Sensei GenAI and Firefly: Adobe latest tech giant to embrace AI integrations

Adobe just announced its foray into generative artificial intelligence (AI) with its new Sensei GenAI and Adobe Firefly services.

The software giant is the latest tech company to get on the AI bandwagon.

Last week Microsoft launched 365 Copilot, which is powered by GTP-4. It is also currently trialling its new ChatGPT-powered Bing search engine. Salesforce, too, announced a partnership with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT to Slack.

And last month Google unveiled its own answer to ChatGPT: Google Bard. Unfortunately, the chatbot made a mistake during the presentation. This resulted in the share value of Google’s parent company Alphabet, drop by $100 billion at the time.

Adobe enters the chat in a bigger way

Now it’s Adobe’s turn, with the software giant debuting its Sensei GenAI product offering at its annual Adobe Summit in Las Vegas. These new services will be integrated directly into the Adobe Experience Cloud.

According to the business, SenSei GenAI utilises a variety of large language models (LLMs) such as Microsoft Azure, OpenAI and FLAN-T5 to address specific business needs.

Some of these will include copy generation for marketing, audience segment generation and caption generation.

Its premier product is Adobe Firefly, which offers creative generative AI models. It will initially be focused on image generation and text effects. It will be weaved directly into the Adobe Experience Cloud, Document Cloud, Creative Cloud and Express.

Firefly will allow users to use text to generate images, audio, videos and more. It can also be applied to existing creative tools in the ecosystem such as brushes and gradients.

In the future Firefly will also be made available via APIs for further workflow automations. It’s unclear which platforms it will be integrated with at the present time.

Transparency and artist protection with Adobe Firefly

While AI certainly has been the Web3 of 2023, Adobe has been quick to point to its history with the technology through the likes of Photoshop, Neural Filters, Content Aware in After Effects and more.

According to Adobe, it will be safe for commercial usage as Firefly has been trained on Adobe Stock images, as well as open license and public domain content.

Adobe touched on this during its keynote in Las Vegas on Wednesday morning, pointing to its Content Authenticity Initiative launched several years ago.

“We want people to get credit for what they create. So with generative AI, we’re going to make sure that all content created from firefly is marked as AI generated content — so people know what the origin of that content is,” David Wadhwani, president of Adobe’s digital media business, said during the keynote.

Adobe also stated that Firefly will not generate content based on other people’s or brands’ intellectual property.

This is important because as we’ve seen over the past few months, some apps such as Lensa have generated images based on art from databases that have scraped the work of real artists without their consent.

“We’re going to also announce the availability of a ‘do not train tag’, so if creative professionals want to create content that they don’t want Firefly to train on they can simply embed that tag in the content,” Wadhwani said.

The prospect of monetisation for creators was also brought up as a possible future initiative for Adobe.

“We recognise that all of this training content is really provided to us by contributors to Adobe Stock. So as Firefly goes into a commercial state, we will be announcing a lot more about how we’re planning that sharing the success of that, and making sure that contributors get compensated for their efforts.”

Adobe sees Sensei GenAI and Firefly as being of particular use to creative and marketing departments that are looking to improve on efficiencies. This was a particular focus in press releases and demonstrations during the keynote address.

“Experience-led growth and the ability to efficiently scale and personalise experiences across surfaces is key to unlocking sustainable profitability,” Anil Chakravarthy, president of Digital Experiences at Adobe, said in a statement.

“As the digital economy continues to expand and effective customer experience management remains an imperative, Adobe Experience Cloud offers every business a generative AI-powered co-pilot for more power, precision, and speed.”

Adobe Firefly is now available for beta registration and it will be granting users access over the coming weeks.

Adobe had a ton of other announcements, including Adobe Express for Enterprise. The company says it democratises creative development by allowing anyone to create content with the Adobe suite quickly, regardless of skill level.

It also revealed an industry-first ‘Content Supply Chain’ solution that connects a number of services across Adobe Creative Cloud and Experience Cloud, letting companies connect the planning, production, delivery, and analysis stages of a content journey.

We’ll be here for the rest of the week so keep your eyes peeled for more stories from the show floor.

The author travelled to Las Vegas as a guest of Adobe.