Generating an image with Firefly directly in Bard by Google.

Adobe Firefly has received a massive response from content creators who, In the first month since its beta launch, generated more than 70 million images, making it one of the company’s most widely distributed betas in the company’s history. Firefly is a generative AI service created to output commercially viable, professional quality content.

Comprised of a line-up of new creative generative AI models, Adobe says they developed Firefly to align with its AI ethics principles of accountability, responsibility and transparency, so that the Firefly models would be focused on creators and safe for commercial use.

Firefly is designed to be embedded directly into creators’ workflows, including in Adobe’s own applications. Adobe’s most recent Firefly news is about a new integration with Bard by Google, and about the expansion of the company’s Content Authenticity Initiative.

Generative AI Partnership

Adobe and Google are partnering to integrate Firefly’s capabilities into Bard, a conversational generative artificial intelligence chatbot powered by Google’s large language model (LLM) LaMDA. Users will then have the option to continue working on the results that Bard generates, in Adobe Express.

Over the next period, Firefly will become the primary generative AI partner for Bard, supporting its text-to-image capabilities. The idea is that users of varying skill levels will be able to describe their vision to Bard in their own words to create Firefly generated images directly inside Bard, and then modify and use them to create designs using Express.

Ely Greenfield, CTO, Digital Media at Adobe sees the response to the Adobe Firefly beta as a demonstration of the potential of generative AI to inspire more people to create, showing a demand for a creator-centric, commercially viable approach. Sissie Hsiao, Vice President and GM of Assistant and Bard at Google, notes, “Generative AI has captured the world's attention and changed how we think about collaboration and productivity."

Firefly’s first model has been trained on Adobe Stock images, openly licensed content and public domain content where copyright has expired. Enterprise businesses will be able to train Firefly further with their own marketing collateral in order to generate content in the company’s brand language.

Integrating Firefly across Adobe Experience Cloud marketing applications means marketers can use Firefly to turn out content faster. For instance, automation makes it easier to manage assets at scale, and Adobe Firefly can support those assets with a continuous supply of variations.

From the Creator’s POV

Adobe and Google say they are approaching this partnership from a creator’s point of view. Adobe will use the Content Authenticity Initiative’s (CAI) open-source Content Credentials system to bring transparency to images generated through this integration. The CAI was founded by Adobe itself, which may or may not reassure users.

The Initiative is intended to help combat the threat of misinformation and ensure proper attribution for creators. It recognizes the opportunities and challenges resulting from AI-generated content and its own role in helping consumers make informed decisions about the content they are consuming.

The CAI’s members are a mix of technology and media companies, camera manufacturers, creative professionals, researchers, NGOs and others. Among its over 1,000 members, new to join are Universal Music Group (UMG), Stability AI and Spawning.ai. “As generative AI becomes more capable and prevalent, people need a way to tell what’s behind the content they’re consuming,” said Dana Rao, General Counsel and Chief Trust Officer at Adobe.

Content Credentials

Content Credentials are tools used to verify how a piece of content was created and modified, and play a role in ensuring people know whether a piece of content was created by a human, or was AI-generated or AI-edited.

Firefly applies the CAI’s Content Credentials by default. They are a free, open-source tool that can be used to show information such as name, date, the tools used to create an image and any edits made to that image. They remain associated with content wherever it is used, published or stored, enabling proper attribution and helping consumers make informed decisions about digital content. www.adobe.com