Adobe’s New AI Tools Recognized By TIME Among “Best Inventions of 2023”

In 2023 Adobe unveiled a whole plethora of new AI technologies for enhancing the editing and visual composition experience of users.

The core of these innovations is bundled under what’s called Adobe Firefly, which has evolved from being a standalone beta test platform for users to freely play with into integrating with Photoshop directly and including paid tiers.

Because of these and other Adobe AI innovations, TIME Magazine has also recognized the Adobe brand in its Best Inventions of 2023 rankings.

The influential magazine specifically named Adobe Liquid Mode as one of the ranked inventions in the Apps & Software category, and Photoshop’s Generative Fill and Generative Expand in TIME’s AI category for the year’s best inventions.

TIME conducts these rankings every year and includes physical products, software tools, services and other inventions that help solve major problems for people across different categories.

The inventions that get recognized by TIME may be ranked because they improve the world in some practical way, or because they contribute to making it more interesting.

With Adobe’s inventions, the TIME rankings seem to be based on a bit of both of the above. Here’s a closer look at what Adobe created and why it’s becoming so highly acclaimed.

Adobe Visual AI Tools: Generative Fill, Generative Expand and Firefly

As part of its extended Firefly family of AI technologies throughout Adobe, Generative Fill and Generative Expand have become extremely popular.

The Generative Fill tool in Photoshop alone has recently seen a massive 10x increase in adoption by users compared to past releases, and this is aside from its presence on Firefly’s standalone web application.

So far, users have generated over 3 billion images with Firefly’s initial Generative Fill model following its beta mode launch in March of 2023.

This number continues to expand enormously and in record time on a global scale now that Generative Fill is also inside Photoshop and Creative Cloud subscriptions.

With Generative Fill, Photoshop and Firefly users can generate photorealistic images using simple text prompts. They can do so safely because as Adobe explains, all images are natively generated to be safe for commercial use and free of copyright issues with third parties.

This is because Firefly has been trained on Adobe Stock’s own native library of hundreds of millions of professional-grade and fully licensed high-resolution images and photos.

The resulting AI-rendered derivatives are fully the products of user creativity combined with AI and Adobe’s own native content archives.

The quality of Adobe’s Generative Fill is also widely seen as exceptional by many subscribers, thus its explosive increase in use.

Generative Fill enables any Photoshop user to create dramatic, crisply realistic visuals in no time, while Generative Expand lets users realistically expand any image to a whole new scale as needed through generated visuals.

TIME had many options for naming an AI photo rendering tool as a top AI technology of 2023, but it chose Firefly AI tools Generative Fill and Generative Expand for its ranking.

Based on this and explosive user growth, this speaks volumes about the quality of these creator tools. Both are fully available to all subscribers who have and use Photoshop as part of their workflow.

Adobe has also incorporated Firefly-powered AI workflow into its gigantic Adobe Stock digital image platform.

Users of Adobe Stock Library can now not only upload their own photos but also remake them with AI tools, or generate entirely new visuals for sale through Text to Image and Expand Image tools.

Adobe Liquid Mode Remakes PDF Viewing and Editing

Another one of the Adobe brand’s major inventions of 2023 is Adobe Liquid Mode. This three-year-old tool was elevated to new heights for 2023 by becoming indispensable on a massive scale. So far, over a billion files have been read with Liquid Mode.

Using Adobe’s proprietary AI technology, Liquid Mode in a way does to PDF text documents what Firefly does to images.

With Liquid Mode, users can rapidly reorder their PDFs to shift text, tables, bullets, headers and other page elements around to fit small screens for easily reading even the most complex documents.

In other words, Liquid Mode makes PDFs easier to handle than ever in the era of increased workflow through mobile devices.

This feature comes included in Adobe Acrobat Reader and users can activate it by simply tapping the “liquid” icon along the top of their navigation options.

Using Liquid Mode opens PDFs to incredibly easy conversion and editing in seconds across multiple device types and screen sizes.

Adobe plans on further expanding and refining its roster of AI and other tools for creators throughout the full range of the platform’s subscription options. We’ll see what else emerges in 2024.

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