Alexandru Costin is vice president, generative and sensei in adobe.
There was no escape from Firefly in Adobe Max London this year. Already infused in the Creative Cloud Suite, the Image and Videos generator AI has been massively updated with new tools and characteristics.
Before the events, we sit down with Alexandru Costin, vice president, generative and sensei in adobe, to explore what is new with Firefly, why stories are important when using the best AI tools and how professionals can use it to improve creativity throughout the Board.
- What can AI users expect in Adobe Max?
In Max, we have the next generation of our image model, two versions of it. We have a vector model, we have the video model. Therefore, great progress in the Adobe model, commercially safe, high quality, incredible human representation. A lot of control and a large style engine, etc. We are also introducing integrations of third -party models.
Our clients told us that they want to remain in our tools, in our workflows. They are still using other models for ideation purposes, or for different personalities. Then, we are announcing the integration of GPT images of Openai and Google’s Image and I see 2 in Firefly, and Flow integration into Firefly boards.
The third great announcement is Firefly Boards is a new capacity in the Firefly web application. We consider it a platform all in one for next generation creativity to iden, believe and produce production content. Firefly Boards is an infinite canvas that allows the collaboration of the team, the collaboration in real time, the comments, but also the characteristics of the generation of deep water intervening in all these models of third parties and third parties, new capabilities to remix images.
- How easy is it to deliver something like that?
It is not easy. We have been working on the concept of the project for a year. Actually, that underlying technology, we have been working for many years, such as real -time collaboration with deep integration, with storage and innovation in experiences of users of Gen AI, Remezclas, automatic description images to create the indications for you. There is a lot of deep technology that entered it. It seems magic and it’s very easy [to use]. We hope it is so easy. Our goal is to build a complex layer. So, for customers, it’s like magic, and everything works.
- What is your new favorite feature?
My favorite feature is the integration between image, video and the rest of adobe products. We are trying to build workflows where customers who have an intention in mind, and want to paint the image that is in their minds, can use these tools in a really connected way without having to jump through so many hoops to tell their story. Firefly Image 4 offers an amazing photographic realism, quality of human representation, rapid understanding. You fast itera.
With Image 4 Ultra, which is our Premium model, you can represent your image with additional details, and we can take them to the Firefly video model as a key picture, and create a video of all that image. Then you can take that video to Adobe Express and do it as an animated banner, add text, add sources. In Creative Cloud, we have many capabilities that already exist. We are bringing Gen AI within those workflows, either in Firefly on the web or directly as an API integration.
But for me, I think that magic is having all this accessible in an easy way. The Photoshop team is also working on an agent interface. They call it a panel of new actions. You write what you want. We have 1000 high quality shares that we have commissioned for you. There are all these tools in Photoshop that are sometimes difficult to discover if you are not an expert, but we are going to bring them and apply them for you. I mean, you will learn along the way, but you don’t need to know everything before starting. Not only are we helping you to achieve your goal, but we are also teaching you the fools of Photoshop as we advance.
- That must be one of the largest entry barriers to many users
It is too powerful to some extent. It has so many controls, it can be intimidating, but with the panel of new actions, we want to eliminate a large part of that entry barrier.
- How important is it for you when it comes to lowering those entry barriers?
All will benefit from this technology in different ways. For creative professionals, it will basically eliminate part of boredom, so that they can focus on creativity. But with things like Firefly boards, they can work with much better equipment and customers. The client can load some stylistic ideas in tables, and then he can take it and integrate it very quickly into his professional workload.
For consumers, with people who want to spend seconds to create something, with Firefly, only write the notice and do it for you. It is a great capacity.
In the middle, there are people who learn in their careers, aspiring creative professionals, next generation creativity. And for them, we want to give them both capabilities of Gen AI, but also a bridge to the existing pixels tools that we have in Adobe. Because we believe that a mixture of these two worlds is the best mixture with which next generation creatives must be armed.
- Where can more improvements be made in that area, making it more accessible?
For me, a great opportunity is a better understanding of humans, such as the rapid understanding of the agent, having a creative partner to bounce ideas. Another thing we are announcing is [upcoming] Firefly mobile application. This is a complementary application that can use many of the Firefly application capabilities, generate text, generate video, etc. But also, because it is on mobile devices, it has access to the camera, it has a microphone, there are many new opportunities to facilitate these interactions. So, we are investigating that. We believe that next generation creatives are a big target market for us because we want to give them the tools of trade.
- What is the motivation behind these new additions in Firefly?
For us, customers are the reason we get up in the morning every day, they tell us what they need, and they told us that they want more quality, better humans, more control, better stylization. That is what is behind the updates of the image model. We just want to make them more usable in more workflows for real production use cases. Because our model is uniquely positioned to be safe for commercial use, we want customers to use it everywhere.
For the video, the video is also growing, and many of our customer base do not know how to use the video product. So, making video creation more accessible is another great accelerator for creativity. We want to offer a larger population of people the tools to take advantage of the video and to begin to achieve their goals there. Although, of course, internal products such as Premiere Pro, we continue integrating deeper and more advanced characteristics, as a couple of weeks ago in NAB, we launch Generation Extend. He won one of the awards. Gen Extend is a 4K extension, which allows professional cameramen to basically expand clips so that they do not have to appear again.
What motivates us is to help our clients tell stories, better stories, more diverse stories and succeed in their careers.
- When everyone uses, how do artists and rivals companies differ?
I think through creativity and human engineering, how do they differ today? All are using Photoshop. They find ways to differentiate themselves because, in reality, Gen AI is a designed tool, at least from an adobe perspective, to be service to the creative community, and we want to give them a more powerful tool that should help them level their trade.
They are describing it as the edition of the person to a creative director. All our clients can become directors of these AI GEN tools to help tell better stories, tell stories faster, etc. Then, we believe that differentiation will continue in the creativity of the human using the tool. And we are seeing so much innovation. We are seeing people who use these technologies in a way that we have not even thought, which is very exciting, always. Mix them novel. Because this is like differences. And we believe that there will always be many ways to express someone’s creativity.
We believe that creativity comes in several ways, and there are different tools that creative people will use and mix to tell better stories and change culture.
