained, experience-led growth.”
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Lighting the path for marketers
Adobe Firefly is part of a series of new Adobe Sensei generative AI (GenAI) services across Adobe’s clouds. Sensei GenAI will leverage multiple LLMs, including ChatGPT, through the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and FLAN-T5, depending on the various needs of businesses. The product will serve as a co-pilot for marketers and other customer experience teams to help increase their productivity without increasing their workload, with use cases including copy generation for marketing, audience segment generation and caption generation.
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A series of new Adobe Sensei generative AI (GenAI) services across Adobe’s clouds will leverage multiple large language models, and includes its new Firefly model. Photo: Adobe
Adobe’s senior vice president for digital experience business Amit Ahuja says there has been an “incredible desire” for businesses to spend more efficiently on marketing products and connect productivity tools into existing workflows. He adds that Adobe has a long history of unlocking AI as a co-pilot for marketers and has a vision for generative AI that covers the full lifecycle of customer experience management.
Part of this vision includes the native integration of Adobe Firefly into Adobe Experience Cloud for businesses to generate content designed to be safe for commercial use.
Adobe’s first Firefly model is trained primarily on hundreds of millions of professional-grade Adobe Stock images, openly licensed content and public domain content where the copyright has expired. This helps ensure that Firefly does not generate content based on other people’s or brands’ intellectual property (IP), creating real business value in commercial settings with generative AI now being leveraged at the enterprise level.
“Customer experiences drive business growth, and generative AI is a transformative, foundational technology that will impact every aspect of how brands connect with their customers,” adds Ahuja.
While the first Firefly model will focus on images and text effects, Adobe says future models will leverage various assets, technology and training data from Adobe and others to generate various forms of content for brand marketing. As other models are implemented, the company says it will continue to maintain its commitment to the ethics of AI-generated content.
Credit and compensation
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Adobe’s verbal commitment to AI ethics includes its prioritisation of countering potential harmful bias and how the human creators who have contributed to Adobe Stock content, on which its Firefly model is trained, should be fairly credited and compensated.
“Content credentials are at the forefront of everything we want the creative community to do. We want people to get credit for what they create,” says digital media business president David Wadhwani, who unveiled images created by Firefly on stage at Adobe Summit 2023.
Adobe's David Wadhwani (centre) presents images created by the company's new generative AI model Firefly at Adobe Summit. Photo: Adobe
As part of Adobe’s Content Authenticity Initiative launched in 2019 with Twitter and The New York Times to promote credentials in content creation, Wadhwani says that the company has pledged to label all its AI-generated content to distinguish it from human-made content. He also shares that Adobe will allow creative professionals to block Firefly from training on their personally created materials by embedding a “do not train” tag in their work.
Adobe says it intends to build generative AI to enable customers to monetise their talents like it has done with Adobe Stock and Behance and is developing a compensation model for Adobe Stock contributors, with more details to come when Firefly is out of the beta stage.
“We recognise that all of this training content is provided to us by contributors to Adobe Stock. So as Firefly goes into a commercial state, we’ll be announcing a lot more on how we plan on sharing that success and ensuring that contributors get compensated for their efforts,” says Wadhwani.
He adds that the “creator-centric” approach to Firefly will increase productivity and creative expression for all creators, from high-end creative professionals to the long tail of the creator economy, and bring generative AI-powered “creative ingredients” directly into Adobe’s customers’ workflows through their contributions.
