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The big news this week has all come from Los Angeles, where another showcase AI event - Adobe MAX 2023 - saw another substantial upgrade to a popular text-to-image service. Last week OpenAI’s DALL-E got a major glow-up, and this week Adobe’s Firefly has followed suit. The new Firefly is certainly impressive, arguably lacking DALL-E 3’s raw power but offering more in the way of customizability and control, but Adobe also showcased some other, even cooler new tech at their MAX Sneaks event. This is their annual preview of the new toys that may (or may not) find their way into its Creative Cloud suite of software in the near future.
We must first mention that - for reasons nobody can adequately explain - Adobe is developing evening wear now, with an animated dress covered in “reflective light diffuser modules” proving to be the biggest hit of the event. It’s called Project Primrose, and while its AI credentials may be a little tenuous we’re including it here under the Rule Of Cool, which also seems to be Adobe’s reason for greenlighting the project. You can check it out here, along with the other projects covered in the event, which are substantially less glamorous but no less remarkable.
In particular, the new video tools on display wowed even the most jaded observers. Project Fast Fill brings Adobe’s Generative Fill tech to video editing, with text prompts used to add elements to existing video clips. The demo featured footage of a man in business attire walking through dappled sunlight, who then has a necktie seamlessly added to his fit through the magic of prompting. It’s an impressive tailoring trick, but Adobe then ramped up the difficulty level with Project Scene Change, which lets users swap background scenery out from one video and apply it to another. Project developer Zhan Xu demoed this by filming himself walking around his workplace, but then swapped this background out for footage of a coffee mug on a table. The AI effortlessly shrinks the human to the size of a puppy, while maintaining realistic scale, lighting and shadows as the tiny Zhan walks behind and around his desk clutter. It’s incredible stuff and suggests the generative video revolution may be closer than we thought.
Adobe may have arrived late to the text-to-image party, but they’ve quickly established themselves as a force to be reckoned with. We don’t know how long we’ll be waiting to see these text-to-video tricks appearing in Creative Cloud, but in the meantime make sure you keep up to date with our updated guide for Firefly Model 2!
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