Bringing the next wave of Artificial Intelligence to Creative Cloud

You type in “A pirate ship floating in the San Francisco Bay” and seconds later, images appear of a galleon with skull & crossbones sails, passing beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. The technology is called Generative Artificial Intelligence and it seems to translate your imagination to a computer screen.

Adobe, along with many other innovators, has been experimenting with Generative AI. It is a transformational technology, one that will accelerate the ways artists brainstorm and explore creative avenues — and make creativity accessible to millions more people.

At the same time, like a lot of new technologies, Generative AI has raised valid concerns. Among the questions: How is the work of creative people being used to train the AI models? And how will we know whether something we see was created by a human or a computer?

From the launch of Photoshop to the rise of 3D, Adobe has a 40-year history of helping lead the creative community through technological transformations in how we create. We are committed to helping lead this transition by implementing Generative AI in our tools in a way that empowers artists and opens creativity to new people, but never seeks to replace human imagination and judgment. And we are working with the creative and technological communities to ensure that Generative AI is developed with transparency.

Today, at Adobe MAX, we announced our approach to developing creator-centric Generative AI offerings by leveraging Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) standards and investing in new research to support creatives' control over their style and work.

The CAI is an Adobe-led initiative with more than 800 partners working to increase trust online. CAI’s open-source technology enables creators to securely attach provenance data to digital content, helping ensure that creators get credit for their work, and for those who view a piece of content understand who made it and how it was created and edited.

Generative AI that empowers creators

As impressive as early Generative AI is, the first models have, in some ways, cut out human beings. You give the AI your prompt and the machine generates some images. If you don’t like those images, you have to reword your prompt and hope you get something closer to what you want.

We are investing our research and product design talent to develop an approach that centers on the needs of creatives by integrating Generative AI in Adobe creative tools.

We’re still early in our journey, but let’s imagine, for instance, AI within Photoshop that generates rich, editable PSDs. The AI can generate a dozen different approaches and you can pick the two or three you want to explore further, using Photoshop’s full selection of tools to transform the AI-generated image into something that faithfully reflects your creative perspective.

Generative AI incorporated into Adobe Express will help less experienced creators achieve their unique goals. Rather than having to find a pre-made template to start a project with, Express users could generate a template through a prompt, and use Generative AI to add an object to the scene, or create a unique text effect based on their description. But they still will have full control — they can use all of the Adobe Express tools for editing images, changing colors, and adding fonts to create the flyer, poster, or social media post they imagine.

And while early Generative AI explorations have focused primarily on images, we believe the technology will help creatives working in all mediums — video, 3D design, texture creation, logo design, and more.

We see Generative AI as a hyper-competent creative assistant. It will multiply what creators can achieve by presenting new images and alternative approaches, but it can never replace what we value in art: human imagination, an idiosyncratic style, and a unique personal story. Creativity is ultimately a form of communication and what we value about art isn’t just the brushstrokes or colors — it’s the story and the human being who’s telling that story.

Responsible AI

Adobe has a history of leadership in the development of responsible AI. We spent several years devising standards for how to responsibly develop AI, and all the AI features we launched at this year’s Adobe MAX have been evaluated to ensure they meet those standards. In 2019, anticipating the potential for AI tools to be used to manipulate media in a way that distorts reality and creates misinformation, we launched the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI).

We are committed to incorporating CAI technology in our creative tools. The CAI standard will enable creators to show whether, and how, Generative AI technology was used to create a piece of content. As Generative AI becomes a bigger part of the creative process, we believe many viewers of content will be vitally interested in that information.

We also know that creative people want to exercise control over their style and work, and we’re committed to new research to support that goal.

Art has always been a mixture of craft and other qualities harder to define — style, judgment, and eye. The history of art is an unbroken series of technical innovations — the development of ceramic kilns, invention of oil paints, debut of digital photography — all of which accelerated these crafts. As craft becomes less of an obstacle, the role of the creator — their vision, story, and imagination — becomes more — not less — important. We believe the same will be true with Generative AI and we’re excited to develop AI tools that will help you express your personal vision.