The art community hasn’t been shy about letting the world know how much it despises AI, as it allows anyone, even those without a single creative bone in their body, to create passable artwork, but it appears that today’s leading tech companies couldn’t care less, with Microsoft and Adobe both launching AI-powered art generation tools today that allow users to create art just by typing in a descriptive sentence. Microsoft’s tool, Bing Image Creator, will begin to roll out to Bing preview users on both desktop and mobile starting today, while Firefly, Adobe’s family of creative generative AI models and tools for generating images and text effects, is now available in beta. Adobe Express, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator will be the first Adobe apps to benefit from Firefly integration.
“Generative AI is the next evolution of AI-driven creativity and productivity, transforming the conversation between creator and computer into something more natural, intuitive and powerful,” said David Wadhwani, president, Digital Media Business, Adobe. “With Firefly, Adobe will bring generative AI-powered ‘creative ingredients’ directly into customers’ workflows, increasing productivity and creative expression for all creators from high-end creative professionals to the long tail of the creator economy.”
From an Official Microsoft Blog post:
We’re excited to announce we are bringing Bing Image Creator, new AI-powered visual Stories and updated Knowledge Cards to the new Bing and Edge preview. Powered by an advanced version of the DALL∙E model from our partners at OpenAI, Bing Image Creator allows you to create an image simply by using your own words to describe the picture you want to see. Now you can generate both written and visual content in one place, from within chat.
For those in the Bing preview, Bing Image Creator will be fully integrated into the Bing chat experience, rolling out initially in Creative mode. By typing in a description of an image, providing additional context like location or activity, and choosing an art style, Image Creator will generate an image from your own imagination. It’s like your creative copilot. Just type something like “draw an image” or “create an image” as a prompt in chat to get creating a visual for a newsletter to friends or as inspiration for redecorating your living room.
From an Adobe press release:
Adobe is designing Firefly to give all creators superpowers to work at the speed of their imaginations. With Adobe Firefly, everyone who creates content – regardless of their experience or skill – will be able to use their own words to generate content the way they dream it up, from images, audio, vectors, videos and 3D to creative ingredients, like brushes, color gradients and video transformations, with greater speed and ease than ever before. With Adobe Firefly, producing limitless variations of content and making changes, again and again — all on brand — will be quick and simple. Adobe will also integrate Firefly directly into its industry leading tools and services, so users can effortlessly leverage the power of generative AI within their existing workflows.
Adobe also launched a beta for Firefly today that showcases how creators of all experience and skill levels can generate high quality images and amazing text effects. Adobe believes that the full power of technology cannot be realized without great imagination to fuel it. Through the beta process, the company will engage with the creative community and customers as it evolves this transformational technology and begins integrating it into its applications. The first applications that will benefit from Adobe Firefly integration will be Adobe Express, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.
Discussion (8 replies)
Join Discussion →I'm sure there's a good "Use your words" meme out there, but I don't know it off the top of my head.
How long, I wonder, till we do implants into the parts of our brains for Sight, Sound, Smell, Taste, and of course most importantly, touch.
Once 'Wired' (Provided Elron Musk can get past the ethics issue blocking him) till we can tell the computer the reality we wish to live in full of whatever magic, tech, steampunk, worlds we imagine.
How will I pull myself away from my perfect lovers, in my castle, in the middle of my Lothlórien-esqe, forest setting, to do my mundane job in the mundane world, to pay my mundane bills, and get back to my preferred reality.
Or maybe I'll just go to the 31st century in Star Trek - that also seems like a nice place to live - Perhaps check out Ni'Var or Andor?
If you are an artist who just wants to do art, this does not affect you. If you are selling commissions, then yes it does. But can that type of work for hire even be considered art? You literally draw something based on someone else's words just like the AI.
Ai just spews out random garbage you still need an artistic sense to spot the actual good ones among all the garbage outcomes. While it is easy to make something that passes the 1 second sight test, the more you look at an AI image the more flaws you find in it.
So all AI does is open the gate to many people to do something, it doesn't mean they can actually make something good with it.
But sometimes it might not even be necessary. I mean I see images on deviantart get thousands of likes that I wouldn't even decorate toilet paper with. So the audience doesn't even realize what is good quality art and what isn't. This means as an artist you should be true to yourself and nobody else, do what you like, don't try to do what the audience likes. No AI can take that away from you. If AI threatens you you are not an artist, that is my 2 cents on the subject.
OK, I'm too tired and just rambling here so I should stop.
"Bing created man in his own words."
—AI translation of Genesis
Unfortunately for us, he was still in preview mode.
Requires an account.
As long as I have to create an account, this means I will never use these things.
No more accounts.
OpenAI required an account to access its ChatGPT demo, and the account creation process also required a mobile phone number, or at least it did for me when I looked at it several weeks ago. I said screw that. The queries are computationally expensive, so I expected some measure of rate limiting and bot prevention, but my hoop jumping ends with the one-off disposable email address.
Bing's integration into the Windows OS is another opportunity for Microsoft to "encourage" users to create a Microsoft Account, which I expect will become a hard requirement in a future iteration of the OS.
When useful open-source AI tools become trivial to deploy and self-host on commodity hardware, I'll be interested. There's been some work in that direction, but I haven't kept tabs on any of the projects.
Do this... as an excercise. Try to find an engine to run/host your own AI engine to query. Be that for enterprise or home use. It's a Pain in the ASS. As someone that wants to tinker and not expose my tinkering or my companies tinkering to the greater community I'm left scratching my ass wondering HOW do we do this?
There are open source AI engines like ChatGPT -- that said, just the source is pretty much worthless until you train it, and that training is what takes months on data centers. Trying to do that at home would be ... harder than cryptomining.
Now, there are ways to export the training as well, and there are some open source projects that will include that - and that's the real "value" that ChatGPT brings - how and what they trained their model on that makes it do what it does. I suspect the open source provided training wasn't nearly as deep or worthy as what ChatGPT has done with it's Billions in funding.
[URL unfurl="true"]https://github.com/nichtdax/awesome-totally-open-chatgpt[/URL]