Adobe does not believe that AI can replace human creativity. At least, the company really wants you to believe that.

During my time with her Adobe Max Last month’s annual Creative Conference, the message came through in every interview, on the showroom floor, during demos, and literally in the first 10 minutes of the two keynotes. It’s a smart message to deliver to a group of over 10,000 professional creators who tend to view generative AI as anywhere from mildly annoying to an existential threat to their livelihoods and the creative industry in general.

Generative AI is one of the most controversial topics in the industry, and professional creators have outlined all the reasons why AI cannot significantly replace them for years. Even with Adobe’s caveat that AI isn’t here to replace creators, the company is diving right in with a plan to integrate AI into all of its products. In the future, Adobe envisions that AI will not be a dirty word; it will be the newest tool in the arsenals of professionals. It’s an idealistic future, to be sure, but it’s one that Adobe is committed to bringing to life, even if it’s a steep climb.

Adobe’s generative AI took off in 2023 with its introduction Firefly image generator and popular tools like generative fill in Photoshop. His path here has not been entirely error-free — a blur updating the terms of service this summer got people worried that Adobe might be scanning every single one of their projects. Now, Adobe hopes to introduce a new type of AI alongside its text-to-image technology, which is most popular in other AI products. The next generation of Adobe AI focuses on generative editing.

Adobe wants to use AI to supercharge the editing process rather than take over the entire creation journey. It’s selective in how it integrates AI, using it to solve common editing problems that require a lot of manual editing to solve. By focusing on these quality-of-life updates, Adobe hopes to endear its creators with generative AI.

For some creators, Adobe’s focus on convenience and problem solving — along with its security protocols — is great news. But many artists still have serious concerns about how generative AI is trained and used, and how its enormous impact on the creative industry is shaping it now and for years to come. And Adobe’s commitment to AI only reignites those worries.

What works for Adobe and AI

Adobe revealed over 100 innovations in Creative Cloud at Max, and AI is helping many of them. But it’s more than behind-the-scenes technical updates — Adobe is trying to use generative AI to eliminate creators’ biggest pain points. In Premiere Pro, video editors who are missing a few frames can use generative stretching to create new clips and smooth transitions. Photoshop’s updated removal tool can remove distracting wires and cables from the background of a photo in minutes. Illustrator’s Objects on Path feature makes it easy to adjust elements that align on an arc or center path. Lightroom generative elimination has better object detection and selection to eliminate photobombs and other intrusive elements.

Part of the appeal of Adobe’s updates is that they are legitimate use cases for generative AI for professionals. This is significantly different from most AI art programs that are aimed at amateurs and non-artists — professional photographers and illustrators can create better images than an AI image generator, after all. But simple edits like removing cables are annoying and time-consuming for creators. Making it faster to fix these types of errors is what Adobe’s AI is all about, Stephen Nielson, senior director of product management for Photoshop, told me.

“The things that were dull and boring, we say, let’s speed things up and make it easy so you can spend more time being creative,” Nielson said.

One of the first AI tools released was generative fill in Photoshop, which allows creators to fill specific shapes or areas with AI-generated images. Now, generative fill is one of the most popular Photoshop tools, on a par with the crop tool. Of the 11 billion images created using Adobe Firefly AI model7 billion of them were generated in Photoshop. In other words, an average of 23 million images per day are made using generative fill, Nielson said.

Deepa Subramaniam, vice president of Creative Cloud product marketing, said in an interview that this high usage proved that Adobe is on the right track. “These things have resonated very well with customers so far,” she said. “(It) really shows us that we’re addressing something that our customers are really struggling with.”

For some creators, that’s true. “I think Adobe has done such a great job of integrating new tools to make the process easier,” said Angel Acevedo, graphic designer and director of the apparel company. God is a designer. “I’ve seen things that will simplify the whole process and make you a little more efficient and productive.”

Adobe also hopes that by building this AI for professionals, it won’t raise the typical red flags that other AI programs do. If it’s well integrated, creators may be more inclined to take advantage of it, said Alexandru Costin, vice president of generative AI at Adobe.

“When we infuse existing workflows with kind of AI, (creators) don’t even care or know; they just love it. It does more Adobe magic,” Costin said. “It makes (creators) more open to using it because they see that it’s designed for them and helps them, versus the potential to disrupt them.”

Creators also told me they were happy with the safeguards Adobe was trying to implement around AI. Adobe AI models are trained only on Adobe Stock and other publicly licensed databases, not on user content or scraped from the open web. Firefly is commercially safe, meaning creators own the images they generate and can use them for business. Firefly’s next generation video capabilities will make it the first commercially available publicly available video model.

Adobe is also investing in better ways to help differentiate AI-generated content, which is one of the biggest problems with AI-generated content. Adobe recently launched a new web app for artists to create content credentialsa kind of digital signature that allows artists to invisibly sign their work and reveal any AI used.

“It’s important that the images are explicit because they’re generated by artificial intelligence,” said Erin Fong, a good artist which uses Adobe for its marketing. “Information travels so fast these days…some people probably don’t know that AI can generate things like this.”

Content credentials also allow creators to indicate that they don’t want their work used to train AI models, a feature that drew loud cheers in the keynote as creators continue to be concerned about protecting their work from companies of data-hungry AIs.

However, concerns about AI persist

Even though Adobe creators are excited about certain AI tools, they still have serious concerns about the overall impact of AI on the industry.

“I think people will see AI as a good starting point, but as things look the same over and over again, I think people would be very tired of the way they look,” said Natalie Andrewson, a illustrator and engraver. – There will be no new things.

This concern stems from the idea that eventually AI-generated content will make up a large part of the training data, and the results will be AI slop — erroneous, erroneous or unusable images. The self-perpetuating cycle would eventually render the tools useless and the quality of the results degraded. It’s especially troubling for artists who feel their unique styles are already being co-opted by generators, leading to ongoing lawsuits for copyright infringement concerns.

It’s kind of a balancing act, Acevedo said. If it makes your work faster, great. But you have to trust that the company isn’t “taking things from other people and repurposing them,” Acevedo said.

“AI tools can be used either for evil or to steal things, but they can also be used for good, to make your process much more efficient,” Acevedo said. “Some things (AI) are game-changers, but I understand that with generative AI, it’s controversial. There are other companies that are a little suspicious about how they pull things.”

Another big concern with generative AI is potential job loss. There is no shortage of experts arguing over whether AI is able to produce artbut artists have they have already lost their jobs in favor of artificial intelligence, especially in entry-level or freelance positions. Jobs experts predict that AI will likely reduce the number of general employment opportunities as you get better at automating easier tasks. The concern for creators is to see their work potentially mixed with those tasks.

Andrewson said she is also concerned about the role AI plays in whether people choose to pursue art professionally. Art schools like the one she attended often come with high prices, and the small art jobs she found to pay back her student loans “don’t really exist anymore,” she said.

“I hear a lot of young people decide they’re not going to be artists because they just don’t feel like they can make a living at it anymore, which is so disappointing,” she said. The possibility of “losing a generation of artists,” as she put it, is worrisome.

Commitment to AI and its chaos

The rapid adoption of generative AI has certainly created chaos inside and outside of the creative industry. Adobe has tried to alleviate some of the confusion and concerns that come with the AI ​​genre, but it clearly believes that this is the way of the future.

“Generative AI is here whether you like it or not. And it will not disappear; it’s only going to grow,” Nielson said.

When a company like Adobe, the industry standard, makes this decision, it makes that technology all the more ubiquitous and inevitable. Adobe sets the tone: By integrating the AI ​​genre into its products, however strategically, Adobe ensures that AI will be part of the future. Creators will need to master this new AI digital literacy, Costin said. The unspoken “or else” is that creators who don’t know AI will be left behind.

Regardless of which way to go, Fong stresses the importance of remembering where AI-generated content comes from.

“We wouldn’t have all this artificial intelligence if there weren’t artists designing and uploading images, or if there weren’t the actual writing of copywriters feeding these designs,” Fong said. “It’s really important to recognize that where the base comes from are real people and their real ideas.”