How AI movie generation can be green and other insights from chatting to Adobe

Last week, Adobe held its annual Adobe MAX event in London, where DIYP had the chance to chat with some of Adobe’s leaders from the Photoshop, Firefly AI, and Content Authentication teams.

I had some enlightening insights from those discussions, and I would love to share those with you.

Why Gen AI is greener for the environment

This is definitely not going to be a popular opinion, but it did get me thinking. I was talking to Zeke Koch, vice president of product management for Firefly, and he had an interesting take on AI vs. handmade art.. Creating art using colors and canvas, or shooting a movie with a full production crew, props, travel, and so on, puts a huge load on the environment. Creating something with AI is not zero-impact, but in many cases, it takes environmental resources than creating this art in real life. (And Zeke mentions that all your AI can probably be matched by eating one less hamburger a year. The issue is that the ease of making videos makes many more of them, and this may be an interesting place to look for potential impact.

We have already crossed the uncanny valley for stills, video is not that far away

Zeke also shares his view on crossing the Uncanny Valley. While we are definitely in a good place with stills, and we can use AI to create images that are indistinguishable from real images, doing the same for videos would take more work. Now, Zeke did not say this, but looking at what FireFly can do today, I think this is closer than most of us think.

Content Credentials should be as transparent as nutrition labels

Talking to Andy Parsons, senior director of the content authenticity initiative, his vision is that it will be incredibly easy for media consumers to learn where their content came from. Many brands have joined this initiative, including two recent additions: Samsung and Panasonic.

There is still a ton of value in handmade creation

Stephen Neilson, senior product manager for Photoshop, had an interesting take on AI vs. handmade art. While AI is here to stay, there is definitely value in handmade creations. The best example of this is Etsy. This is a marketplace entirely dedicated to handmade things

Harmonization is getting bigger

Stephen also shared that a feature is coming to Photoshop where you can cut an object from one photo, paste it in another photo, and then “harmonize” it to look good. With about 50% of the Photoshop tutorials dealing with cutting an object well, and the other 50% dealing with making it look good after being pasted into another image, this is going to lower the barrier for creating realistic photo compositions.

---