Alexandru Costin is vice-president, AI generative and sensei at Adobe.
There was no moving from Firefly to Adobe Max London this year. Already infused in the Creative Cloud suite, the AI image and the video generator have been massively improved with new tools and features.
Before the events, we sat with Alexandru Costin, vice-president, AI generative and Sensei at Adobe, to explore what is new with Firefly, why stories count when using the best AI tools and how professionals can use it to improve creativity at all levels.
- What can AI users wait at Adobe Max?
At Max, we have the next generation of our image model, two versions of it. We have a vector model, we have the video model. Thus, a lot of progress on the model of Adobe, commercially safe, of high quality, an incredible human rendering. Lots of control and an excellent style engine, and this. We also introduce integrations of third -party models.
Our customers told us that they wanted to stay in our tools, in our workflows. They always use other models for ideation purposes or for different personalities. Thus, we announce the integration of OPENAI GPT images and the imagen of Google and Veo 2 in Firefly, and the integration of flows in fire cards.
The third big announcement is Firefly Boards is a new capacity in the Firefly web application. We consider it as an all-in-one platform so that creatives of next generation IDEATE, create and produce production content. Firefly Boards is an infinite canvas that allows team collaboration, real -time collaboration, comments, but also features of the deep generation AI intervening, in all these first party and third -party models, new capacities to remix images.
- Is it easy to deliver something like that?
It is not easy. We have been working on the project concept for a year. In fact, this underlying technology, we have been working for many years, such as real-time collaboration with deep integration, storage and innovation in user experiences Gen AI, remixing, automatic decoration images to create you prompts. There are many deep technologies that have entered it. It looks like magic, and is 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 favorite new feature?
My favorite feature is the integration between the image, the video and the rest of the Adobe products. We are trying to create workflows where customers who have an intention in mind, and they want to paint the image that is in their minds, can use these tools in a really connected way without having to jump so many hoops to tell their story. Firefly Image 4 offers incredible photo realism, a quality of human rendering, a quick understanding. You will quickly.
With Image 4 Ultra, which is our premium model, you can make your image with additional details, and we can take them to the Firefly video model as a huge key, and create a video from this image. Then you can take this video in Adobe Express and make it a lively banner, add text, add fonts. In Creative Cloud, we already have a lot of abilities that exist. We bring the AI generation in these workflows, either in Firefly on the web, or directly as API integration.
But for me, I think magic has it all accessible in an easy way. The Photoshop team also works on an agent interface. They call it a new action panel. You type what you want. We have 1000 high quality actions that we organized for you. There are all these tools in Photoshop which are sometimes difficult to discover if you are not an expert, but we will simply bring them and apply them for you. I mean, you will learn along the way, but you don’t need to know everything before you start. Not only do we help you reach your goal, but we also teach you the ins and outs of Photoshop during this.
- This must be one of the biggest obstacles to entry for many users
It is. It is too powerful to a certain extent. He has so many controls, he could be intimidating, but with the group of new actions, we want to remove a large part of this entrance barrier.
- To what extent is it important to you when it comes to reducing these obstacles to entry?
Everyone will benefit from this technology in different ways. For creation professionals, it will essentially eliminate part of boredom, so that they can focus on creativity. But with things like fire cards, they will be able to work much better with teams and customers. The customer can download in the plates of stylistic ideas, then you can take it and integrate it very quickly in your professional workload.
For consumers, with people who want to spend seconds to create something, with Firefly, you just type the invite and we do it for you. It is a great capacity.
In the middle, there are people who learn in their careers, as an aspiring of creative professionals, next generation creatives. And for them, we want to give them the two AI generation capacities, but also a bridge to the perfect existing tools on the pixels we have at Adobe. Because we think that a mixture of these two worlds is the best mixture whose creative next generation should be armed.
- Where can improvements be made in this area, which makes it more accessible?
For me, a great opportunity is a better understanding of humans, as a rapid understanding of the agency, having a creative partner to bounce ideas. Another thing we announce is the [upcoming] Firefly mobile application. This is a companion application that can use many Firefly application capacities, generate text, generate a video, and this. But also, because it is on mobile, you have access to the camera, you have a microphone, there are many new opportunities to facilitate these interactions. So we examine this. 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 to Firefly?
For us, customers are why we get up in the morning every day, they tell us what they need, and they told us they wanted more quality, better humans, more control, better stylization. This is what is behind the updates of the image model. We just want to make them more usable in more workflows for the use of actual production. Because our model is only positioned to be sure for commercial use, we want customers to use it everywhere.
For video, the video also increases and many of our customers do not know how to use the video product. So, making the creation of videos more accessible is another great accelerator for creativity. We want to offer a larger population of people the tools to exploit the video and be able to start achieving their goals there. Although, of course, inside products like first pro, we continue to integrate deeper and more advanced features, as a few weeks ago at NAB, we launched GENERATE EXTEND. He won one of the prices. Gen Extend is a 4K extension, allowing professional videographers to largely extend clips so that they do not have to remedy.
What motivates us is to help our customers tell stories, better stories, more diverse stories and to succeed in their careers.
- When everyone uses AI, how do artists and businesses differ from rivals?
I think that thanks to human creativity and engineering, how do they differentiate themselves today? They all use Photoshop. They find ways to differentiate themselves because, in reality, General AI is a designed tool, at least from a Adobe’s point of view, to be useful to the creative community, and we want to give them a more powerful tool that should help them to pay their profession.
They describe him as passing the publishing person with a creative director. All our customers can become directors of these Gen AI tools to help them tell better stories, tell stories faster, and Cetera. Thus, we believe that differentiation will always be in human creativity using the tool. And we see so much innovation. We see people using these technologies in a way in which we have not even thought, which is very exciting, always. Mix them in a new way. Because that’s how you differentiate. And we think there will always be many ways to express someone’s creativity.
We believe that creativity presents itself in various ways, and there are different tools that creative people will use and mix to tell better stories and change culture.
