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XAdobe Announces New Generative AI App That Doesn’t Steal Artists’ Work
Adobe jumped back into the white-hot generative AI field on Tuesday, announcing a new tool called Firefly that allows users to create and modify images exclusively via text. Though the company already has some basic tools that use generative AI techniques built into its Photoshop, Express and Lightroom software, Firefly represents a significant step forward, using multiple different AI models to generate a wide variety of formats and types of content.
Essentially, this is graphic design for people who never figured out how gradients or masking layers work. Just by typing simple phrases and written instructors, a user can tell Firefly to flip an image of a bright summer day into winter, automatically add or remove elements from a photo, design their own graphics and logos, or even create a custom “paintbrush” based on a texture or object already featured in an image. The first Firefly app to debut “transfers” different styles and artistic techniques onto a pre-existing image, and will also apply styles or texturing to letters and fonts based on written instructions; it launches soon in a private beta.
What's Firefly?
Adobe already makes widely-used visual and graphic design software, so their integration of generative AI tools makes a lot of common sense. While experimenting with AI art processes like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney can be fun for everyone – and have gone viral on social media purely for their ability to bring imaginative concepts and scenes to life – Adobe products present a more immediate and practical application.
One other element setting the company’s new Firefly tools apart is how they’re trained. According to the company, Firefly’s models have been trained exclusively utilizing the company’s own royalty-free media library, Adobe Stock, which contains content owned by the company as well as openly licensed or public domain images. Firefly users in the future will also be able to train the software on their own content and designs, and all material produced by the apps will contain metadata indicating whether or not it was entirely AI-generated, and if not, the original source of all the visual content.
Art vs. Theft
This is a major sea change from the technique employed by Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, OpenAI’s DALL-E, and other similar AI art tools. These apps were trained on databases of existing images culled from public image hosting websites, including copyrighted or privately owned material. This has naturally led to a multitude of murky ethical and legal debates about who really owns artwork and the sometimes subtle differences between influence, homage, and outright theft.
Some experts have argued that training software on artwork so that it can one day create original artwork of its own, falls under the definition of “fair use,” just like an artist going to a museum, studying paintings all day, and then going home to their own studio and applying what they have learned. But while human artists can learn about plagiarism and how to avoid it, and use the work of others to evolve and develop their own voices and styles, computers have no such understanding or “voice” of their own, and will unquestioningly re-apply techniques and styles they’ve borrowed/stolen from across the Web for use on new projects.
These issues are at the heart of the ongoing lawsuit against Stability AI and Midjourney, along with DeviantArt and its AI art generator, DreamUp. A trio of artists allege that these organizations are infringing on their rights, along with the rights of millions of other artists, by training AI tools on their work without consent. Getty Images has also filed a lawsuit against Stability AI, alleging “brazen infringement” of their intellectual property “on a staggering scale.” They claim Stability copied more than 12 million images from their database with no permission or compensation.
Pivoting to Video
If all of that sounds heady, multi-faceted and complex, just get ready, because the next major step in generative AI – text-to-video generation – appears to be right around the corner. AI startup Runway, which to date has focused on specialized applications like background removal and pose detection, announced its first AI video editing model, known as Gen-1, back in February, and uploaded a demo reel of the next iteration – Gen-2 – earlier this week. (Runway helped to develop the open-source text-to-image model Stable Diffusion.)
While Gen-1 requires a source image and video to produce content, it's not transforming existing video—it's generating an entirely new one based on multiple inputs. It's the same model that Gen-2 uses, just improved with the addition of text prompts. So far, the results are not exactly “Top Gun: Maverick” in 4K; they tend to look indistinct, blurry and pixelated. Many also have that hallucinatory, psychedelic effect that frequently results from constantly-swirling, uncanny AI animation. Still, nonetheless, the resulting videos are identifiable based on the prompts. The footage exists without ever being recorded with a camera.
For now, users wanting to check out Gen-2 can sign up for a waitlist on Runway’s Discord, but it’s just a matter of time before these tools go more widely public (despite the astounding amount of processing power required to generate original video). So whatever thorny ethical considerations remain around generative AI, the time to figure them out is now, because there’s apparently no stopping this proverbial train now that it’s left the station.
- Art Created By Artificial Intelligence Can’t Be Copyrighted, US Agency Rules ›
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- Is OpenAI as 'Open' as Its Name Suggests? ›
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LA Tech Week: Six LA-Based Greentech Startups to Know
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
At Lowercarbon Capital’s LA Tech Week’s event Thursday, the synergy between the region’s aerospace industry and greentech startups was clear.
The event sponsored by Lowercarbon, Climate Draft (and the defunct Silicon Valley Bank’s Climate Technology & Sustainability team) brought together a handful of local startups in Hawthorne not far from LAX, and many of the companies shared DNA with arguably the region’s most famous tech resident: SpaceX.
“It's very clear that climate is no longer a niche issue,” said speaker Lauren Faber O’Connor, former chief sustainability officer for the City of LA. “It's not a boutique policy area, it's not a boutique sector of the economy, it is really becoming embedded into the future of our economy.”
Here’s a look at the greentech startups that pitched during the Tech Week event, and how they think what they’re building could help solve the climate crisis.
Arbor: Based in El Segundo, this year-old startup is working to convert organic waste into energy and fresh water. At the same time, it also uses biomass carbon removal and storage to remove carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in an attempt to avoid further damaging the earth’s ozone layer. At the Tech Week event Thursday, Arbor CEO Brad Hartwig told a stunned crowd that Arbor aims to remove about five billion tons of organic waste from landfills and turn that into about 6 PWh, or a quarter of the global electricity need, each year. Hartwig is an alumni of SpaceX; he was a manufacturing engineer on the Crew Dragon engines from 2016-2018 and later a flight test engineer at Kitty Hawk.
Antora: Sunnyvale-based Antora Energy was founded in 2017, making it one of the oldest companies on the pitching block during the event. Chief operating officer Justin Briggs said Antora’s goal is to modernize and popularize thermal energy storage using ultra-hot carbon. Massive heated carbon blocks can give off thermal energy, which Antora’s proprietary batteries then absorb and store as energy. It’s an ambitious goal, but one the world needs at scale to green its energy footprint. According to Briggs, “the biggest challenge is how can we turn back variable intermittent renewable electricity into something that's reliable and on demand, so we can use it to provide energy to everything we need.”
Arc: Hosting the panel was Arc, an electric boating company that’s gained surprising momentum in only two years of existence. Founded in 2021, the company’s already 70 employees strong and has delivered some of its first e-boats to customers willing to pay the luxury price tag, CTO Ryan Cook said Thursday. Cook said that to meet the power needs of a battery-powered speedboat, the Arc team designed the vehicle around the battery pack with the goal of it being competitive with gas boats when compared to range and cost of gas. But on the pricing side, it’s not cheap. Arc’s flagship vessel, the Arc One is expected to cost roughly $300,000. During the panel, Cook compared the boat to being “like an early Tesla Roadster.”
Clarity Technology: Carbon removal startup Clarity is based in LA and was founded by Yale graduate and CEO Glen Meyerowitz last year. Clarity is working to make “gigaton solutions for gigaton problems.” Their aim? To remove up to 2,000 billion pounds of carbon from the atmosphere through direct air capture, a process which uses massive fans to move chemicals that capture CO2. But the challenge, Meyerowitz noted in his speech, is doing this at scale in a way that makes an actual dent in the planet’s emissions while also efficiently using the electricity needed to do so. Meyerowitz spent nearly five years working as an engineer for SpaceX in Texas, and added he’s looking to transfer those learnings into Clarity.
Parallel Systems: Based in Downtown LA’s Arts District, this startup is building zero-emission rail vehicles that are capable of long-haul journeys otherwise done by a trucking company. The estimated $700 billion trucking industry, Parallel Systems CEO Matt Soule said, is ripe for an overhaul and could benefit from moving some of its goods off-road to electric railcars. According to Soule, Parallel’s electric battery-powered rail vehicles use 25% of the energy a semi truck uses, and at a competitive cost.
Terra Talent: Unlike the rest of the startups pitching at the Tech Week event, Terra Talent was focused on building teams rather than technology. Founder Dolly Singh worked at SpaceX, Oculus and Citadel as a headhunter, and now runs Terra, a talent and advisory firm that helps companies recruit top talent in the greentech space. But, she said, she’s concerned that all the work these startups are doing won’t matter unless we very quickly turn around the current trendlines. “Earth will shake us off like and she will do just fine in 10,000 years,” she said. “It’s our way of living, everything we love is actually here on earth… there’s nothing I love on Mars,” adding that she’s hopeful the startups that pitched during the event will be instrumental in making sure the planet stays habitable for a little while longer.
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
LA Tech ‘Moves’: LeaseLock, Visgenx, PlayVS and Pressed Juicery Gains New CEOs
Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
“Moves,” our roundup of job changes in L.A. tech, is presented by Interchange.LA, dot.LA's recruiting and career platform connecting Southern California's most exciting companies with top tech talent. Create a free Interchange.LA profile here—and if you're looking for ways to supercharge your recruiting efforts, find out more about Interchange.LA's white-glove recruiting service by emailing Sharmineh O’Farrill Lewis (sharmineh@dot.la). Please send job changes and personnel moves to moves@dot.la.
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LeaseLock, a lease insurance and financial technology provider for the rental housing industry named Janine Steiner Jovanovic as chief executive officer. Prior to this role, Steiner Jovanovic served as the former EVP of Asset Optimization at RealPage.
Esports platform PlayVS hired EverFi co-founder and seasoned business leader Jon Chapman as the company’s chief executive officer.
Biotechnology company Visgenx appointed William Pedranti, J.D. as chief executive officer. Before joining, Mr. Pedranti was a partner with PENG Life Science Ventures.
Pressed Juicery, the leading cold-pressed juice and functional wellness brand welcomed Justin Nedelman as chief executive officer. His prior roles include chief real estate officer of FAT Brands Inc. and co-founder of Eureka! Restaurant Group.
Michael G. Vicari joined liquid biopsy company Nucleix as chief commercial officer. Vicari served as senior vice president of Sales at GRAIL, Inc.
Full-service performance marketing agency Allied Global Marketing promoted Erin Corbett to executive vice president of global partnership and marketing. Prior to joining Allied, Corbett's experience included senior marketing roles at Disney, Warner Bros. Studios, Harrah's Entertainment and Imagi Animation Studios.
Nuvve, a vehicle-to-grid technology company tapped student transportation and automotive sales and marketing executive David Bercik to lead the K-12 student transportation division.
Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
This Week in ‘Raises’: Curri Scoops Up $42M, Mosaic Scores $26M
Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
A local logistics platform raised fresh funding to put toward product development, infrastructure and sales and marketing initiatives, while a San Diego-based fintech company closed its Series C funding round to expand its investment in AI which will empower high-growth SMB and mid-market finance leaders.
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Venture Capital
Curri, a Ventura-based logistics platform, raised a $42 million Series B funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners.
San Diego-based financial platform Mosaic raised a $26 million Series C funding round led by OMERS Ventures.
AHARA, a Los Angeles-based startup focused on providing personalized nutrition suggestions, raised a $10.25 million seed funding round led by Greycroft.
Per an SEC filing, San Diego-based developer of peptide therapeutics designed to assist in the treatment of autoimmune diseases and disorders selectIon raised $5 million in funding.
Miscellaneous
Los Angeles-based Sensydia, a company working on non-invasive cardiac diagnostics, said this morning that it has received $3 million in a NIH grant.
Raises is dot.LA’s weekly feature highlighting venture capital funding news across Southern California’s tech and startup ecosystem. Please send fundraising news to Decerry Donato (decerrydonato@dot.la).
Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.