Adobe has become the first major company to make AI video generating tools available to the public.
The company revealed its new AI model, called the Firefly Video Model, at the annual Adobe MAX conference this week. The tools can now be used in beta on Firefly’s website, or in Adobe Premiere Pro.
According to Adobe, Firefly can artificially extend existing footage or generate short videos from text prompts.
AI video: the state of play
Firefly puts Adobe in direct competition with titans like OpenAI, Meta, Google, and ByteDance, who have all announced AI video generators in recent months.
OpenAI unveiled its video generator, called Sora, in February, but it has yet to reach the general public. The technology would be able to create complex videos up to one minute long, based on text prompts.
Meanwhile, Meta announced its Movie Gen tool earlier this month, which can also generate short videos from text prompts. It aims to introduce Movie Gen to users on its platforms like Facebook and Instagram, but not before next year.
Google’s Veo and ByteDance’s PixelDance and Seaweed are similar video generator models, and both are being tested with small groups of creators. Google plans to make Veo publicly available in 2025, while ByteDance hopes to roll out its models later in October.
The copyright problem
AI companies have come under fire for training their AI models on copyrighted material.
After major authors filed a series of lawsuits against OpenAI, arguing the company used their books to train ChatGPT, OpenAI agreed in September to make its training data available to observers at its San Francisco office.
British forum Mumsnet also announced legal action against OpenAI in July for harvesting its online content without permission.
Adobe likely hopes to ward off these issues early, as Firefly was trained on Adobe Stock images and licensed content.
The company will “compensate creators for training” Firefly, said David Wadhwani, the company’s President of Digital Media Business. “We do not train on customer content. We do not scrape the internet.”
Firefly will also add a watermark to its content that marks it as AI-generated material.
Adobe Inc. (ADBE) has traded at US$508.03 today, down 0.32% from yesterday's close of US$509.65. Shares reached a day low of US$506.80 and a day high of US$513.821. The market cap of Adobe is US$223.63 billion.