Prompts are so last month; Welcome to the Controls Era

One of the guiding lights behind Adobe’s AI strategy thinks we’re moving on from prompts and into something a whole lot more creative.

One of the most interesting presentations we saw at Adobe MAX came at the start of the Inspiration Keynote. This is always one of the signature communal events at MAX, and a look into the work and career of several high-profile users of Adobe’s tools. The clue is in the title, Inspiration, and we were particularly taken with Emmy award winning Motion Graphics Designer and Director Emonee LaRussa’s talk on how she builds value within herself as an artist and what is effectively work/life balance.

As she says: You need to implement non-work time in your day. A strictly delineated structure such as hers isn’t for everyone, and not everyone has the flexibility to manage their own time, but it’s an interesting topic, especially given what we are about to discuss next. Check it out from about 51:30 here.

But it was Scott Belsky’s opening remarks that we really want to highlight here. Belsky is very much an Adobe big cheese. He leads corporate strategy and development, is responsible for design across the Digital Media and Digital Experience businesses, and according to his company bio is ‘driving incubation’ of some of Adobe’s fastest growing emerging products. He is both Chief Strategy Officer and EVP, Design & Emerging Products, and thus a man with his finger in a wide variety of pies.

He might not actually know the future, but he has a good say in the direction it’s going in. He’s also been responsible for at least some of the recent past, and perhaps he has a few regrets about the way that some of that unfolded. 

“We are now two years into a new era of technology fuelled by, yes drinking game word AI,” he said. “Every day I see creative people who are exploring, experimenting and using this new technology to become more efficient and raise the ceiling on what is possible. Now, obviously there's still skepticism, and there are good and fair, open questions. But a few years into this revolution, the chapters are starting to reveal themselves.”

This is where it gets interesting. He calls the first chapter the Prompts Era and characterises it as the idea that anything can be summoned with just a few words in a prompt box. 

"I think we're going to look back on the prompts era and actually realize that it fell short, that it perhaps cheapened and undermined the craft of creative professionals and the ideas, judgment and taste honed over years and decades that you bring to your work” he says.

The good news is that we’re moving on, and rapidly too, into a new chapter that Belsky calls the Controls Era. 

“In the Controls Era, creators are at the center, fully in charge of what they produce with more options, not fewer. Controls don't replace what you do. They bring these new levers, knobs and chisels, and these controls provide more cycles of exploration to help you find better solutions.”

Belsky’s contention is that a lot of the more recent tools we’ve seen debut at MAX and in Creative Cloud in general in recent months are starting to flesh out this category.

“Until now, we've spent a majority of our creative time editing and endlessly iterating with very limited cycles for ideating to find the best solutions. But as this new era comes to fruition, we're all going to spend less time on this tedious final mile of production and more time on the core of creativity and exploring the full surface area of possibility and creating more and better work. That's what this second chapter of controls is all about. I believe AI will unlock a whole new category of creative exploration.”

We’ll see how it goes. Given all that has gone before, one would expect evolution to be rapid.

tl;dr

• Adobe's AI strategy is moving beyond prompts to a more creative phase called the Controls Era, where creators have more options and control over their work. 2
• Scott Belsky, a key figure at Adobe, believes that the previous Prompts Era fell short and undermined the craft of creative professionals.
• In the Controls Era, creators will spend less time on production and more time exploring the full potential of creativity, with AI unlocking new possibilities for creative exploration.
• Recent tools introduced by Adobe are seen as part of this new Controls Era, signaling a shift towards more creative freedom and exploration.