The “Creative co-pilot”/Midjourney competitor, (codename ‘Firefly’) has announced that more than 1,000,000,000 images were generated in 3 months. That is a big success for them. Also, Adobe’s sophisticated ‘art killer’ (as we define it) is expanding to more languages. Read on. 

The race for the prompt

According to Adobe, the standalone Firefly web service now supports text prompts in over 100 languages, empowering users to generate high-quality images, create stunning text effects, streamline workflows, and improve productivity in their language of choice. Additionally, Adobe plans to expand Firefly user interface localization to over 20 languages, with versions in French, German, Japanese, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese. Firefly has generated over one billion images since its launch over three months ago and is now integrated directly into Photoshop, Express, and Illustrator, with workflows marrying generative AI’s speed and ease with Creative Cloud’s power and precision. Adobe summarizes: “Users have already generated over one billion assets on the Firefly website and in Photoshop, making these two of Adobe’s most successful beta releases in the company’s history”.

What’s next? Premiere Pro?

For the readers of YMCinema, it’s not a secret that we define those prompt AI software as ‘Art Killers’. It’s time for lawyers to step in. As for Firefly, we’ll tell you what’s next. Firefly will be integrated into Premiere Pro. Then it will become the colorists’ killer. Imagine this: Instead of creating a LUT for film grain, all you will have to do is write this prompt: “Add grain to the blue sky, use Kodak Vision3 500T”. Here’re some other examples for prompts: “Apply the teal & orange look to the room, amplify the light coming from the window, add a bit of dramatic lighting, and correct skin tone accordantly”. Even the ‘Marvel Director’ Joe Russo claims that AI will engineer storytelling. Frightening!

Continuation of integration

Back to the news. Adobe claims that since its launch in March, Firefly has been integrated into Photoshop, Express, and Illustrator, helping customers build their creative confidence by removing the barriers between imagination and blank pages, and bringing even more precision, power, speed, and ease directly into Creative Cloud applications and workflows. “We’ve been amazed at how creators have been using Firefly to create more than a billion gorgeous images and text effects making it one of Adobe’s most successful betas ever in just over three months,” said Ely Greenfield, CTO, of Digital Media at Adobe. “The recent announcement is about making Firefly accessible to more people in their preferred languages, so they can continue to leverage our unique model to bring their imagination to life, and create the highest quality assets that are safe for commercial use”.

Adobe: “Create the highest quality assets that are safe for commercial use”

While Midjourney is based on the LAION-5B dataset which contains almost 6 Billion images accumulated from the web, Firefly is based on the Adobe Stock Photo, as explained by Adobe: “Adobe’s first model, trained on Adobe Stock images, openly licensed content and public domain content where the copyright has expired, will focus on images and text effects and is designed to generate content safe for commercial use. Adobe Stock’s hundreds of millions of professional-grade, licensed images are among the highest quality in the market and help ensure Firefly won’t generate content based on other people’s or brands’ IP”. Hence, as opposed to Midjourney, Firefly is ‘legal’ (?), but in our opinion, not less harmful to artists, and even more.

The ‘Do Not Train’ concept

Moreover, Adobe emphasizes that there’s a ‘Do Not Train’ Content Credentials tag in the image’s Content Credential for creators to request that their content isn’t used to train models. The Content Credentials tag will remain associated with the content wherever it is used, published, or stored. In addition, AI-generated content will be tagged accordingly. Additionally, according to Adobe, the dedicated service, Firefly for Enterprise, is designed to be commercially safe and Adobe plans to enable businesses to custom train Firefly with their own branded assets, generating content in the brand’s unique style and brand language. Firefly for Enterprise addresses the surging demand for digital content at scale and helps enterprises streamline and accelerate content creation while optimizing costs. The new company-wide offering enables every employee across an organization, at any creative skill level, to use Firefly to generate beautiful, on-brand, ready-to-share content that can be seamlessly edited in Express or Creative Cloud. Enterprises also have the opportunity to obtain an IP indemnity from Adobe for content generated by certain Firefly-powered workflows allowing them to deploy it across their organization with confidence.

Wrapping up

AI-generated imagery, based on training other images, will be one of the biggest threats to content creators. Firefly, which has been developed on the concept (and fear) of Midjourney, can be (and will be) further developed and implemented on Creative Cloud’s products and offer a comprehensive ‘business package’ for those who have zero knowledge of editing, color grading, and VFX-ing, and give them the power to create, based on other assets that were built by real artists.