Adobe celebrates its 40th birthday! Creative giant officially starts selling AI paintings

If you want to say who is the top in the AI ​​world, it must be AIGC. Generators such as DALL-E and Stable Diffusion are used and shared by users around the world

On December 5, Adobe announced a big event: it officially started selling AI paintings!

This means that you can download and use creative and visually very trendy "AI artworks" at any time on Adobe Stock, which has more than 320 million creative assets.

# In a blog post, Adobe wrote: “While early generative AI technologies raise legitimate concerns, Adobe is committed to helping guide The evolution of this technology gives artists more creative capabilities without replacing human imagination."

Of course, there are still some things that creators need to pay attention to. Place:

• Must state in the title, label and tag that the content is generated by AI.
• Must ensure broad commercial licensing of content.
• Must be marked as an illustration, even if it looks very realistic. (Only photos taken with a camera can be labeled as photography)
• No submission of any third party content is allowed without explicit authorization. Such as a recognizable face or logo, and other artist's style (as part of the prompt).
• Pictures depicting real people require model permission. The same applies to private property or places that exist in real life.

Interestingly, Adobe just celebrated its 40th birthday on December 3.

It is no exaggeration to say that this is a milestone. After all, only a handful of high-profile tech companies today—such as Apple and Microsoft—have achieved this feat.

Perhaps because it has dominated the market for too long, everyone has forgotten that Adobe was once a high-spirited upstart and was confused about the future.

In fact, if photocopying giant Xerox had more business sense and vigorously promoted the work of the outstanding scientists working in its PARC research laboratory, Adobe might not even exist. .

Initial Story

Back in the early 1980s, Adobe’s founders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock were still working at Xerox’s PARC laboratory. Responsible for developing advanced printing technologies.

However, companies show little interest in commercializing their work.

##Adobe founders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock

losing patience The duo chose to leave the company and put their passion into a new startup, Adobe Systems.

The name of the company is a reference to the creek behind Warnock’s home, which is also their headquarters.

As an excellent designer, Warnock’s wife Marva created the original logo, and its blocky “A” continues to be the company’s logo to this day.

Adobe’s first office, located in Mountain View, California

Still, it does take budding entrepreneurs a while to decide what exactly their company should do.

At first, they thought the company could operate a chain of print shops or produce high-end workstations and printers. But it was ultimately decided that we should focus on software, specifically PostScript, a language that could elegantly render a variety of fonts at any resolution.

Subsequently, they signed an agreement with Steve Jobs and successfully incorporated PostScript into Apple's LaserWriter, which was about to start desktop publishing. A key piece of equipment for the revolution.

1986 Advertisement for Adobe fonts

Now, those who were founded The software company of 1982 no longer exists, let alone the fifth-largest company in the industry by market capitalization.

Even in another world, Adobe did not enter the 21st century.

In 1983, Jobs tried to launch an acquisition for $5 million, but Adobe had not yet released any products. However, Warnock and Geschke valued their independence and declined the offer.

But he later accepted an investment of US$2.5 million in exchange for 20% of Adobe's shares (Apple cashed out in 1989).

##In 1996, Photoshop 4.0 was born on the cusp of the digital photography revolution

Since its birth, Adobe has never disappeared from the stage, but has cleverly expanded its business scope. And this often requires foresight and enough patience to keep pace with the times.

In 1988, when Adobe struck a deal with Thomas and John Knoll, the creators of Photoshop, there was a very small market for such a product. After all, most machines of the era didn't yet run smoothly. This software.

In addition, one year before the official release of Photoshop, Adobe had just entered the industry with Illustrator, and was an out-and-out newcomer.

But Warnock believes that Adobe can sell hundreds of copies of the software in a month.

Then Adobe released Acrobat in 1993 not just as software but as a platform: software for creating digital documents, plus a free reader application that allowed Available to everyone.

Acrobat in 1993 made it very convenient to share files with rich formats

In 2003, Adobe bundled Photoshop, Illustrator, and other applications into what it called the Creative Suite, making users' workflows even more Adobe-centric than before.

In 2013, Creative Suite gave way to a purely digital Creative Cloud service. While customer complaints about the move to a subscription model never fully subsided, it allowed Adobe to add new features to its products at a faster pace.

##Adobe founders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock, 2019

Along the way In the past, Adobe's development was inseparable from the acquisition of other companies, including its two most powerful former rivals, Aldus and Macromedia.

However, for such an old company, the acquisition of a total of 56 entities is indeed not a lot. After all, for Microsoft, this number has long exceeded 280.

In September 2022, Adobe made its boldest acquisition since the company was founded - acquiring Figma, the maker of the popular web-based interface design tool, for $20 billion. . If the deal closes as expected, it would be the largest acquisition of a venture capital startup ever.

There is no doubt that an important reason driving this acquisition is to fill the key loophole in its own product lineup-AdobeXD.

And Adobe’s ambitions go far beyond that. In this regard, Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky said that this is all to accelerate the company's growth.

Developing AI, but more than AI

At Adobe Max, Belsky shows how to create new fonts in Adobe Express, a web-based design tool.

More specifically, he's showing how to describe the typeface you want—with phrases like "colored cables hanging from the ceiling" or "orchid petals"—like this Express can generate it for you.

Adobe Chief Product Officer shows off AI-generated fonts in Adobe Express

This is a preliminary attempt for generative artificial intelligence to take over some of the heavy work of content creation, and it is also one of the biggest themes of this creative conference.

Narayen said: "In fact, we are already using artificial intelligence to make our products more accessible, more efficient and more interesting."

The company has given Sensei a unified brand for its artificial intelligence capabilities, which range from image processing algorithms that clean up documents in Adobe Scan to tools that help marketers allocate budgets.

Currently, many artificial intelligences generate content with the help of services such as DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion. Some of these services are cool, but also controversial.

This technology leaves those working in creative jobs feeling neglected, not only because it may threaten their livelihoods, but also because it uses the work of human artists as training data. The creative style of human artists is imitated without understanding it.

Image generated by Stable Diffusion

This copy art style The behavior of "lazy" has annoyed a large number of human artists, and Stable Diffusion also tried to solve this problem in the latest update.

As a company that started off by relying on the creative community, Adobe has always been cautious. The CEO himself is also trying to lower people's expectations for generative artificial intelligence: "The ability of technology to defeat human intelligence in the near future has been seriously exaggerated."

Obviously, Adobe's The goal is not to rush into generative AI and then be helpless in the face of the new challenges it presents.

Back in 2019, Adobe co-founded the Content Authenticity Initiative. It's an industry association that works to set standards to combat misinformation by identifying the origins of photos, videos and other digital content.

As computers become increasingly capable of producing synthetic media, people need to strengthen relevant supervision. These synthetic media are so realistic that people are likely to believe them to be real.

Adobe’s Next 40 Years

For a technology company of this size, Adobe appears to be very low-key. If you don’t pay careful attention, it is easy to overlook the company’s current huge scale.

In 1998, when Narayen first joined the company, Adobe had annual revenue of $895 million. In 2008, his first year as CEO, revenue reached $3.6 billion. Last year, it reached $15.8 billion.

In his second year as CEO, Narayen facilitated the acquisition of analytics technology giant Omniture.

It's a very different business than a traditional business, but Adobe Experience Cloud grew revenue to $1.12 billion in the last quarter after completing other key acquisitions in areas such as marketing and content management. Accounts for about a quarter of the company's total revenue.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen

is embracing new areas At the same time, Adobe has not forgotten to improve existing products.

At the Adobe Max conference, Adobe showed off a new Illustrator feature, Intertwine, that makes it easy to create elements that overlap in different ways and in different locations.

This is a victory of practicality and a feat of advanced technology, leaving another milestone in Illustrator's 35-year life cycle.

From the perspective of the technology industry, 40 years of history is eternal. But much of Adobe's present and future is built directly on its past success.

The Adobe of 1993 may be an antique now - but it is there, intertwined with the Adobe of 2022.

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