Content. It’s everyone’s favorite art form. Whether it’s a picture of someone next to a waterfall or an instagram post featuring a misquote of Einstein, everyone loves it. But what if there a way to completely remove creativity from the content creation process?
Enter Adobe GenStudio.
Essentially this is an app that lets you make on-brand content for different purposes. Need a Facebook post? A banner ad? A forgettable slide for a powerpoint presentation? Adobe has you covered.
Basically this is a mash up of Firefly, Adobe’s GenAI art app, and Adobe Express. You can ask it for a picture, add some branding and text, and ship it instantly. You can tell the AI to match your brand guidelines – no dogs, no blood – and then A/B test it on various platforms.
GenStudio seems a lot like the stuff Google is trying to sell newsrooms – a lot of disparate tools stuck together in search of a business model. Interestingly, the biggest thing that Adobe seems to be trying to solve is the sense that GenAI is insecure.
“I think the majority of customers we talk to are incredibly excited about GenAI but also have a lot of trepidation about GenAI in a lot of different ways around, ‘hey, what’s the status of my data? What data am I using, the status of the models,’” Adobe’s Amit Ahuja, the company’s SVP for its Experience Cloud platform, told TechCrunch. “That’s resulted in — and we just ran a survey on this — a lot of them are in just kind of this almost siloed experimentation mode with it. I think the opportunity for Adobe is: how do we bring that more directly with the right security safeguards and with all the right compliance into the tools that these people are using?”
Unfortunately, I don’t think most creatives are worried about the “status of their data.” Instead, they’re worried about creating good content on a deadline. AI generated images, especially plopped out by Firefly, is roundly awful. While you can sometimes get good stuff – Pete likes to put a bunch of robots on this newsletter – but most of the time it looks something like this:
I mean come on.
So maybe the reason creatives aren’t using GenAI for art is that the results are bad and they are also afraid to lose their jobs. As a writer I’m fine with anyone using GenAI to build the outline or skeleton of a nice blog post. I wouldn’t recommend anyone use it to write entire posts from whole cloth. But if I were a creative director trying to reduce my budget I probably wouldn’t use a tool that doesn’t work well to do it.
Again, all of this is going to get better and all my ranting is pointless in a world that doesn’t care. But these tools aren’t ready for prime time, especially when it comes to the visual arts. I’ll use Photoshop all day long. I won’t have Photoshop generate the perfect picture of a dog for me because, inevitably, that dog will be situated somewhere in the uncanny valley and everyone will be upset.
So there you have it: another product aimed at folks who probably won’t use it, created by people who have a rudimentary understanding of the vagaries of a real creative process. But, as we’ve learned, it’s folks who sell the picks and shovels, no matter how shoddy, that make all the money. Adobe knows this all too well.
Leave a Reply