Generative AI makes content creators faster and deal with challenges of creative process better, says Adobe

As Adobe made a major push towards integrating generative AI across its suite of apps last week by making several key announcements at its annual MAX conference, a senior company executive told India Today Tech that these new tools and features will not only make the creative professionals fast, but will also help them deal with the challenges of the creative process better. The idea is to accelerate the first few steps and provide artists with more time to work on other things.

"I guess the way you do things is a little bit different in terms of using text to prompts -- the whole prompting concept in itself is a faster motion than how people used to do things previously. It reduces hours of work when you think of things like Generative Expand where you just want to change the aspect ratio, earlier it would take hours, but now you can do it with a click. That saves a lot of time and now, you can work on other projects or other variations of the same project," Chandra Sinnathamby, Head, APAC, Document Cloud Solutions, Adobe told India Today Tech.

Adobe announced several new generative AI enhancements at MAX 2023 including new models as part of Firefly, Adobe’s generative AI imaging tool, while also adding new features to Lightroom, Illustrator and Adobe Express. The software giant has also introduced the capability to create vector images and design templates from text.

Sinnathamby said that all these new features have been introduced with the aim of providing creators with more tools to drive their creativity. He added that some of the recently announced AI tools by Adobe have been quickly adopted by users.

"What you saw at the MAX are the latest innovations that we are bringing. We have been in AI for the last 10 years but generative AI is the new subset and we have seen so much adoption. Generative Fill has been adopted 10 times faster than any of our product releases. So, we are seeing that these capabilities and tools are we are bringing really resonate with the creative professionals," he said.

While generative AI has seen a quick adoption and is being widely discussed, there is also a fear that it may take away creative jobs or change the nature of their jobs.

Sinnathamby told India Today Tech that AI is only helping professionals meet the demand by augmenting and helping creators do things faster. He said that in a country like India where about 60 per cent of the population is under the age of 35 years and uses smartphones as the primary way of engaging with everyone, consumerism is increasing and brands constantly want more content from creators.

"Brands not only need to engage with these audiences but also differentiate. So, all of that at the macro level is fuelling more demand for more content and producing as many creatives as demand. AI is just augmenting and helping creators do things faster, rather than try to replace them. In fact, I think we are freeing up with their bandwidth allowing them to address other issues," he said.

It's also interesting how some of these AI-driven tools can also help beginners and not just seasoned professionals, by iterating the initial process and providing them with a base to work with. It's like dealing with the writer's block, said Chandra.

"How do you address writer's block? You keep iterating, right? I think we have accelerated the iterating process. Look at what we did with text to image -- it gives you a starting point. If you an idea in your hand but don't know where to start, just use the text prompt. One, it accelerates the starting point. Two, it gives you multiple variations that you can just iterate fast," he added.

Adobe announced its generative AI tools called Firefly only this year and it has already been used to generate more than 3 billion images. That explains the company's heavy investment in more such models. It has already announced the Firefly Image 2 model, an updated version of the text-to-image tool. The new model is claimed to offer higher-quality renditions, providing better resolutions and better details in AI-generated images.