Creativity Gets an AI-Powered Boost in Adobe’s Latest Remix
We love it when artists take our logo for a spin. That’s why, with Adobe Remix, we invite our community to find their own interpretations of it. “It’s a way of connecting with our communities,” says John Caponi, senior creative director at Adobe.
For our latest round of Remix, we tapped Albania-based visual designer Vasjen Katro (aka Baugasm), and added a new ingredient to the process—artificial intelligence (AI). We asked Vasjen to experiment with style transfer technology powered by Adobe Sensei, our AI and machine learning framework and set of intelligent services. Style transfer technology lets artists apply the structure and detail of one image to the content of another. For example, you can transform a photo into the style of a famous painting.
“Vasjen is a highly experimental designer and was very engaged with the technology we proposed for his process,” says John. So he was the perfect choice to jump in with AI right away.
“I’m really inspired by sci-fi movies like ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and ‘Stranger Things,’ along with the vibe of 80s music,” Vasjen explains. “For this Remix, my idea was to mix everything together—to have an organic feeling of ink and oils and acrylic, but at the same time to be digital and have a sci-fi concept.”
Vasjen started by making sketches, then broke out the acrylic paints, a camera, and a prism. Once he’d captured photos, he moved through several stages with style transfer technology. Using a van Gogh painting as a reference, he created and refined the unique textures he applied to the final piece.
“It’s been so exciting to watch how Vasjen approached the project. He really used style transfer technology as a creative inspiration—it was a collaborative process. Then he’d add his own polish, and create in the way only he can,” says John. Vasjen refined and finished his work in Adobe Creative Cloud, using Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Adobe After Effects.
Vasjen got so deep into the process that he even created a video to go with his still image. “The video shows how the digital world mixes with the physical world—having the paintings in acrylics, then using style transfer technology powered by Adobe Sensei to digitize them and using a prism and light from the physical world and mixing that together with a 3D element,” says Vasjen. “I’m showing that creativity is happening, and energy that’s coming out of it.”
Where will creatives take AI?
With new AI tools like style transfer technology becoming available for creatives to use, we recently commissioned a qualitative research study to find out what creatives think about the impact of AI. Among more than 75 creative professionals in the U.S., U.K., and Germany, more than half told researchers that they’re interested in how AI can enhance their creative workflow. Overall, they agreed that creativity itself is a profoundly human ability, but that AI can help iterate, and most saw huge potential for AI as a virtual assistant.
Seventy-four percent of the creative professionals said they spend more than half their time on tedious, time-consuming, non-creative tasks, and they’d like AI to free up their time for creating instead. Eighty-nine percent are interested in a virtual AI assistant that could reduce drudgery, 81 percent would try AI to learn new features, and 77 percent would try AI for image searches.
After his explorations with Adobe Sensei, Vasjen is dreaming of more ways to use AI himself: “I see it as really convenient, especially in helping with tedious tasks that I’m not happy doing. I don’t want to do them, so why not have an assistant helping me crop a photo or figure out layers? I see it as a tool to create things more easily and faster—less time spent on tedious tasks is more time spent on creating or designing.”
Even further into the future, Vasjen is imagining the creative possibilities. “That’s the cool part about the possibilities of AI. It’s a tool, and it depends on what you give it; you’re not restricted to what it gives you. The question is, How can I use this tool to go beyond?”
To learn more, check out the amazing ways artists have remixed the Adobe logo, discover how Adobe Sensei is powering digital experiences, and get the details on the recent research about creatives and AI. You can also check out our Instagram story #AdobeRemix highlight on Vasjen, Behance, Create Magazine, and CMO.com.