Adobe doubles down on all things AI at Adobe MAX

AI dominated the opening keynote at Adobe MAX in Miami, with the company setting out its optimistic view of the AI-powered creative future.

For all the misgivings about AI that many creatives have, every so often a feature comes along that even the most jaundiced and cynical of us can look at and go ‘Yeah, okay, that makes sense.’ And there was a cracking example of this on stage during the two hour long opening keynote of Adobe MAX in Miami.

It was part of Anna McNaught’s Photoshop demo where she was showing Photoshop’s new AI-powered wire/distraction removal tools. Pretty much she went from the pic below on the left to the pic below on the right with the touch of one button and a second or two of processing time. That is a seriously impressive tool that many of us would have lopped off at least a little finger for at some point in our creative lives.

Now you see it, now you don't...

It also very much reflects the message of the whole two plus hours. 

“We see generative AI as a tool for, not a replacement of, human creativity,” said Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen in his opening remarks. And he backed that up with a lot of data.

“A survey of our customers recently showed that the demand for content will increase 5x over the next two years, and this demand is already starting to have an impact. In fact, when we look at it, nine in 10 creative teams are reporting that they're hiring, and according to the US government's own projections, creative jobs will grow twice as fast as the economy overall in the decade ahead,” he said.

He acknowledges that jobs will change, but casts this in a positive light of repetitive tasks going down and all the genuinely creative tasks taking up more of your time.

“Your creative vision, your content, has never been more valued, and as study after study suggests what you do will evolve as employers are increasingly seeking people with creative vision and AI skills to bring everything in their head to life more quickly.”

It is of course, a contested vision. Adobe very much takes a utopian stance on AI and, at its own event, was not about to give stage room to dissenting voices and have a debate about it. But even AI skeptics have to admit that the way the company is going about implementing AI is genuinely different to most others in the space.

“We only train when we have permission,” said Narayen. "We compensate creators for training. We do not train on customer content. We do not scrape the internet.”

The number of AI innovations introduced is accelerating

David Wadhwani made a similar point forcefully when introducing the new Firefly Video Model.  

“The Firefly video model is the first publicly available video model designed to be safe for commercial use,” he said. “Let me say that again, the Firefly video model is the first publicly available video model designed to be commercially safe. Just like all the other Firefly models, it's only trained on content that we have the rights to use.

In other words, you can use this safely without worrying about the lawyers coming for you in the future. 

This is a good thing because Adobe is stuffing Adobe Intelligence (they’re not actually calling it that, yet, but we’re not sure Apple can trademark the phrase) into pretty much everything and everywhere. Whether you’re using the tools for simple procedures that would have been run by a bog-standard algorithm in the past, or really driving the generative AI features hard, AI is intricately wound into pretty much everything Adobe does nowadays.

“We want AI to further bridge the digital divide, not widen it,” said Narayen in his closing remarks. 

The key to selling that to its user-base, even the skeptical part, lies in enabling them to do more, better, and quicker.

Which is just what Sr. Quality Engineer and Animation Explorer Dacia Saenz demonstrated, tracking and removing objects (in this case dancing astronauts) from video in Premiere Pro with what was frankly ridiculous ease.

“Let's talk about those soon to be over days when we would sit at our computer trying to mask track hair,” she said, “and tears would be falling and we would be getting all of the carpal tunnels, probably a lot of coffee breaks… Oh my gosh, we’re not going to be able to have them very much longer. That’s a problem.”

Looks like we’re going to have to find a whole new reason to stand around drinking coffee fairly soon.