“Writing should be respected and held to be nobler than all goods, unless she has suffered degradation in the brothel of the printing presses. She is a maiden with a pen, a harlot in print. Governed only by avaricious gain, will not that most base woman deserve the name of prostitute?”
In 1440 when the Gutenberg printing press was introduced, not everyone was a fan. Take Filippo de Strata (quoted above) who wrote an entire polemic tome to urge Italian nobility to banish the printing press to the fire heap. I mean, the guy outright called the machine a prostitute!
It is not unheard of that new technologies are met with a blend of excitement and fear.
Radio: “Radio is a highly complicated machine in the hands of people who know nothing about it.” Thomas Edison
The Internet: “The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works” Clifford Stoll, Newsweek Magazine
Now, let’s do Artificial Intelligence (AI): “It will mean that 95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly and at almost no cost be handled by the AI.” Sam Altman
There is a rightful discussion and welcome debate over where and how AI, and perhaps more specifically Generative AI (GenAI) can or should be unleashed…and where it should or must be constrained and restricted. In fairness, even Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, clarified his above quote by noting that GenAI and AI as a larger entity would reframe human creativity, not replace it. Since GenAI tools exploded onto the scene, there has been a blend of curious enthusiasm and cautious skepticism with a side of fear mongering as pundits wonder aloud just how many hard-working humans will lose their livelihoods in this rise of the machines.
After spending a week in Miami surrounded by artists, creatives and creators, I am happy to report that AI adoption and use has evolved beyond those early days of fear and misunderstanding. I would argue that artists and creators have embraced the debate and the tools, choosing to be active participants by contributing to the guardrails that protect intellectual and creative property while also unleashing their own wild human creativity in new and extraordinary ways. The electricity that ran through the Miami Beach Convention Center at Adobe MAX 2024 was more about what artists could do next in this age of AI as art and art with AI. If the machines rise, the consensus in Miami was that the artists and creators of the world were going to rise right along with them.
Some Standout Announcements
- Adobe Firefly Video Model is here and its gonna be a whole big thing. In beta, this newest member of the Firefly model family generates video from text and image prompts. It can smooth out transitions and even extend video clips. It also doesn’t hurt to have deep integrations with Premiere Pro so that video generation to editing and use is a smooth process. Generative Extend is a prime example, now available in beta in Premiere Pro. It extends video clips to cover gaps in footage and can even hold on a shot longer to enable perfect timing on pesky edits.
Keeping pace with video creation requests feels impossible for most marketing and creative teams. Video can be expensive, time consuming and operationally impossible to move along efficiently. But this is interestingly where Adobe seems to be focusing…at that key content supply chain bottle neck that can fester and disrupt the flow between creative ideation and content generation.
The introduction of the Firefly Video model is on its own an impressive announcement, but couple it with a brand new Frame.io and new device partnerships between Frame.io and the likes of Canon, Nikon and Leica to the Camera to Cloud ecosystem, video production as we know it is about to have a whole massive shakeup that makes video far more accessible, affordable and usable for marketing but easily extends to informal engagement hubs like HR, Sales and Service.
- The Adobe Firefly Image Models also keep improving with the introduction of Firefly Image Model 3 that doesn’t just look at generating more content aware and realistic images…it does it four times faster. That’s right…now you can generate in FAST MODE. And yes, every time I see the button to activate these faster generations, I can’t help but shout “FAST MOOOOOODE!!!!” with my hands cupped like a bullhorn.
A snappier model joins enhancements and improvements to Adobe’s Firefly Services and Custom Models for enterprise customers, making it is easy to see why enterprises are leaning into generating with Firefly for speed and for brand safety. With the focus on commercial readiness, these continuously improving models aren’t just focused on how good a generation can look…it also ensures that when you ask for an image of a woman drinking a soda, that the soda label isn’t a CocaPepsi or some other brand-infringing gaffe. Plus, with Custom Models, organizations can amplify safeguards by training the model on brand approved style guides and asset portfolios brining a new level of specificity to the generated assets.
- Adobe brought an impressive upgrade to the GenStudio line with GenStudio for Performance Marketing. GenStudio is the end-to-end set of Creative Cloud and Experience Cloud applications together. GenStudio for Performance Marketing is a self-service, GenAI forward solution designed to optimize content for specific performance driven initiatives. This connects the dots between creation and campaign deployment across paid campaigns or even marketing driven emails. Soon every resource involved in this content supply chain can activate campaigns and make real time, in-flight adjustments on everything from creative assets to deployment parameters in channels like paid social and even mobile. Imagine saying goodbye to that social ad campaign postmortem where the image or the video clip was to blame for poor performance…instead imagine a GenAI empowered process that can meet market and consumer demand for fresh content while also satisfying the business’ demand for optimized spend and performance.
- Project Concept just speaks to my marketing and agency exec soul. If tools like GenStudio are focused on the gaps in the launch and optimization stages of the content supply chain, tools like Project Concept rewind the tape BEFORE the very beginning and gives a collaborative home to the very initial stages of creativity, concepting and testing. Mood boards aren’t just for teenagers manifesting their perfect prom-posal. I often relied on crude mood boards cobbled together on PowerPoint slides to bring a visual center point to campaign and project concepts.
A good mood board can encapsulate the look AND actual feeling intended to be shared with a campaign’s audience. A GREAT mood board sticks in your memory not just for the campaign it spawned, but for the creativity NOT used yet. Exceptional mood boards are durable…home to a collection of images, attempted glyphs for logos and even early-stage illustrations that should be revisited. Mood boards are home to everything from colors and textures to styles and fonts. Creativity is not easy. But having tools that collect and bring order to artistic chaos can make the creative process a little bit easier. Project Concept is in its own earliest stages of iteration, just entering private beta, but expect to see this highly collaborative space for creativity to be ready for ideation soon.
Even with ALL that, it was a single tool…a single new feature…that earned the MAX live audience’s biggest, boldest, most unbridled cheer: Distraction Removal. Described as a “smart technology to help remove people, wires, poles and other distractions from images” it was the star of the show. It once again proves that for users, AI’s most potent magic is in the simple, usable and immediately valuable details.
Some Parting Thoughts
It is hard to walk away from Adobe MAX without a sense of awe at what creatives, artists and every day creators can dream up and express. While the tools and the announcements were impressive and signaled a significant commitment to an AI-powered roadmap that will continue to push Adobe and the experience market forward, the tools always pale in comparison to the people and the community on display.
AI is neither the prostitute printing press nor the creative job killer. It, like every innovative tool and instrument before it, is as powerful as the minds and the hearts of those who wield it. How you use it and how you fill it still requires that you make the first thought, the first idea…the first prompt. How the rest unfolds is up to you. Throughout the week, I had the chance to connect with creators who were all more than willing to share their creations, showing off art tucked into sketch books or stored on laptops and phones. This community is doing what it has done since the very first time artists got together in a town square: they share, they celebrate and then...they roll up their sleeves. What they will create next will only be limited by their imagination and not dictated by any technology or tool. And thanks to new AI tools that extend creative capabilities into more informal creative and engagement hubs, the community will get larger and welcome even more more creators.
For a more comprehensive list of announcements, read here.
There is also a MAX blog that highlights some of the announcements I’ve listed above, read here.
