September 28, 2023
In today’s blog, we thought we’d take a sidebar to talk about AI and Design. We’ve written before about Ai art, where platforms like Midjourney essentially generate an image based on a user’s prompt. If you’ve been anywhere near socials recently, you’ll know that it is a highly contentious topic, with a range of different viewpoints. We thought it would be good to really zoom in on one particular side of AI and design: Photoshop’s generative AI tool.
In Adobe’s own words:
“Part of the revolutionary and magical new suite of Firefly-powered, generative AI capabilities—is grounded in your innate creativity, enabling you to add, expand, or remove content from your images non-destructively using simple text prompts in over 100 languages.
Use this feature to automatically match the perspective, lighting, and style of your image, make previously tedious tasks fun, and achieve realistic results that will surprise, delight, and astound you in seconds.”
So out of the furore of last year’s AI arms race came the generative fill tool from photoshop. This tool, powered by adobe firefly affords users a greater degree of control over the resulting image that the AI concocts over the other competing AI image generation platforms, which offer a less precise degree of control and hinge on the specificity of your prompts.
With Generative fill however, you can use the Lassoo tool to define areas that the generative fill should effect, this can include extending the background of your image or conjuring an entirely new scene.
Yes, you heard right – Generative Fill is now out of Beta, this means it will automatically be included in all updated versions of Photoshop! It truly is a new age of possibility!
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7066804517488455680/
In this video from LinkedIn, you can see just how easy it is to credibly alter an image, add different elements in until you end up with a completely different product.
I think the great thing about Generative fill is that it really represents unlimited possibilities. You could start with a photo, a drawing or a blank canvas and using generative fill you could morph it into anything you want. The only limit is truly your imagination.
There is, however, another side to all this fun creativity and that comes in the question of ownership. Generative fill is powered by Firefly, Adobe’s AI programme, which touted itself as the ethical Ai platform as other large language models were being trained on copyrighted content without any sort of permission from their original creators. Adobe also uses your data stored in the cloud to train its Ai models from. If you don’t like the sound of this then you can opt out, but it’s a worrying development for designers.
The debate rages on about the ethics of AI and content creation. Recently a group of renowned authors have sued open Ai over their work being used to train AI without their permission.
I hope that today’s blog has piqued your interest more into the world of AI – assisted design. If you’d like to get in touch to talk about everything AI then you can find IF’s contact details here.