Viva Las V(AI)gas!
In this outtake from the Weekend Mumbo, Calum Jaspan talks all things AI from the 2023 Adobe Summit in Las Vegas.
“What the hell am I doing here? I don’t know how to use Adobe!”
Aaron Sorkin himself wasn’t the only one a little confused by his presence as the second-last keynote speaker at this year’s Adobe Summit in Las Vegas*.
This year’s summit largely focused on showcasing Adobe’s developments to its generative artificial intelligence product suite, named Sensei GenAI, and how it will be implemented across its Adobe Experience Cloud and Creative Cloud services.
Sorkin on stage (David Becker/AP Images for Adobe)
Is AI your copilot or your Sensei?
I’m not going to pretend I’m an expert on the functionality of AI, so rather I’d like to talk about the impact it might have on this industry.
“It will be great… if it works” seems to be the assessment so far from colleagues and analysts on the ground at the summit.
Is it a gimmick? No, it doesn’t appear so. Creatives and marketers that use Adobe products are going to double their efficiency if you’re to believe Adobe’s Anil Chakravarthy, who said its new-gen AI product is set to “transform every aspect of marketing”.
Author of Platformer, Casey Newton, wrote a few weeks ago about the ‘winners and losers of the race to add AI’. He mentioned Notion AI, Snapchat and Quizlet as companies rolling out new AI integrated offerings, though posed that the developments of companies like Google implementing AI into its services “may gobble up” a lot of today’s AI startups like Notion, along the way.
Another of Adobe’s largest in-direct competitors, and also key partners at Summit this year, Microsoft, invested heavily in OpenAI this year, the company that owns ChatGPT.
Founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates this week even went as far as calling ChatGPT one of the greatest technology breakthroughs ever.
“I’m lucky to have been involved with the PC revolution and the Internet revolution. I’m just as excited about this moment.”
Now, Microsoft is rolling out the company’s Chatbot Tech into its Office suite, to help users optimise workflows and save time on things like meeting summaries, generated emails and slide decks with the help of AI-powered assistants called Copilots.
Microsoft has been in the virtual assistant game for a long time, remember Clippy?
‘Copilot’ seems to be the term many tech companies are running with while they very quickly integrate AI. ‘Co’ is very important here, letting you know you’re still in control, tempering fears that AI might steal your job.
A product demo of Firefly (David Becker/AP Images for Adobe)
It too was the buzzword at Adobe this week (alongside the overly-used Americanism ‘awesome!’).
Arguably the most insightful of the keynotes this week was a fireside chat between Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayan and Lisa Su, president and CEO of tech/computer processor company, AMD, aided by the visible strong rapport the pair had.
“This is the week, the month, and the year of AI,” said Su, as she compared AI’s use to be similar to a personal assistant, helping you solve whatever your problem set is. She also said while it’s only in its early stages, you can already see how it can make us 50-80% more productive.
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Inspirational starting point, or uninspiring replacement?
Chakravarthy said the Sensei GenAI suite will “fundamentally transform how we work”, making teams more productive by giving them a head start, while also giving creatives an inspirational starting point through Firefly, its new product, available now as a beta model.
On day one, Adobe gave the audience a demo of the new Firefly product, and how the Sensei GenAI tools will be integrated into Adobe Experience Cloud.
It looks brilliant, but at the same time, my first thought was somewhat predictable: “this is going to cost a lot of people their jobs”.I ended up getting access to it while transiting through San Francisco Thursday night US time (Friday afternoon in Australia), as I write this.
It is going to be an inspirational starting point for a lot of creatives, yes, but it’s also going to replace a few, too because the end product is to the untrained eye becoming scarily close to the real thing. Which was why it was so impressive in the demo.
In reality, when playing around with it, it wasn’t quite yet there yet.
Prompt: An Adobe conference in Las Vegas
Firefly draws its database entirely from Adobe’s own image stock set, as well as files with no copyright, or expired copyright, which is part of its ‘commercially safe’ and ready-to-use positioning. All of this produces images that look incredibly real in seconds and can be edited and altered on hand.
Speaking to a senior industry exec after the ‘Sneaks’ event on Wednesday evening, which previews the company’s products that are in development, they pointed to the first two products, and said “if pulled off, could wipe out one third of the ad industry”.
The ‘if’ here is of course very important. Demos can look very schmick, but there’s a reason many of these products don’t make it.
So do we focus on the jobs that will be lost thanks to products like Sensei GenAI, or do we focus on the jobs that will be created, and how, if used properly, jobs will be done better?
“It’s not a replacement at all,” said Su. “Everyone in this room can be a little better, and a little faster.”
Su on stage with Narayan: ‘It’s not a replacement for all’ (David Becker/AP Images for Adobe)
Take my profession, we’ve already seen companies like The Brag already begin to use ChatGPT to pump out stories across its titles. That is the entire job!
I asked ChatGPT ‘is AI going to steal my job?’ Here’s an excerpt from its answer.
“It is possible that some jobs may become automated and replaced by AI in the future, but it is important to note that AI is also creating new job opportunities. The impact of AI on employment is a complex issue, and it depends on many factors such as the industry, the type of job, and the skills required for that job.
“Some jobs that are routine and repetitive in nature, such as data entry or assembly line work, may be more vulnerable to automation. However, jobs that require creativity, critical thinking, and social skills, such as teaching or nursing, are less likely to be replaced by AI.”
Taking a pretty rudimentary view of it, the consensus seems to be that those who use AI products to replace humans will end up with a fairly average end product. But those that use it to genuinely be more efficient, and free up your time from more mundane, repetitive tasks to be more creative, will excel.
This all brings me back to Sorkin, who wrote movies you might have seen including A Few Good Men, Moneyball, The Social Network, as well as the TV show The West Wing.
While humorous, Sorkin questioning why he was there answered itself later in the chat, but maybe not in the way Adobe would’ve wanted. Or maybe, it was exactly the way Adobe would’ve wanted.
Sorkin said where technology makes him nervous is when he hears AI can now write an entire screenplay.
Though he felt reassured after knowing this is only possible through being fed hundreds of award-winning scripts, all of them written by humans.
Yes, these ‘copilots’ are going to be much more helpful than Clippy, but they’re also very clearly still in their early stages.
Could AI write The West Wing? “No.”
“I think you’re going to enjoy things done by humans more.”
*Mumbrella travelled to Adobe Summit in Las Vegas as a guest of Adobe.
Calum Jaspan is acting editor at Mumbrella.
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Calum Jaspan was news editor at Mumbrella, based in Melbourne. He was also the producer and host of the Mumbrellacast. He left Mumbrella in May 2023.
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