Adobe’s Firefly Generative AI is Now Available to Everyone
After months of being in public beta, Adobe has officially released Firefly, its generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology, to the world but with a catch: it is somewhat regulated by what are called “generative credits.”
When Adobe announced Firefly in March, the company emphasized its ethical approach to AI. Significantly, Adobe built Firefly without stealing content. While that decision has hurt the performance of Firefly, it has not affected the AI platform’s popularity.
Another consequence of how Firefly has been designed, implemented, and released is that the platform is commercially viable. This means that companies can use Adobe Firefly to create content without concerns over content ownership, a situation that is much murkier with some competing generative AI models.
Since Firefly entered beta, over 2 billion images have been generated across various popular Adobe applications, including Firefly on the web, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Express. Firefly has also made its way to other popular apps, bringing AI innovations to the Premiere Pro and After Effects video editing software.
Starting today, anyone, whether they are in Adobe’s beta program or not, can head to Firefly.Adobe.com and begin creating content using Firefly. With simple text prompts in one of over 100 supported languages, Firefly will generate four images with customizable art styles, colors, and visual themes.
In the public versions of Adobe’s flagship apps, like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Express, Firefly’s full release is ready to go.
Firefly underpins popular new features like Generative Fill and Generative Expand in Photoshop. Firefly also helps users retouch and restore damaged photos, which will help preserve precious memories for many.
In Illustrator, Firefly waves goodbye to the tedious task of manually recoloring artwork. In Express, users can create a huge variety of content in little time with minimal effort.
“With over 2 billion images generated during the Firefly beta, Generative AI is ushering in a new era of creative expression for customers across every segment,” says David Wadhwani, president, Digital Media Business, Adobe. “Firefly’s breathtaking capabilities combined with the rich tooling of our Creative Cloud apps, Express, the Firefly web app and Adobe Experience Cloud, give users unparalleled opportunities to work with generative AI in new, rich and productive ways.”
With the move to public release, something else is changing about Adobe Firefly aside from who can use it — how people use it.
While beta versions of Firefly have been free to use as often as someone wants without restriction, it requires using “Generative Credits” to create content now that Firefly is publicly available.
Those with a paid Creative Cloud plan, whether it is an all-apps or single-app plan, will be given a monthly allotment of Generative Credits. After these are consumed, users are subject to slower content generation unless they buy additional credits. Importantly, even when credits are depleted, users can still create content.
Creative Cloud All Apps includes 1,000 monthly credits, while a single-app plan doles out 500 credits per cycle. Adobe’s website has a complete breakdown of credits per paid account.
Users with paid Stock, Express, or Firefly plans can create up to two Firefly-generated images or vector generations daily after their monthly allotment is used.
As for free users, such as people using the free version of Adobe Express, they also receive a monthly allotment of credits. If the credits run out, they must wait for the monthly credit reset or upgrade their plan to a paid one.
Image credits: Adobe
