Adobe Firefly: AI Art Generator | Hacker News Reader

Adobe Firefly: AI Art Generator

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908 pointsadrian_mrd483 comments

What this reinforces is that unlike with previous big innovations (cloud, iphone, etc), incumbents will not sit on their laurels with the AI wave. They are aggressively integrating it into their products which (1) provides a relatively cheap step function upgrade and (2) keeps the barrier high for startups to use AI as their wedge.

I attribute the speed at which incumbents are integrating AI into their products to a couple things:

* Whereas AI was a hand-wavey marketing term in the past, it's now the real deal and provides actual value to the end user.

* The technology and DX with integrating w/products from OpenAPI, SD, is good.

* AI and LLMs are capturing a lot of attention right now (as seen easily by how often they pop up on HN these days). It's in the zeigeist so you get a marketing boost for free.

I think you're missing a fundamental reason: adding AI functionality into products is simply easier.

That is, these companies are largely not doing the hard part, which is creating and training these models in the first place. The examples you gave of of cloud and iPhone have both huge capital barriers to entry, and in iPhones case other phone companies just didn't have the unique design talent combination of Jobs and Ive.

>That is, these companies are largely not doing the hard part, which is creating and training these models in the first place.

fyi, for Adobe Firefly, we are training or models. From the FAQ:

"What was the training data for Firefly?

Firefly was trained on Adobe Stock images, openly licensed content and public domain content, where copyright has expired."

https://firefly.adobe.com/faq

(I work for Adobe)

Adobe in particular, however, has been more twords the forefront of AI research. I'm pretty sure they aren't just using SD here. They might not even be using transformers at all. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35089661

That is, these companies are largely not doing the hard part, which is creating and training these models in the first place.

No, there is no real "hard part" to AI current. Training is simply "the expensive part".

It seems "the bitter lesson" has gone from reflection to paradigm[1] and with that as paradigm, the primary barrier to entering AI is cash for cpu cycles, other things matter but recipes is relatively simple and relatively available.

[1] http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

I don't think they missed it, their second point is that the DX (developer experience) is good.

> That is, these companies are largely not doing the hard part,

Are they the hard parts though? The short time it took from the first waves of public excitment around DALL-E to stable diffusion being the well established baseline looks more like the class quantity of problems that can be reliably solved by shoving enough resources at it. What I consider hard problems are those full of non-obvious dead ends are where no matter how much you invest, you might just dig yourself in deeper.

I think you are both correct

But this phrase from GP is pretty darn salient:

>>"They are aggressively integrating it into their products which (1) provides a relatively cheap step function upgrade and (2) keeps the barrier high for startups to use AI as their wedge."

Also missed: All these big tech companies were already invested in AI and using it in their products: it just happens that the latest batch of AI tools are far more impressive than their internal efforts.

Creating AI models has proven to simply be easier than other past innovations. Much lower barrier to entry, the knowledge seems to be spread pervasively within months of breakthroughs.

People seem to take offense at this idea, but the proof is in the pudding. Every week there's a new company with a new model coming out. What good did Google's "AI Talent" do for them when OpenAI leapfrogged them with only a few hundred people?

It's difficult to achieve high margins when barrier to entry is low. These AI companies are going to be moreso deflationary for society rather than high margin cash cows as the SaaS wave was

It's easier for large rich companies with infrastructure and datasets. It's very hard for small startups to build useful real world models from scratch, so you see most people building on top of SD and APIs, but that limits what you can build, for example it's very hard to build realistic photo editing on top of stable diffusion.

That's not really true though. 4 months on and no one else is close to matching the original ChatGPT.

It's too early to say how hard this is, for all we know no one but OpenAI will match it before 2024.

> * Whereas AI was a hand-wavey marketing term in the past, it's now the real deal and provides actual value to the end user.

Ehhh.... Sometimes. It's still a hand-wavey marketing term today. Almost every sales call I'm in either the prospect is asking about AI, or more likely the vendor is saying something like "We use our AI module to help you [do some function not at all related to AI]". Also, even when it's "real" AI (in the sense that we're talking about here), it's not always providing actual value to the end user. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't.

Yes, not everything AI is working out – never has, and never will. The same is true in any field. And yes, there will be a display of incompetence, delusion and outright fraud. Again, in any field, always.

However, with AI in general, we have very decidedly passed the point where it Works (image generation probably being the most obvious example of it)

Even if, starting now, the underlying technology did not improve in the slightest, while adoption rises as it is going to with any new technology that provides value, anyone who does not adopt is going to be increasingly uncompetitive. It quite simply is too good already, to not to be used to challenge what a lot of average humans are paid to do in these fields.

Like a toothbrush with “AI” that tells you when you’ve brushed enough

> I attribute the speed at which incumbents are integrating AI into their products to a couple things

And also it's something many companies have been working on for a big part of the last decade. Kevin Kelly in particular has been talking about it for at least the past 7 years. In 2016 he released a book titled "The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future" and the addition of AI to everything is covered in that book.

Another point is that many of the incumbents have seen the trend for far longer than the general public, and had time to gather inhouse talent. For example this isn't Adobe's first stint into generative AI, back in 2016 they announced (and quietly dropped after the backlash) Adobe VoCo, "photoshop for voice".

Right? Adobe was first to market with properly integrated AI-based photo editing features with stuff like Content Aware Fill back in 2015 iirc.

This is a great point. It appears the success of OpenAPI has validated their approach, specifically around (1) using the web as a training set and (2) using transformers.

I imagine a lot conversations with in-house AI folks is around deploying these methods.

I attribute it more to open source and free plugins into existing Adobe products like Photoshop.

People are already using these plugins to do inpainting etc with Stable Diffusion. Adobe is trying to provide official support simply to keep up.

To me, the most novel thing is the data source being free of licensing concerns.

But that, too, will be eroded as more models appear based on datasets with straightforward licensing for derived works.

Image stock collections (and prior deals around them) seem more valuable now than they did before all this.

> * Whereas AI was a hand-wavey marketing term in the past, it's now the real deal and provides actual value to the end user.

The skeptic in me thinks it's more:

* The market is rewarding companies for doing X (integrating AI), so companies are doing X (integrating AI).

Song as old as time.

It's important to note that this is generative AI.

As pretty much everyone on HN is aware, AI is a broad term for a variety of technologies.

AI has been in our everyday lives for quite some time, but not in a way that generated (no pun intended) such buzz.

Having my iphone scan emails and pre-populate my calendar with invite suggestions is far less newsworthy as the ability to generate a script for an Avengers film where all the members are as in articulate as the Incredible Hulk.

If anything, with generative AI being so buzzy, this latest round of AI integration is more marketing.

I can’t think of a company more suited to take advantage of the generative AI hype. If firefly is built into the adobe stack you’ll have a rather elegant composition and refinement toolkit to modify anything you dislike about the generative output.

> They are aggressively integrating it into their products

And no reason to suspect that it won't spectacularly backfire. Not that they're integrating (or more correctly slapping it on with some hot glue) transformative technology they barely understand into legacy products which are themselves likely to go defunct. Why even use a spreadsheet when you can get GPT-4 to write a whole data analysis pipeline and summarize everything? Or why bother with word documents when GPT-4 can generate, spell/grammar check, translate (if necessary), format and output into any format you want?

From a practical perspective, because of inertia and all managers seemingly being "burned once, twice shy" on re-designs.

If my company already uses spreadsheets and teams of people skilled at manipulating them, it might not be very hard to convince my manager that good AI use cases (quick formatting, intelligent auto-completes, intention detection from sheet structure) could probably speed us up by 20% - but convincing management of the value of a full system re-design by comparison would likely be a very tough sell, if not viewed as an insult or sign that I'm not a team player.

Just because the future may prove these methods antiquated doesn't mean management is liable or likely to change their tune today.

I think the other thing driving this is the market / investors.

Companies have to get involved in this field because it's all the buzz, while everything else you said is true, this means companies have no choice to get involved.

If someone like Adobe, google etc, doesn't get into the game, they are sure going to be a lot of questions on there next investment / financial calls.

The incumbents need to keep up appearances and not look like they are behind / unaware of AI, else investors will be worried that they will simply be sidelined/replaced at some point in the future.

Except for Chat GPT I havent yet seen super impressive implementations. Dall-e, codepilots, text to speech etc. are still all not good enough to use for more then playing around.

However this landingpage looks amazing.

Any good other tips?

Midjourney v5 might be ready for prime time, in most cases it seems to have solved faces, hands, etc. The difference between version 1 from exactly one year ago and v5 now is rather striking: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...

This is effectively DALLE-2 (apparently retrained on different data) with a native frontend designed by experienced designers.

You don't see the value in effectively not needing any art/design skills to make aesthetically pleasing logos/mockups/memes? Even just for "playing around" - I bet there's a large market of people who want to add "fun edits" to their existing personal photo library.

Focus less on landing pages and more on the implications a technology brings. Then you'll see where things are headed.

> “incumbents will not sit on their laurels with the AI wave.”

Yes, because they are already technology companies who understand tech. In the disruptive times of the Internet, then iPhone (mobile Internet), the companies being disrupted were not tech companies, so they didn’t know how to catch up.

This time this is a massive tech improvement, but in a market already saturated by key tech power players who are in prime position to implement these improvements into their existing competitive advantage.

Exactly this. This makes will eventually make it difficult for new AI startups, once those existing solutions get technically up to speed, if they can't differentiate in a meaningful way.

My own startup is https://inventai.xyz. Subscriptions aren't ready, so you can't actually generate anything yet, just trying to move quickly.

I think what we're going to see is that all the small startups going for big, broad ideas ("we do AI writing for anything", "your one-stop marketing content automation platform", etc) are going to flat out lose to the big companies. I predict that the startups we'll see survive are the ones that find tight niches and solve for prompt engineering and UX around a very specific problem.

> unlike with previous big innovations (cloud, iphone, etc), incumbents will not sit on their laurels with the AI wave

Adobe had a whole bunch of smart people including Dave Abrahams helping transition to iPhone and iPad, and to build for the cloud, so I'm not sure what you're thinking here.

> unlike with previous big innovations (cloud, iphone, etc), incumbents will not sit on their laurels with the AI wave

Wasn’t “cloud” also added to major products? Even Adobe relies on that heavily. Similarly, most big companies (including Adobe) offer an App Store app.

Let’s just take this moment to declare that AI did not turn out to be the next 3D hype.

That’s something I almost forgot about. This was not a forgone conclusion - there was a pretty big divide between people who thought AI would have real value and staying power and those that didnt.

> It's in the zeigeist so you get a marketing boost for free.

I never thought about it that way, but now that you mention it, it makes so much sense.

Startups? Cloud and mobile were not spearheaded by startups but by megacorporations.

Iphone?

Didn't the incumbents come together for Android as a group?

From that page's FAQs:

> trained on a dataset of Adobe Stock, along with openly licensed work and public domain content where copyright has expired

> We do not train on any Creative Cloud subscribers’ personal content. For Adobe Stock contributors, the content is part of the Firefly training dataset, in accordance with Stock Contributor license agreements. The first model did not train on Behance.

Not sure what "first model" means there.

Also interesting: https://helpx.adobe.com/stock/contributor/help/firefly-faq-f...

> During the beta phase of Adobe Firefly, any Adobe Firefly generated assets cannot be used for commercial purposes.

> Can I opt [my Adobe Stock content] of the dataset training?

> No, there is no option to opt-out of data set training for content submitted to Stock. However, Adobe is continuing to explore the possibility of an opt-out.

From Adobe's reddit post[1]: > We are developing a compensation model for Stock contributors. More info on that when we release

If they can properly compensate the stock contributors based on usage then I think this is a very fair approach.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/photoshop/comments/11xgft4/discussi...

I didn't see this before I posted, but I'm glad that's the case. In fact, it might be great for contributors that don't have a large library or aren't ranked as well.

with ai image generation the value of stock imagery in terms of licensing out to third parties approaches zero. On the other hand, in terms of its contribution to training a model, the image value also approaches zero on a per image basis.

I dont have any confidence they can create a fair compensation method.

Still on the fence for whether or not you should be able to opt out of training (I'm sure many artists would love to "opt out" of humans looking at their art if the human intends to, or might, copy the artists' style at some point).

hi, I'm an artist, I do not give a shit about other humans looking at my work, I am delighted when a younger pro comes to me and thanks me for what they learnt from my work. That tells me they were fascinated enough with it to look at it and analyze it again and again. I made a connection with them via my drawing skills.

I am catastrophically unhappy at the prospect of a corporation ingesting a copy of my work and stuffing it into a for-profit machine without my permission. If my work ends up significantly influencing a generated image you love, nobody will ever know. You will never become a fan of my work through this. You will never contribute to my Patreon. You will never run into me at a convention and tell me how influential my work was to something in your life. Instead, the corporation will get another few pennies, and that is all.

As a fellow artist, I can kind of see where you are coming from. I've had my art copied in several places, nobody ever asked for permission and probably nobody knows I did it. Nor will. I've seen my work in memes, Doom mods, promotional posters and even ads. It's harsh, but it's naive to expect a reward, the world doesn't work like that in practice. And that's human fault and has happened way before AI imaging was even considered a possibility. Look at how many "classic" artists only became known by chance (and posthumously), despite the quality of their output.

Also, if anything, being included in a training set means you are already notorious. The big ones are usually trained on stock art or famous professionals/classics, and the ones trained by random people are going to use quality filters to get the best images of a specific subject. If you aren't already notorious, you simply will not make it into a set. The other possible motivation is spite, but that'll only happen if you participate in internet slapfights.

And...Patreon? Fans? Influence? "younger PRO" (so a non-pro doesn't count even if they are trying their best?) I sincerely recommend you choose sentences more carefully. Makes you sound phony and using art as a social strategy. When there's so much talk about art and its "soul" you really don't want to make yourself sound like art is a mere means to an end or you risk making the cold, calculating machine seem "purer".

Personally, art should be its own goal. I had plenty of time to stomach one isn't entitled to anything just because effort, so I just want to make my art better. And saves me from the trouble of chasing trends to stay relevant.

I'm an artist as well. I think this can happen whenever anyone sees your art anywhere online. They can copy it. They won't tell you about it. They might copy it really well. And they might copy not just your technical style, but what your art says and how it says it.

Honestly having worked as an artist and illustrator for a long time I'm kinda relaxed when it comes to this.

companies stealing your work isn't a thing that just happened to become possible because AI can make it easier to imitate. The real world scenario is much rather: _they just steal your existing work_

ever since I've been publishing my own illustrations I've always ran an image search on the stuff I've got on my homepage once or twice a year, and almost every time i did this I've found multiple individuals or companies who just used my illustrations for something without ever contacting me.

On the other hand, if my style was ever to become known and sought after enough for people prompting AIs with my name, I'm pretty confident that this would mean that:

A) I've grown big enough to have more inquiries than i could serve anyway and

B) The ones doing this are neither people or companies I'd liked to have as clients, nor would they have booked my services for the price I ask if it weren't for AI.

Big agencies with interesting clients couldn't allow themselves to risk their reputation with faking original work, and other large corporations that just don't give a fuck because they are ready to litigate if i challenge their usage are likely to have such reach that they'll end up still contributing to the desirability of my original artwork if they appropriate it. And the smaller ones, they fulfill premise B) on the one hand and would also feed the hype.

So I truly feel what actually bothers you, forever I've been drawing first and foremost because i want to inspire people to express themselves and make experience the same experiences I've had when loosing myself in a drawing. And i do think the bittersweetness of imaging AI remains that while some people will gain the confidence to DO try to express themselves creatively, others will at the same time never want to seek achieving this by their own physical skill and raw will.

But when it comes to myself and my art, I actually see only benefit and progression, regardless of what current dystopic scenarios might manifest :)

It's not like 90% of the work available to human commercial artists would even be there in the future with these developments...

Most customers currently paying an artist will just slap some quick AI stuff and call it a day.

Big customers might still make it a matter of prestige or pride or "quality" differentiator to use "real human art" from some famous graphic designers, but that is like 1/1000 of the commercial gigs going on today.

Do you think Rembrandt know his fans? Until Renaissance, artist don't even signed their work.

We are making huge steps to promoting ourselves in last decades.

Is there a license that exists that you could put on your work to prevent its use in model training?

It's not quite the same... And I'm not sure how people on HN of all places are failing to grasp that these algorithms aren't sentinet, much less people.

I think this is incredibly cool technology, but using other people's property without their consent is stealing (I'm not talking about legality, but morality here).

The second reason why it's not the same is that people can't look at X million pictures and become proficient in thousands of different art styles. So, again its not legality but more about ethics.

I guess different people have lower moral standards than others, and that's always been part of the human condition.

With all that out of the way, I think artists won't get replaced, because these tools don't really produce anything... Substantial on their own. An artist still needs to compose them to tell a story. So, all this nonsense about how it will replace artists is misguided. It can only replace some parts of an artist's workflow.

I know there was an art competition where someone won with a piece that was AI-aided, but honestly it looked like colour sludge. The only thing that was really well executed in it was the drama created by the contrast from sharp changes in values near the centre of that work, and something vaguely resembling a humanoid silhouette against it. You could've called it abstract art if you squinted.

I'm curious, do you hold the same beliefs about text?

Do you think ChatGPT should not be allowed to read books and join ideas across them without paying the original authors for their contribution to the thought?

But these stock image artists provided consent when signing a contract and selling their work to Adobe. The contract is pretty clear that you basically don't own the work anymore and Adobe can do whatever they want with it.

If you don't like it, don't sign the contract.

> thousands of different art styles

Are you saying all those art styles are original? They are not. Artists influence artists. Sometimes the influence is strong, other times just a glimmer.

Perhaps the burden of responsibility shouldn't be on Ai machine learning, but the human prompt author who chooses the instruction: "...in the style of Jo Blow". Who owns the ethical dilemma in that case? Who is being unfair to Jo Blow in that case? I'm quite certain whoever wrote the prompt is 100% responsible.

"I guess different people have lower moral standards than others, and that's always been part of the human condition."

Instead of lower morality, I'd say it's selective morality.

I bet quite a few artists (rightfully) feeling threatened by this phenomenon would have absolutely no problem watching a pirated movie, using an ad blocker, read paywall-stripped articles, the like....whilst this is principally the same thing: taking the work of others without consent or compensation.

> I'm sure many artists would love to "opt out" of humans looking at their art if the human intends to, or might, copy the artists' style at some point

I’m pretty sure that would be a death knell for art. Where are these mythical artists who have never looked at anyone else’s art?

It's the same problem with fake copies of Van Gogh and so forth, except historically those fakes were produced at a much slower rate because of the time needed to master the skills to produce those fakes. With modern tools, those fakes could be mass produced, while the original artists are still alive.

I can train a LORA on my own PC in less than an hour. Good luck opting out of that.

What does that matter? Generate as much as you want for your own personal reasons.

It's about actually being able to use that content legally (and commercially) that matters to most in this conversation.

I can trivially torrent movies at home also. But then going out and selling them is widely accepted as being "wrong".

Should Github Copilot be trained on private, closed-source, proprietary code?

Yes, AI should be trained on every piece of information possible. Am I allowed to become a better programmer by looking at private, (illegally leaked) closed-source, proprietary code?

> trained on a dataset of Adobe Stock, along with openly licensed work and public domain content where copyright has expired

As someone who has contributed stock to Adobe Stock I'm not sure how I feel about this. I'm sure they have language in their TOS that covers this, but I'm guessing all contributors will see nothing out of this. Fine if this is free forever, but this is Adobe.

It's also worth considering is that there are quite a number of fraudulent images on Adobe Stock, which means that the Firefly dataset without a doubt contains some amount of unlicensed material.

LLM-based AI is tech's equivalent of mortgage-backed securities. Lump in the bad stuff with the legitimate, hope no one notices, and when they do, blame the inherent black-box nature of the product.

I strongly suggest everyone to read this: https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/06/is-adobe-using-your-photos...

I hope it's fair to say that they do train on your work.

We dont. More info here:

>The insights obtained through content analysis will not be used to re-create your content or lead to identifying any personal information.

https://helpx.adobe.com/manage-account/using/machine-learnin...

Thanks for the response. This and the proposed compensation for stock contributions demonstrate that you are taking the right and correct path.

I hope you do continue doing so. I'm all but disappointed in others' approaches in this area, and it paints a very bad image for the potential of AI as tools.

I would not be surprised if behind the scenes they are starting the lobbying engine to safely mine whatever they want. The universe of existing content out there is simply too enticing and out there. This is Google Search vs authors all over again.

speaking of Adobe and AI I really hope they would somehow make finding useful help in their help system somehow possible. It is an endless labyrinth with an almost useful but usually ruined item in each dead end.

Adobe employee, not in Creative Cloud.

We got access to this in beta a week ago and it was an instant hit across the whole company.

This is just the tip of the iceberg and there is a lot of really cool, in-house products around generative AI. The team is going to great lengths to make this ethical and fair (try and generate a photo of a copyrighted character like Hello Kitty or Darth Vader). I'm excited to see the final product of all the internal work that has been going on for so long.

> The team is going to great lengths to make this ethical and fair (try and generate a photo of a copyrighted character like Hello Kitty or Darth Vader)

are you saying it won't work? if that's the case, that seems really silly. actually, it goes against everything I believe in (as well as my understanding of even the kindest meaning of the word "hacker"). it drives me up the wall, it makes my blood boil

who is going to stop me from drawing hello kitty myself?

it's not the tool's job to regulate my creativity. the law exists to regulate the use of my art, not the act of creating the art. I can draw hello kitty all I want and leave it in my drawer, if it floats my boat

limiting the tool just makes me never want to use it. you're like Sony fighting digital music in the 2000s. the future is right in front of you but you just can't see it.

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GP works for Adobe, and Adobe's bread and butter are the professional creators who would love a world where there is hardware DRM on your eyes and you can't even see their creations or a likeness of them without paying a royalty (and one to "rent" the memories of the visualization, not to "own" the memories like we do now). While I largely agree with you, the GP post is exactly what I would expect from an Adobe person.

I forgot for a second that this Adobe, the top stories on HN about Adobe are almost all negative

> "it's not the tool's job to regulate my creativity. the law exists to regulate the use of my art, not the act of creating the art. I can draw hello kitty all I want and leave it in my drawer, if it floats my boat"

This is very well said. Thank you!

And you good sir are the few types of people who keep my sanity in check. thanks for calling out the tyrants :) - they are terrible and just like the kings of old want constant praise and their rings kissed for the blessing of imposing serfdom to all but their chosen nobility

I think there is a broader phenomenon in the society for complete disregard for law/order and taking it in their own hands. Enabled by Big Tech and giant ESG corporations, this is a method of sideskirting written laws, constitution, the judicial process and force feeding the public with an authoritarian whip. It is anything but 'democratic' hiding under ostensibly kind causes such as safety, climate, misinformation, etc.

It's not a good look for the tech industry and the ESG corporate culture. It is destroying the very hacker culture that made them.

> "the law exists to regulate the use of my art, not the act of creating the art"

Thanks airstrike, for dropping this truth bomb.

And just like that, Adobe expands its ministry of creativity powers. In the beginning, it was dollar bills on the no-can-do list. Now it's pictures of Darth Vader and hello kitty.

This runs into the core problem with technology--we answer "What can we do" before "Should we do it" and "What are the impacts"

Let's say you take your hello kitty dot art, and make a poster promoting a commercial event. You then take it to FedEx Kinkos and use a self-service copy machine to make 1000 copies. You could reasonable argue that you are violation of copyright infringement, and the photocopier / FedEx kinkos isn't.

Now instead, you have AI generate a poster, and it generates a very similar image to hello-kitty. It's arguably so similar than a reasonable person would say it's a copy. You take that poster and again make 1000 copies. Is there copyright infringement? If so, who if anyone, is liable for damages?

Whoever put the poster up for display and reaped some reward out of it is liable for damages. Everyone else is just doing their job in the supply chain. We want supply chains to work for the good of the economy, which is a proxy for increasing availability and reducing prices of "goods and services" to the average person.

> This runs into the core problem with technology--we answer "What can we do" before "Should we do it" and "What are the impacts"

The counter is always, “Well, we can see our way forward to doing it, which means someone else can also do it. So… we better beat them to the punch.”

Reminds me of the recent chatgpt GPT4 virtue signaling in the update notes: "Now AI will refuse more prompts, so it safer" - Yeah this was requested by exactly 0 real human beings (lawyers and politicians excluded of course)

I hate limitations as much as the next person, but these tools are viewed as generators by company xyz. You don’t want Disney to sue Adobe because the tool can circumvent IP and abuse it.

“Draw a Disney logo but for adults”

That image now lives on Adobe.com

> You don’t want Disney to sue Adobe

No, you don’t want Disney to sue Adobe.

What if I draw the logo with a regular 2B pencil?

I want to see Disney sue Faber-Castell for making great pencils I used for my deviant art

Also IANAL but even then there's probably fair use rights in parodying their logo

There will be open source tools replicating this within months. You can build your own model based on billions of images on the web or use someone else's or contribute to one.

To expand on this, what we're seeing with LLaMa is that you can fine-tune your model using other models.

It's not clear that the quality will be exactly the same (in fact it will very likely be worse), but working generators are essentially ways to quickly generate training data. And I can't think of a legal argument for why generated output from a model would be less legal to use as training data than an unlicensed photo off of DeviantArt.

Nobody has really called out OpenAI on this, but OpenAI has a clause in it's TOS that you won't use output to build a competing model. But that's... just in it's TOS. If you don't have an OpenAI account, it's not immediately clear to me (IANAL) why you can't use any of the leaked training sets that other people have generated with ChatGPT to help align a commercial model.

Certainly if someone makes the argument that generators like Copilot/Midjourney aren't violating copyright by learning from their sources, it's very hard to make the argument that Midjourney/Copilot output is somehow different than that and their output can't be used to help generate training datasets.

O_o If you wanna draw hello kitty go for it.

You just have to, you know, draw it.

“How dare you not let me copy your stuff for free woth zero effort!”

… entitled much?

hello kitty is not "their stuff"?

"draw it" in this context means "use AI to draw it for you"

am I being entitled or are they acting like they are The Law?

> The team is going to great lengths to make this ethical and fair (try and generate a photo of a copyrighted character like Hello Kitty or Darth Vader).

imagine doing something as unethical as drawing hello kitty

I know why, but why do you guys make your subscription management such an awful experience for users? I used to like Adobe, now I hate the company and will go as far as suffering massive inconvenience to avoid Adobe products.

Last time I canceled a subscription (can't do it through your website, only by talking to support) when I finally got in touch with someone it took several hours to actually convince them to cancel.

One of the great aspects of open-source stable diffusion (civitai.com et al.) is there's a model for every purpose.

Does your inpainting model work with every style? Or is it going to have trouble matching the content for e.g. specific fanart?

It would have trouble matching on trademarked styles, or individual artists / creators styles.

One of the primary goals for Firefly is to provide a model that can generate output that respects creators and is safe for commercial use.

(I work for Adobe)

I don't really understand the negative comments on this. Though a hacker by heart, I'm a designer first and foremost

And I'm extremely eager to get my hands on AI tools that let me extend my capacities based on _my own_ styles & context, and that is focused enough on this scope to evade future legal obstacles when used in production

Very excited to try this tool!

I understand the intent but the result will clearly sway in the direction of protecting big brands, artists, and individual styles. There’s simply no way that it couldn’t. At some point in the pipeline, there’s a blocklist for copyrighted works of a finite size that’s decided by employees, no?

So that means it would have trouble matching my style, too.

Sounds like a good way of making it useless or otherwise 100X less useful than Stable Diffusion.

is civitai.com literally just 90% japanese porn?

You can hide NSFW stuff, and apparently they’re going to implement a way to hide anime.

Hey open-paren, do you know if the videos on this page are high fidelity mock ups or a demo of the current working beta?

From the wording on the page it sounds like these may be mockups:

> With the beta version of the first Firefly model, you can use everyday language to generate extraordinary new content. Looking forward, Firefly has the potential to do much, much more. Explore the possibilities below.

> Imagine generating custom vectors, brushes, and textures from just a few words or even a sketch. We plan to build this into Firefly.

> We’re exploring the potential of text-based video editing with Firefly.

> Get ready to create unique posters, banners, social posts, and more with a simple text prompt. With Firefly, the plan is to do this and more.

> In the future, we hope to enable Firefly to do amazing work with 3D.

The upscaling example is 100% just a downsampled image. Really makes you question the rest of the demos.

Please provide some insight into why you believe that to be the case. Avoid spreading FUD without any substantive backing of your claims.

What if you need to generate a picture of Hello Kitty for an article someone is writing about the art style of Hello Kitty or something? I.E. Fair Use cases.

Copy it? Use a different image generator?

This is just one tool. It doesn't need to be fully general.

Interesting that the large company AI products (this, Microsoft copilot, etc) are so much more compelling than any of the startups I’ve seen.

Makes me think that we haven’t seen what true innovation looks like in this space. Right now, AI is a feature, not a product.

Edit: Not talking about the models themselves (stability, mid journey, GPT-x), talking about what is built on those models.

I would consider both Stable Diffusion and MidJourney to be startups and both are better by far than the established companies like OpenAI, and there are dozens of LLMs soon catching up with GPT3/4. As you say, it will be a very interesting next 6-12 months..

I played around (till free account expired) with MidJourney and what one can produce out of blue is mind-boggling. Indie devs can with a bit of effort generate much of their art via this for peanuts (the only problem may be consistency from what I've seen, basically every image is like from another artist, even in same batch)

The biggest problem is that you can't do much if not conditioning the generation with your prompt and maybe image embeddings, if you are an indie dev you would probably find much more useful Stable Diffusion.

If you control the --chaos --stylize and --seed then you can get more consistent results.

Dall-E is still ahead of the competition for some tasks. Midjourney has a very polished look but it lacks the depth of understanding that Dall-E can manage. I regularly hit prompts that I need to jump into Dall-E for.

For playing around, sure. For serious work though you probably need control-net in some way, otherwise you end up with a bunch of images which are great on their own but make no sense together.

Yeah, but text understanding is just one part of the "product" in this space nowadays. If you look at all the modes and features a GUI around SD can do now (like AUTOMATIC1111's) and compare to what you can do at the DALLE2 webpage it's night and day.

Stable Diffusion is a thing you can run on your computer for free and train models for. It's from a research university. Is this one of those more expansive definitions of startup?

I wouldnt consider stable diffusion, mid journey and Open AI products. Little bit too low level, they seem to be more platforms that the products are built on. Not to say they aren’t amazing, just that the productized versions (one level up) are being executed really well by the big companies.

> AI is a feature, not a product

Part of the reason for this is that very often the best applications of AI are really invisible to the user, making everything a little bit better, quietly behind the scenes.

The same is true for software in general. The best software products automate loads of stuff behind the scenes so from the user perspective they just click a button and the thing they want to happen, happens.

Perhaps the most successful and important AI product is a great example of this: the spam filter. I bet most younger email users don't even realize how much value this old AI tool provides them unseen.

But the trouble is making effective AI products is not "sexy" right now, and if your team ships one it won't get any credit in a big company. I've had my PM instantly shoot down plenty of interesting applications of AI that wouldn't be very visible to the customer or larger product-org.

I don't fundamentally disagree, but if spam filters are "AI" then my bloody toaster is also artificially intelligent.

You must have a smarter toaster than I do. My toaster is a completely deterministic mechanism that knows nothing about my past toasting experience, nor makes any inference about future toast.

A spam filter:

- Is provided historic information about the problem

- Learns from this information to construct a basic model of language

- Is then provided unseen information

- Then makes a probabilistic decision based on a degree of uncertainty.

The exact model behind the spam filtering can be extremely simple (naive Bayes) but could easily (and probably will without you even realizing it) expand to include things like GPT.

A spam filter is making decisions under uncertainty with new information based on patterns it learned from previous information. If this doesn't fit your definition of "AI" then I think if you understood what was happening under the hood I don't think you would consider GPT to be AI either.

If you toaster does learn your toast preference over time from your toasting behavior (unlike mine) then I would consider that AI as well.

Isn’t almost everything on this page concept stuff though? Seems like the only thing they’re shipping is text to image and the results they show look pretty underwhelming.

Seems like all these big companies are pushing amazing looking concept videos more than anything.

Yeah, I thought it was funny that most of the page is "in the future...". Guess they're trying to get attention for the product before it's ready and gauge interest/response.

Microsoft is just licensing their technology from OpenAI, which is still a small company, if not still a startup.

ChatGPT is not nearly as good of a product as what was demoed by Microsoft if you want to make that comparison.

Not talking about LLMs/underlying model. I don’t think adobe makes their own either. Talking about the interface to it.

> Interesting that the large company AI products (this, Microsoft copilot, etc) are so much more compelling than any of the startups I’ve seen.

This is an indicative signal. It's amazing how easily it is ignored.

> Makes me think that we haven’t seen what true innovation looks like in this space.

It's interesting that a bunch of product add-ons could be considered "innovation" in the first place.

In Adobe's case, it absolutely makes sense it would be a feature of Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere. They've been adding various "smart" masking features and the like over time already.

Adobe has lost any good sentiment I had for them with their forced subscriptions and dark patterns. I use their products begrudgingly, it’s a sunk cost fallacy from decades of muscle memory.

My reaction to seeing any announcement from them is, yeah whatever Adobe.

Agreed. Adobe has lost my complete trust and I've learned to avoid their tools. I honestly don't know what they can do to win me back. They're a damaged brand.

Agreed. Greedy company, no longer associated with cool creators. I hope people start to move away from their products.

I'm surprised so much good sentiment in this thread as I honestly don't think I ever met anyone who hasn't had a great distate for this company. The first thing that came to my head when I read the headline - oh no, can we not have Adobe stink up this party?

Once you get stranglehold of the market place, you can pretty much do whatever you want. Adobe... Microsoft... Apple... Google... all pulling the same lever.

At least with all of those (except Adobe!!) you can cancel your subscription using the same interface you bought the subscription on!

What’s interesting to me is how this only works because of prior art.

BUT, when prior art will be AI-assisted if not 99% generated art, from a pool of prior human art ever so slowly diminishing… where is this going?

For one, "art" can only lessen in value. Perhaps physical art will grow in value as digital art’s "made by without AI" tag becomes unprovable and meaningless.

I think it’s bad. Whomever provides these tools is not refilling the pool of prior human art, only muddying it up. Therefore everything will converge. It was quite obvious already the way eg. most webapps nowadays have the same boring design… but this is worse.

But I don’t know it must be the inevitable evolution, perhaps this is how we will end our differences… as human’s "collective mind" becomes more and more evident.

As an accelerationist, I can see an upside. Human culture has been in decline for decades, with mainstream art (of all kinds) rapidly declining in creativity and value. There are always exceptions, but I think this was and is the trend.

This AI trend will turn our attention back to what it truly means to be an artist. From the muddy waters of AI art will shine the true works of art that only humans are capable of producing. This will raise the barrier to entry and increase true arts value. This imo will be a good thing.

Humans are still picking the AI-generated images they like, so there is still human input.

Also most AI art that is published is retouched and edited. Until it's not of course.

> I think it’s bad. Whomever provides these tools is not refilling the pool of prior human art, only muddying it up.

What's the worst that can happen? AI art becomes too boring? That will just benefit human artists who can do something new and interesting.

Online art getting "muddied up" with AI art is only a problem for companies seeking to train a new model. But I trust they'll figure it out just fine.

This could be a problem but it seems to like Adobe and other stock image owner may be in a better position to deal with it than companies scanning things from the open net.

Lots of arts/craft are kept alive because they form the basis for more automated processes and this may well continue with simple painting and photography.

Think about manual art, as the part that kick starts the compiler. Rust can compile itself, but you had to build the first compiler with C.

Art was done with Pencils, or Adobe Photoshop. Now, it's done with an AI. It's all random bits but to the humans visualizing them.

Obviously requires an Adobe account, which hints at it being folded into their subscription pricing. I wonder if this is a customer retention move given the number of third-party plugins to use Dall-E, SD, Midjourney, etc. with Photoshop.

(I also wonder who is powering this or if it's an in-house solution -- that should be telling...)

Edit: Why, they've trained this on Adobe stock images. OK, this may be very interesting for publications worried about copyright.

Their blog about their methodology[1] implies to me it's an in-house solution. They also talk at length about maintaining provenance, ethics, and transparency. I found it a much more informative read than the product announcement.

[1] https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/03/21/responsible-inn...

Actually, when signing up for the waitlist, they don't ask for your Adobe account.

it's only a matter of time i'm sure. I don't think you can use any adobe product today without Adobe Creative Cloud™

> I don't think you can use any adobe product today without Adobe Creative Cloud

The Elements versions of Photoshop and Premiere are paid for with a one-off purchase and are not part of a cloud subscription.

I use Creative Cloud photoshop but a while ago purchased a separate Premiere Elements license for video editing - this was cheaper than extending my CC subscription to include Premiere Pro. But I switched to (the awesome) Davinci Resolve for video editing when my copy of Premiere elements wasn't able to open video clips from just-released cameras and phones.

There are a variety of consumer products (and Adobe Reader) that are still non-subscription. There also subsets of Creative Cloud. But, yes, this will presumably be part of their subscriptions at some point.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35247630 points to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35089661 from Adobe Research. Maybe it's based on that?

This will supercharge artists, it won’t replace them because details matter and when you need to get it just right, you cannot just keep rolling the dice by “prompting better”

Agreed.

I think it will decrease iteration time during an exploration phase for new artists or when you're not quite sure what you want and want to explore your idea space more quickly (and maybe even get new ideas as you iterate).

It's similar with these coding AIs. A lot of the time it's great for the "blank page" phase of a project where you have to do all the "boring" stuff out of the way. Another great example (I think it was a blog post here) where the AI recommended a method the author didn't know about that yielded a crazy performance boost.

I tried to get some help from copilot on writing a shader the other day, and it was really an amazing experience. One still needs to have a pretty deep understanding of what needs to be done to use these tools.

I imagine it's similar for writers. Maybe they want some help to reword a sentence to be more succinct, but the ideas will still come from their heads.

I can't predict if this will one day be so sophisticated that you can have it do both low level and high level "thinking" when exploring ideas, but if that day comes I don't think it will mean an end to jobs, just that some jobs will become more accessible, or that it won't be so much about nitty-gritty work and more about higher level idea-level work (which to me sound good, not bad).

Obviously there's people who enjoy the nitty gritty (as a developer, and amateur painter who does enjoythe process), and I don't think that will fully go away, just become more of a creative/artisan field maybe. Who knows, though? I may be way off, but I don't think it's as bleak as some people fear.

As a writer, I find ChatGPT can provide some vaguely useful scaffolding. On the other hand, I'm not someone who finds a blank page especially difficult to start writing on--and, in fact, I generally want to start off with something non-formulaic to draw a reader in. Still I can see it being helpful in a way that automated spellchecking and grammar checking is.

Im a generalist who has been trying to kick an obsessive habit of perusing tech news and trying new/old tech for 8 years. You made me realize that may be one reason I feel like this tool i have just enough depth in many areas that I’m able to scrutinize the output and it’s making up for the lack of depth all over the place.

Yes, but by "supercharging" artists, each artist will be able to do more, which means fewer artists will be needed.

Maybe, maybe not.

For instance, I'd like to make a game. But I don't have enough money to even hire an artist to help with concept art. So I don't get to the point where I can raise money off that art, and hire an artist to make game assets.

Now I can generate all the concept art I want for free, and I can raise money off of that (wallets open faster with pretty pictures than with words). What am I going to do with it? Hire artists! They will probably be better at using AI art generators than I am, and they have the skills to actually work with the generated results, unlike me.

Except now you’re competing for the attention and disposable income of everybody else doing that. How are consumers going to tell your stuff apart from all the other AI placeholder games that will flood the market?

That artists will be able to do more not necessarily mean that fewer of them will ne needed. I bet the opposite actually. Companies will want to produce more (with more resources) not the same (with less resources).

But do the companies actually need more art?

I guess a better way to rephrase that: would it make them more profitable to produce more art? Or to keep producing the same amount but paying fewer people to do so?

This is completely ignoring the thousands, maybe millions, of non-notorious artists that do their art, in whatever form, because it's fun, because it allows them to express themselves or as a creative outlet or as a mere hobby to unwind after a hard day of work.

Honestly, I'm an artist myself. I'm competent enough to be reposted and plagiarized (to my amusement) in places, and I have influenced people with my designs or style, even unwillingly. I mean, I can say anything on the internets, but I've been through all of the "artist's phases of grief" and nobody can take that from me.

Let's humor this thought for the sake of discussion: What if, maybe, just maybe, the artists that get replaced by an stable diffusion instance...deserve to be replaced?

People keeps talking business and not enough people is talking about ART. Something which is baffling to me as an artist. A lot of artists have a lot of technical skill obtained through grinding (and learning from others) but have zero passion to improve further or have any real distinctive traits to stand out. It's double baffling coming from places such as Hacker News, where a majority, being tech workers, know that you need to keep improving and recycling yourself to stay relevant to employers. We know that pressure very well. You think art is not a competitive field? Every day 10 people can just pop out of nowhere to compete in your niche and take your audience away, with a much lower barrier of entry. That other person just needs their art to look good, no need for qualifications. Some people are just gifted, too.

If your art stagnates and all you do is sexy ladies for overblown prices, then, yes, you failed to keep up and someone else will replace you. If it was not the AI, it would have been another human being, as always.

Besides, corporate entities usually use custom photographs with photogenic actors, carefully staged for maximum engagement, or generic, parametric, inclusive-yet-bland art in the lines of Alegria. The whole notion of megacorps purposely stealing from indie artists (when their models are usually curated, or going to have to be curated for maximum advertiser friendliness, and a lot of indies draw cheesecake because it's what people commissions...) paints a pretty tale of David vs Goliath, but it's completely absurd in practice. And the risk of some random dude "stealing" your style has existed always.

The AI can have pretty dark uses in the wrong hands, but a lot of the situations described say more about the lack of passion or excess of ego of the one crying foul, than actual reality. And, take it from an artist, we do have an issue with inflated egos. All of this sounds to me like a huge case of "Do not steal", when making it into any huge training set in any significant capacity should be a badge of honor to wear. If even The Algorithm© recognizes the value of your art then you are already pretty well established anyway. I really can't wrap my head around the strange perspective of other artists.

People should really put all those strong emotions onto the canvas instead of internet kerfuffles, is what I'm saying.

There are interfaces where you can not just "prompt better" but change the image with a tool like Photoshop and then feed that back into the diffusion model.

Also there are people who really don't care about quality. There have always been different tiers of art: it's one thing to have clip art for a throwaway blog post (royalty free stock), it's another thing to base a marketing campaign around images (rights managed stock) because you don't to have all your competitors choose the same image.

https://cxl.com/blog/stock-photography-vs-real-photos-cant-u...

The bottom feeders will be very happy to accept the problems of A.I. art and in fact you might not have the embarrassing dogpiling problem that the above blog post describes.

Not everyone requires “just right” though. There are no wrong answers in art.

Although in this case, it’s an adobe product, the only people who will use it are artists.

I actually find the artwork/design generative AI a lot more interesting than the text. (Don't really have an opinion on the code generation.) While it's obviously early days, something like Stable Diffusion can, with a bit of work, generate artwork that neither I (nor I assume the vast bulk of the population) could. On the other hand, the text it generates might pass muster for content farms or a starting point for a human editor familiar with the topic but certainly isn't producing anything I could use out of the box.

I wonder what happens over time as more and more workflows use AI generated content as the starting point? Will all images slowly start looking the same?

ControlNet has entered the chat.

At this point someone is going to make a startup off just managing your AI waitlists. (Kidding)

There were/are airdrop farmers doing that in the crypto space

Airdrops can be very lucrative (5, 6 figures with market depth supported by VCs allowing easy conversion to cash)

So tempted to throw GPT4 at this problem and launch it today.

Will there be a waitlist?

Of course, that would be at least 50% of the joke! haha

I found the little sketch-to-vector-variations part interesting and surprising- this is something that is solidly not done via a diffusion model unlike everything else shown. Although I note it says "We plan to build this into Firefly" implying that... this isn't something already finished.

I imagine this would use "in the style of a line drawing" prompts under the hood to produce line-esque raster images suitable for vectorization, with the resulting vectorized images being what's shown to the user.

That was also my first instinct, but is vectorization from a line sketch really that smooth and reliable now, though? It has been some time since I've used modern tools, but last I tried any raster-to-vector on line drawings that weren't super basic, the results left a lot to be desired. Jittery, under- or over-fit, etc.

I’m intrigued as well, but especially with regards to how it would perform in the real world given that I’ve also observed that diffusion models aren’t great with vectors.

I suspect the example they used might have been cherry-picked

How long do we think this "big company gates access to an impressive AI model" moment will last?

I wonder if generative models will become such a commodity that they cease to be a revenue driver or differentiator.

There will be moats around training data (Adobe probably has huge amounts of high-quality training data that isn’t available to the public), and around fine-tuning for specific fields. The more specialized the application, the less of a commodity it will be.

And it remains to be seen how long it will take until there is an open-source model on the level of GPT-4. It may be harder than many expect, and the commercial offerings may be on yet another level by then.

Exactly, and the moats largely boil down to: "Why is there no Open Source replacing for Google Search?"

Big AI's advantage is still being made. Every time a user hits "Feedback" they're fine-tuning this proprietary model. You can absolutely make an Open Source model with enough compute, but if it is only e.g. "95%" good relative to the paid one at "97%" or "98%" are you going to prioritize it? How many of you use Google because it is 2% better than Bing for example?

If it's 95% as good and it can be rolled into every product at basically zero cost, then yeah, the paid version will die.

There are plenty of proprietary technologies that are better than say Postgres, or JPEG, or JSON. And some businesses need that marginal edge. But if the open source option is free, standardized, has great tooling, and is 95% as good, that's a real problem for OpenAI and their peers.

This is cute and all for creating one-off, in distinct, stylized images. But what if I want to illustrate say a children’s book with generated images?

dall-e for example never gets faces right and good luck trying to have the same character look the same between generated images. Feeding it a seed image sometimes got something similar but always with major uncanny valley vibes.

Anyone know how to get around this?

>But what if I want to illustrate say a children’s book with generated images?

You'd use what's available as "good enough", and manually modify it when needed.

Then you'd wait a few years until it does get faces right (haven't seen much issue with faces to be frank. Hands, yes).

Have you checked out Midjourney? It is very realistic sometimes... It's crazy.

https://www.midjourney.com/

I'm not very familiar with AI art but isn't this what LORAs are for?

While this is very exciting it's worth pointing out most of the page falls under "WHAT WE’RE EXPLORING." That is to say, these are from the marketing department and it's impossible to know whether they are strictly aspirational or just around the corner.

From the page:

> Looking forward, Firefly has the potential to do much, much more. Explore the possibilities below ... We plan to build ... We’re exploring the potential of ... the plan is to do this and more ... in the future, we hope to enable.

All that being said, shut-up-and-take-my-money.jpg!

They do a highly rehearsed live demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3z9jYtPx-4

It's mainly just text to image, but the results are extremely impressive IMO. Probably best in class for a lot of usecases.

Yeah, we are being a little more open, a little earlier, in part because this space is so new, and we really want feedback / direction from the community.

Currently in the beta, there is text to image, and text effects, and will have vector recoloring in the next couple of weeks.

I was incredibly happy to find a second career in 3d. To get there, I focused on building skills that I could find clients to pay for, and I love the process: modeling, texturing, lighting. Getting the details of products just right. I worked a lot of hours after a my day job an unrelated field to build a client list, learn more, provide more value, and keep doing the thing I love. Eventually, I was able to go freelance. I knew I would be competing with a globalized world, but I figured I could maintain my career through proven value and relationships.

And so far, that's been true! Despite the ubiquity of 3d services in low-wage areas of the world -- and good ones! I've been able to build a career that I'm proud of.

I'm the millionth person to say it, but this is like watching a predator you know you can't avoid, slowly gaining on you.

I'll find another job, I'm sure. But it won't be the one I love and that I worked hard for.

Keep up the good work. I raise my point solely because people are comparing these trailers against Stable Diffusion and the like, when in reality the examples are artists renditions. There's no point in comparing.

I hope someday y'all get to the point where we can change a video's season, time of day, etc. and have things work seamlessly. That would be quite incredible!

One thing that disturbs me is the push to censor the AI output.

Photoshop is used to produce a ton of porn, but Adobe doesn’t try to stop that.

In terms of “safety”, models Photoshopped to impossible standards have helped create impossible beauty standards causing depression and even life threatening eating disorders in teenage girls.

Yet, Adobe and all the others will carefully censor the output of these generative models.

Photoshop runs on the user's machine. This AI is running on Adobe's servers - that's the difference.

That would be the job of AI ethicists to ensure models generated to be all across the BMI spectrum

Finally a big player is talking about image to vector using generative AI. This will make the lives of graphic designers so much better. No reason that humans will continue to trace images in this day and age

When I look at older magazines, photos, billboards, and advertisements -- today's world of media is so much more colorful and vibrant than it was in the 60s & 70s. E.g. This [0] vs. this [1].

With the race to the bottom for generating high-quality, scalable, rich and colorful illustrations at almost no cost in massive quantities, I'm envisioning the world is about to get even more colorful and vibrant.

[0] https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0050/4252/files/carros_ant...

[1] https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MzMrYtY_Ooo/US_iZSd3noI/AAAAAAABC...

Counterpoint: BYTE Magazine artwork (1980s) compared to macabre SVG libraries of wavy modular body parts stitched together to show human activity.

[0]: https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/bytecover.jp...

[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Co...

It seems to me that at one point people were fed-up with vibrant style of 90s. Reaction was minimalism and later flat design and Corporate Memphis.

Now the pendulum is swinging back.

Race to the bottom is only when it comes to wages.

Companies are making profits not seen before.

We had a blip in the history where everyone could participate in the economy - from building prototype in a garage to becoming relatively wealthy.

Now we have wage slavery and access to market gatekeeped by VC and banks.

Not a great future.

I won't argue with you that they have gotten more colorful, but I feel like they've also lost a lot of originality as well. Advertising in the 60s and 80s seemed more fun and witty, and you had commercial artists like Andy Warhol giving ads a wholly unique style, despite the limitations of the craft back then.

Nowadays, we have Corporate Memphis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis).

Funny really. Despite creative tooling opening up new possibilities, I see the end result as a net loss in quality. Cheap generally wins out over great.

Ever the optimist, I like remind myself that in a world where good loses out to mediocre every single time, it's easier to stand out for being great.

Alright so why's your first example look so much more colorful to me?

You're right. I think I chose the wrong terms with colorful/vibrant. Perhaps better words would have been busy/detailed/intricate/textured.

These older advertisements might have as much color, but they're pleasing in their simplicity. Even a solid color can be bright and beautiful, but it's not nearly as busy as a collection of overlapping gradients. I walk back my use of the word color in favor of the word busy. Thank you for pointing that out.

> With the race to the bottom for generating high-quality, scalable, rich and colorful illustrations at almost no cost in massive quantities, I'm envisioning the world is about to get even more colorful and vibrant.

Counterpoint: The world may get "more colorful and vibrant", but also it will go toward uniform styles as AI will take all the commercial high-paying jobs and leave all but zero opportunities for actual artists.

I'm not sure it's commercial high-paying so much. If you're going to do a rebrand, you're still going to hire an agency that will fuss with the tiniest details.

At least initially, the impact will probably be more on the type of thing that even a junior designer can do in their sleep but is a lot harder for someone who isn't a designer to do.

Even pretty routine graphics and illustrations for books and presentations are pretty hard for the average person to do by themselves and there's often no budget to have someone else, whether internal or external to a company, to do them. Tools have improved a lot in the past few decades but it still takes a degree of talent to produce even routine polished work.

I wonder about how companies are approaching letting their customers understand what is and isn't copyrightable with the results of these ai models.

The us copyright office has made it clear that elements of designs that lack human authorship cannot be copyrighted. A prompt is not enough - the same way if you provided a prompt to an artist while commissioning a work does not grant you copyright to that work. The results (including specific elements) of these ai models cannot be copyrighted which has extreme implications to commerical art in general. If you have your ai models come up with a character you cannot claim copyright of that character. If your ai models comes up with a composition you cannot claim copyright on that composition.

If you use the ai to generate an idea and then have a human develop the idea, the elements of the design that the ai came up with cannot be copyrighted because they lack human authorship.

Commercial operations that care about ip beware.

I don't see how this will possibly be relevant.

AI generated content is about to sprint so far ahead of the existing legal framework that something will just have to give.

on the opposite - existing legal frameworks protect human works, and altering them to allow corporations to own any idea they can provide a prompt for is directly harmful to society and the future of intellectual property in every country.

using ml is already powerful and fast. protecting ideas from mass corporate ownership so that your grandchildren will be allowed to think freely is more important than chat gpt or stable diffusion or whatever algorithm replaces them next week.

Looks pretty polished honestly. I wonder who they're partnering with for the GPUs. Does Adobe have their own data centers?

Yes, Adobe has their own datacenters as well as very large infrastructure on both AWS and Azure.

Source: I was on Adobe's container infrastructure team 2017-2021, most of that time as a lead.

Adobe is an ad network, stock house, analytics, etc. They probably have the resources to do this.

If anyone wants to do the same thing on Figma, I built a plugin just for that. https://www.magicbrushai.com

That's awesome! Thanks.

Man, Adobe knows what they're doing. This is the right response to image generative AI, to integrate it into workflows.

IMHO,it was only a matter of time before the big names started to include AI generations on their software. I'm guessing if most of the AI design tools that are being launched everyday and which relies mostly in consuming a public api could be easily absorbed?

People have been talking about things like ChatGPT Doing code, but I just realized... something like ChatGPT could be incorporated right into your IDE.

Think Clippy, for Code... "I see you're trying to write a recursive function to compute finocacci. Would you like help?"

Or Code Reviews / Static-Code-Analysis: "Hey Visual Studio. I've written a RESTful API for my application. What do you think of the approach, architecture, and adherence to best practices? What can I do to improve it?"

Or instead of scratching your head going "why doesn't this work?", just typing that question directly into your IDE....

This is kind of like Copilot inside of VSCode right now.

That’s just Copilot.

Clippai™

Possible this is not significant, appears that within the feature set is a text-to-vector image generator that produces editable vectors art. There’s no direct link I was able to find, but feature is listed here:

https://firefly.adobe.com/

Is anyone aware of any similar open source or services that handle text-to-vector generative AI?

> services that handle text-to-vector generative AI

I think I used one...maybe Kittl or Illustroke. Not FOSS though. In the FOSS world there are some really brilliant tools like potrace at the very least. That one is still built into Inkscape, I believe.

Very short demo of the feature(?): https://youtu.be/c3z9jYtPx-4?t=180

Anyone able to comment on where in their opinion the measure is for current state of copyright law when generative AI is a subset of an image?

There are at least two potential issues pertaining to copyright law here, and it's not clear which one you're asking about. That's why the responses you're getting here seem to be answering different questions.

1. Are the AI systems violating the copyright protections of the images they were trained on? If so, are users of such AI systems also in violation of those copyrights when they create works derived from those training images?

Answer: That's not yet settled.

2. If you make an image with an AI system, is your new image eligible for copyright protection, or is it ineligible due to the "human authorship requirement"?

Answer: The US Copyright Office recently wrote[1] that your work is eligible for copyright if you altered it afterwards in a meaningful way. Here's a quote:

>When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship. As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application.

>In other cases, however, a work containing AI-generated material will also contain sufficient human authorship to support a copyright claim. For example, a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that “the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.” Or an artist may modify material originally generated by AI technology to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection.

[1]: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05...

As I am sure you’re aware, already posted response US Copyright’s ruling related to authorship here, so will not be repeating myself:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35247377

Will say that post you linked to also states, “17 U.S.C. 101 (definition of “compilation”). In the case of a compilation including AI-generated material, the computer-generated material will not be protected outside of the compilation.” — the problem is that unlike say for example a compilation of recipes, where the individual recipes are not protected, but the compilation is, there is no clear delineation within a singular work of art such delineation. As such, injecting such delineations is counterproductive and shows no understanding of the nature and spirit of the rule of law. Further, while their opinion appears to be a prompt is somehow a recipe and not a novel expression that merits copyright, clearly photographs of the output of a recipes are commonly photographed and given copyright protection.

Sure others have made far more compelling arguments against the ruling, but to me, the ruling lacks merit as is.

It's currently unknown, but copyright law is really political in nature and companies are hopping on using AI like crazy and delivering real value so my expectation is that it will be granted fair use for no philosophical reason but because US legislators don't want to put their boot-heel on American business.

Because if they stifle this is will basically cement China is the world's AI powerhouse who will give zero shits about copyright.

This is gonna be interesting times for copyright because this is the first time copyrighted works are actually useful in building tools. I think it's a very neat real-world example of how universities are actually right to make engineers take humanities courses because your code writing AI is actually better for having read Vonnegut.

``` Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05...

Aware of the ruling, reviewed it when it was released, though it does not appears to cover any aspect related to for example layout, color select, etc — and to me targets one-shot generative art; poorly so at that.

As is, landscape photographers for example, control camera angle, timing of photograph, camera type, lens type, etc — but they rarely create the landscape itself or for that matter the equipment and related technologies.

Even “found object” art is covered by copyright:

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_object

At this point, to me, it’s unclear author of that ruling even understands technology used to create the outputs that were the subject of that ruling.

Basically, no one knows. But the IP lawyers I know are generally of the opinion that, manufactured possible violations notwithstanding, it's probably OK for the most part.

Generative AI with ClipSeg/ControlNet is the main way to make Adobe products obsolete. No wonder they are pushing it into production ASAP but their investments to advanced tools they had edge over competition like e.g. intelligent background filling can be easily replicated/overcome now. We might see a quick commoditization of Adobe image processing tools.

Yeah but Adobe will presumably outspend stability.ai/midjourney/the stable diffusion community 10 to 1, plus they have access to better datasets. I think if they play this right this could end up building them a moat rather than filling it in.

Yes but Adobe tools are both expensive and their subscription system and website are full of horrible dark patterns. There's a reason Figma users were upset and pissed to hear Adobe was buying them. Adobe used to be a loved company, but this was many many years ago at this point.

I hope this means that the next generation of Manga & Comics et al will be daily serializations

No more waiting 30 days for the next episode, hurray

Unless of course you were to work in that area. If I did, I would be terrified.

Will I be able to generate an image of Xi as Pooh bear?

Simple question. Just make it and post here the link to the result.

Or will I receive a message that this prompt is not permitted and any attempt to get around the block will result in my account being suspended - like in Midjourney?

No.

Is “no” the answer to the first or the second question?

I wish these schemes would stop using Discord. It's just a cheap grab at building a community where one might not gather naturally, and the generative grunt that goes into public Discord prompts would be just the same in a logged-in API such as ChatGPT.

It doesn't seem to do be able to do anything that Stable Diffusion cannot do, and I bet they put a ton more restrictions too. Other than OpenAI, most of these closed-source AI developments are quite underwhelming.

Not specifically in comparison to Stable Diffusion, but in general our approach is to provide a model that is really easy to use, can be used commercially, and has deep integration with our our creative tools.

On this last point, we have really only shared about the model and "playground" which is a web based interface to play around with Firefly. We are working on initial integrations in the tools, and will have more info on that in the coming weeks / months (particularly for Adobe Express and Photoshop).

While you can do a LOT with plugins in tools like Photoshop (which may be enough for some users), we can do much deeper integration into the tool, and integrate it in ways not otherwise possible.

(I work for Adobe)

Did you see how it accurately put the snow on the surfaces where it would accumulate? I don't know how to do that with SD, but I'll try it later with ControlNet.

Adobe Firefly sounds promising, especially in terms of enhancing creativity and productivity. However, I wonder about the learning curve for users who are not familiar with AI-powered tools. Will there be tutorials or resources available to help users get the most out of Firefly's capabilities? Additionally, I'm curious about the ethical implications of using generative AI models in creative work. How can we ensure that AI-generated content maintains originality and doesn't infringe on intellectual property rights?

Yeah, Adobe, release a competitor of your own clients, they'll love it.

They'll have to buy it (or something like it), they won't have much of a choice. Artists that use this kind of tool will be so much more productive than ones that don't, that they simply won't be able to find employment otherwise.

In many circles, discovering that an artist is a copycat is professional death sentence.

Discovering an artist using AI generated images won’t be different.

It's that or go out of business.

Someone's going to have a slick and extremely powerful product where all the tools for creating and editing work seamlessly with all the tools for generating and other ML-assisted processes.

Based on my experience with the podcast product they released recently I am excited to see what this would look like. I think they can execute on UI for working with generative AI much better than others.

This is how generative AI art should've been done the first time

* get rights to the training data * keep artists and illustrators in the loop

Could've saved a lot of pain.

The high compute costs for training and legacy software foothold seems that it may encourage rent seeking in the big tech companies. I hope the huge costs and compute demands won't only enrich the big tech companies that can afford to run the models on heavy duty hardware. If it does, it will potentially lead to the rich companies, individuals, and persons greatly outpacing their peers.

These models can be run locally, but I see far too many businesses and bloggers resign themselves to renting OpenAI's cloud instead of tinkering with LLaMA/Alpaca, the community Stable Diffusion finetunes and such.

Adobe does have a legal edge here, which is interesting and perhaps actually worth a subscription if needed.

The problem is that GPT-3.5 is so cheap, and the results that you get out of it are still quite a bit better than LLaMA/Alpaca. There just doesn't seem to be any solid economic reason to run it locally except to keep inputs and/or outputs private.

What lot of folks are missing here is just how easy it is to add "AI" to products for large companies. The APIs are prevalent and easy to integrate with. Right now we're in the hype cycle, but soon people will be finding and reporting on all sorts of limitations and security issues.

Adobe will need to allow the importing of custom models, or else their product will be too limited. That then allows the "unofficial" use of copyrighted material for image generation. They're definitely starting from a place of advantage leveraging their already vast open-license stock portfolios.

That’s the real moat for any future startup. You will need so much data to make a dent when you start that it will be too expensive to even consider it. Without $$$$ for the data and compute , you will not be able to produce even an MVP, so you won’t convince VCs to invest.

What I love about this AI generative art is it will finally put the right price on computer generated art: $0.

It will be interesting to watch the entire Hollywood and associated creative industries lose control to AI. Entire movies will be created in small basements. Same with AAA video games.

I personally find it infuriating that the jobs we're closest to automating right now are the ones that we dreamed of doing as youths.

Who dreamed of cleaning bathrooms or flipping burgers? Too bad, that's still done by manual humans.

But who dreamed of being an artist or a writer? Great, we've figured out how to replace you with a generative algorithm!

Not just dreamed of doing as youths, they are also exactly the jobs that AI positivists promised we would be doing instead when robots took away all the boring "make rent" crap.

They won't. They own the hardware, the distribution channels and the datacenters.

For comparison, despite making professional music is even easier (a copy of Ableton Live Lite and a few hours of studio recording for the vocals makes for less than 300$) every single music chart is still dominated by music made by corporations (Universal Sony / Time Warner, mainly).

On the other hand, music is less valuable than ever. From 20$/unit (the price of a CD) to 0.0004c for stream. Or you get lucky and somehow someone buys your music during bandcamp friday.

Just a subset of Musicians are still around because they're famous enough to get an audience for their tours and/or dj sets. Visual artists have nothing comparable to sustain themselves.

I hope we will see much bigger universes with intricate and detailed lore where human steers parts of storylines and visuals to make them interesting and fit together but AI fills in the blanks.

Gamedev example: If NPCs lines can be generated quickly, maybe it's possible to develop open world games that change their character throughout the game.

Way to often addons and expansions are carefully cordoned off from the main game because no one wants to redo all that work.

Will any of these meaningfully enhance gameplay? Sure, there could be more features, but what is the marginal utility? I think people assume more immersive, more expansive is better for games, but I'm not sure this is the case.

And digital art in general. If you can't tell the difference between human made and AI made art, they will cost the same. Near $0.

Creative people are paid to be creative, not enter keyboard shortcuts all day. It’s the idea and vision that are the real differentiator.

Kids at street corners have idea and vision, no shortage in that. What matters is putting together idea and vision with execution. And for anything that is beyond basement scope, execution further subdivides into craft and access. Access to the means, and that is true for Hollywood as much as it is true for the smallest-time painter who might not be good at making friends with gallerists. The outliers are those that learn the craft, network into a position of access and still retain some trace of idea and vision through all of that.

How is this 'Firefly Model' trained and sourced? Will it be on the contents of the stock.adobe.com library?

Clicking through the available pages it seems like a lot of 'coming soon' talk, so there's not really any detail about any of the underlying process.

> The current Firefly generative AI model is trained on a dataset of Adobe Stock, along with openly licensed work and public domain content where copyright has expired.

https://www.adobe.com/sensei/generative-ai/firefly.html#faqs

I'm sure it's all of their content plus half of the web. The proprietary data they get from Behance, Lightroom, Photoshop and Illustrator (and soon figma) has to be a great advantage for them though.

Does not include Behance data or user data.

https://helpx.adobe.com/manage-account/using/machine-learnin...

"The insights obtained through content analysis will not be used to re-create your content or lead to identifying any personal information."

all you've asked is in the FAQ, right at the top.

For what kind of model it is, another poster pointed to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35089661 (a GAN) as a possibility.

Adobe tends to be really old school and doesn’t have APIs.

Or if they have an API it’s too expensive or crippled to be useful.

That’s Adobes 1980s DNA…. everything is a client application.

It’s a pity cause it looks like it would be fun to build with.

Most adobe applications have quite extensive APIs. I think you can even do some linear algebra via Illustrator.

I mean you’re not allowed to run it on a server.

>Adobe: We're going to move you to an all-subscription model and slowly bloat all the software you rely on, my dear captive audience of graphics people.

>Also Adobe: HOLD MY BEER!

Is this all Adobe developed or they are relying on partners?

Closed beta. Requesting access requires filling out a four page form. Product page is a bunch of hand-selected images.

Nothing to see here.

You can see it in action here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkTXyY9cnEs

and there is a live stream later today here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3z9jYtPx-4

Did you bother to browse the entire page? There are videos showing live editing and changing a backdrop. This is a teaser of a live product that is actually working remarkably well.

Thats one way to get people to pay for photoshop instead of pirating it I guess.

Any relation to GigaGAN? Page doesn't seem to mention what kind of NNs are used.

When is Getty Images going to release their own AI Art Generator?

Can anyone speak to company culture/QoL of working at Adobe?

I work at a smaller department, that was a company bought by Adobe. Can't speak for every part of the company, but it's been pretty nice so far. Competitive pay, good benefits, for American standards it has great time-off (https://benefits.adobe.com/us/time-off/vacation-and-paid-hol...). It seems very supportive to employees, and has a bunch of "employee networks" for supporting employees (https://www.adobe.com/diversity/strategy/employees/employee-...) with events and help and stuff.

No complaints so far really, that's always subject to change, but so far it's been a nice place to work.

SWE?

Thanks!

I worked for 5 years at Adobe on an infrastructure team. My team and management was amazing and it was a genuinely good workplace. But it is a very large company and many of the usual tradeoffs if large companies still apply (eg small cog, big inscrutable machine). People's experiences varied across teams and I seemed to be on one of the better ones at the company.

Much appreciated.

A little bit too late to the market for a company of their size.

And the fingers still look like out of a horror movie.

I looks like InvokeAI but more expensive.

Anyone know what underlying tech this is using?

It's a trap. They already have you locked in for photo and video work, AI is the chance to escape them.

Photopea considered, is PS still as prevalent?

Wow zero mention of any competition, these guys will get decimated with proper local tooling for editing.

> Once Firefly is out of its beta stage, creators will have the option to use content generated in Firefly commercially.

The reason this sentence exists is because Adobe wants to create the impression among readers that it owns the output and that it's Adobe's choice how creators use those images. But under current copyright interpretation, Adobe doesn't own those images. So it's nice that it's giving permission, but that's not Adobe's permission to give -- so thanks but also heck off Adobe, nobody needed to ask you for permission in the first place. You can use any AI image commercially because AI images are not under copyright.

Of course, Adobe would love to have a world where most art is generated algorithmically and Adobe is in charge of deciding how that art gets used and what gets generated because it controls the tool. So it's in Adobe's best interest to pretend that it's granting artists a permissive right, rather than recognizing that it doesn't have any real legal argument to make that artwork generated through Firefly is owned by Adobe (or by anyone for that matter).

And that's good! It's not anti-AI to say that, because what you have to realize is that what companies want from AI image generation is a model where every single artist goes through them in order to build or generate anything. They want a model where creative tools are a service, for the same reason why Adobe wants its tools to all be subscription based. No SaaS company is getting into generative AI with the goal of increasing accessibility of art. They are (Adobe especially) interested in closing down that accessibility. They are all drooling at the opportunity to turn your workflow into a SaaS business that can only be run on extremely expensive hardware clusters.

So yes, the denial of copyright for AI-generated images does make it trickier to monetize those images, but denying that copyright has the much more important effect of making harder for these companies to lock out competitors and build services where they control/monopolize an entire creative market. You can still use AI during a creative process and end up with a thing that can be copyrighted. But Adobe can't release a tool and later on start to argue that nobody else can train competing generators using that tool, or that the tool can only be used in a particular way, or that everything the tool can generate is owned by Adobe. That matters.

It means that competitors can use Adobe Firefly output to train their own models (including locally run models like stable diffusion). It means that there's a limiting factor in place that keeps Adobe from making lazy grabs to assert ownership over large numbers of images. It means that you can pull images generated by Firefly into other pipelines without asking Adobe permission.

You can see the same thing playing out with ChatGPT. OpenAI's TOS states that you're not allowed to use OpenAI to help build something that competes with OpenAI. That's going largely unquestioned, but my strong suspicion is that it's only a TOS violation to break that rule, because again, OpenAI does not own the copyright on anything that GPT generates. So if you're not signing that EULA, it's not clear to me that OpenAI has any legal right at all to restrict you from using output that you find online as training data. As far as I can tell, current copyright consensus in the US is that the text that comes out of ChatGPT is public domain. But that's not what OpenAI wants, because if anyone can build anything using ChatGPT's output, then how is OpenAI going to build a moat around their service to block competitors? How are they going to eventually turn profitable by closing off access and raising prices once people start to rely on their service? So just like Adobe, they stick the language in and hope nobody calls them out on it.

this is very cool.

Wow is all I can say.

Imagine paying for Adobe products.

I did that once. Never again. What a shit company. Cancelling the subscription was a total drag. Fuck you Adobe, I hope you go bankrupt sooner rather than later.

What they did to allegorithmic, the substance suite and the on boarding process to even learn the system is a travesty

Substance Designer used to have a platform called substance share where anyone could share and open source knowledge of complex parametric textures for free to anyone with a substance account, obviously the first draft for how Adobe would get the money back from their purchase is to monetize the entire learning processes by shutting down that website and adding pay walls to near every single interaction to even learn the software, it is just so horribly shortsighted and these ideas can only be approved and implemented by sheer rentiers managers

Lamentably adding their training set will make Adobe's value proposition much higher.

Open source creative alternatives have a even harder time (Blender, inkscape, krita, Gnu Image Manipulation Program)...

Since Adobe lack of Linux support holds it back significantly with creatives, this makes opens source more of a challenge.

https://sniep.net/adobe.png

midjourney data set is curated with only consented images, and they have an artist opt out option for artist who want to be removed from their data set.

Either way, competition is always good for the market as a whole.

If you use oh-my-zsh, enable the zsh plugin (after installing zsh).

Wow, what a waste of time for Adobe to implement something like this. Who’s even going to use this since all the artists said AI is bad and everyone who uses it should be put in prison?

Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com