Adobe announces Firefly, its own image generation AI

Most large technology companies are rapidly adopting new AI technologies and are already starting to integrate them into the services they offer. Adobe, the biggest player in the creative space, has announced its AI called Firefly, which can generate images based on descriptions in a way not dissimilar to DALL-E, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, but as a new service in Beta, it doesn’t offer as good results as the competition, but it does have some advantages.

Adobe Firefly to be integrated directly into Creative Cloud software suite

Adobe says Firefly is not trained on images downloaded from the unlicensed Internet. All images that have been fed into its AI training are either unlicensed images or licensed images. Incidentally, the company promises to reward artists who contributed to the development of this AI model once the service comes out of beta.

What’s more, Firefly also allows you to make graphics that other AI models can’t. These are trained specifically to make new images, whether they mimic reality, or mimic other artistic styles in the area of painting, drawing or animation. Firefly, on the other hand, can also make text-like elements, with textures made based on a user description, over a font of the user’s choice.

Firefly is currently available to those who already have Adobe subscriptions, but soon it may require its own subscription. No announcements have been made about how much access to this AI might cost, but it will probably be integrated into one of the Creative Cloud photo creation packages.

Of course, the biggest advantage will be that Firefly will integrate directly with Adobe software like Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere or After Effects, so you can quickly go from iterating in image generation to editing them in professional software.

Disadvantages would be the quality of certain aspects of the generated images. In the case of human faces, this AI model is far behind the competition, but Adobe may not even have tried to train the algorithm too much in that direction, instead providing images with other features. It’s possible that over time, Adobe Firefly will evolve in this direction as well, to better compete with the alternatives on the market.