Adobe has just announced that Creative Agent, the AI-powered assistant that sits in multiple creative applications is being expanded across Firefly, Photoshop and more. Here’s what it means and why it’s a notable announcement.

This is interesting because Creative Agent is only a couple of months old and it’s now enhanced to allow users of LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini and others to interact with it.

This arguably means that many more people will be able to use Adobe’s apps — but it could also pose a challenge, which we’ll come to shortly.

Adobe has sought to serve creative professionals for decades — its annual Max conference draws photographers, artists, designers, video editors and more to learn about how their workflows can be quickened.

The Adobe north star, it seems, is to create situations where the user remains as creative as possible, instead of being dragged down by time-consuming processes that can blunt that precious moment of inspiration.

One of the ways it does that is to offer libraries of designs, videos and more, and that content along with anything it generates through AI is commercially safe, that is, it hasn’t been lifted from or trained on anyone else’s intellectual property.

Adobe told me the Creative Agent isn’t there to get in the way, it should be a trusted partner to whom you can delegate tasks, keeping you more efficient and in the creative zone.

Expanding Adobe Creative Cloud To Third-Party Chatbots

However, the company recognizes that the world is changing and that chatbots are ubiquitous. So, since you can talk to ChatGPT in natural language, shouldn’t that be part of how Adobe responds to you, too?

With this change, Adobe’s tools are now expanding to platforms including ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini and Slack, for example. This means that tools from its suite of Creative Cloud applications, (a suite that includes Premiere and Photoshop, for instance) will now be accessible by the AI Assistant in Firefly, the app it calls its all-in-one creative AI studio — an accurate description, I’d say.

Why this matters is that Firefly already has the kind of conversational interface so you can type in a command asking it to imagine a giraffe in a tutu and it will comply. But now, there are new capabilities so that if the starting point for your creative journey comes from another place, like Copilot, say, you can incorporate what was created there into your project.

The AI Copyright Dilemma: Is Third-Party AI Commercially Safe?

Which is where we get to the challenge mentioned above. It’s important to sound a note of caution. While the output from Adobe Firefly is commercially safe because it’s trained on Adobe’s stock content, other sources may not be.

The key here is that when you’re generating an image, for instance, the new improvements mean you’re no longer restricted to Firefly’s image model. You can choose from others such as Nano Banana, Flux Context, Imagene and more.

I asked Adobe about what that meant and the company told me that when users start with those models, there’s no guarantee of commercial safety for the products they introduce to Firefly from them. Adobe said that there is a nuance to understand but that it makes sure that it is transparent about it.

New Automated Brand Kits And Smart Folders

The new creative skills which the latest update introduces to Firefly AI Assistant include brand kit creation, which can start with commands as simple as, “Can you help me make a logo for my brand?” and the assistant will respond with questions about style, for instance. The interface asks more questions and suggests directions including, at one point in a demo I saw, the highly tempting invitation to “Surprise me.”

Programs like ChatGPT have accustomed users to extensive chat history, and that’s here, too — again a response to the way people work today.

Additionally, as part of the enhancements which come to other brands in the Creative Cloud suite there are new organizational capabilities, which can label folders usefully and gather relevant items into them, streamlining a tedious clean-up process.

Adobe Vs. Apple Creator Studio: The Battle For Creative Professionals

In the last few months, Apple has launched its own suite of apps called Creator Studio, including Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro and more. Adobe’s suite has been around much longer, but the latest updates suggest the company is keen to stay current.