Bard, Google’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is getting new generative AI capabilities courtesy of Adobe.

Adobe announced today that Firefly, its recently introduced collection of AI models for generating media content, is coming to Bard alongside Adobe’s free graphic design tool, Adobe Express. Firefly — currently in public beta — will become the “premier generative AI partner” for Bard, Adobe says, powering text-to-image capabilities.

“Adobe has been a leader in creativity for many decades,” Alexandru Costin, VP of generative AI at Adobe, told TechCrunch in an email interview. “The partnership between Google and Adobe brings the best model designed to be commercially safe closer to the best search engine and enables Bard customers to tap into the power of Firefly — creating, styling and taking their content to the next level by using Adobe Express.”

The partnership follows on the heels of the launch of Image Creator, Microsoft’s generative AI tool built into its Bing Chat chatbot, powered by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2. From the sounds of it, the Firefly experience in Bard will be similarly robust — and perhaps more so.

In the coming days, Bard users will be able to generate images via Firefly and then modify them using Express. Within Bard, users will be able to choose from templates, fonts and stock images as well as other assets from the Express library.

Image Credits: Adobe

“The initial integration will focus on enabling the Bard user to easily take their generated Firefly image to the Express website, allowing the user to continue their workflow,” Costin said. “With Firefly, we’ve been exploring integrations with multiple partners and enterprises to enable them to serve their customers.”

Adobe further explains the setup in a blog post published this morning:

Say for example you’re opening a yoga studio want want to create a social media ad for new customers. You can get started and inspired by asking Bard to generate an image like a “giraffe doing a yoga pose.” You can then use Express and a ready-to-go template (or create something from scratch) with your new image as a centerpiece and quickly modify it with easy-to-use editing tools in Express. You can even post directly to your favorite social media channels from Express!

Adobe argues that, unlike some of the generative AI tools available today, Firefly is designed to generate images free from copyrighted materials. Firefly in Bard will be trained on hundreds of millions of licensed images from Adobe Stock, Adobe’s stock content library, Adobe says, along with openly licensed images and public domain content where the copyright has expired.

Some experts suggest that training models using public images, even copyrighted ones, will be covered by fair use doctrine in the U.S. But it’s a matter that’s unlikely to be settled anytime soon. To wit, two companies behind popular AI art tools, Midjourney and Stability AI, are in the crosshairs of a legal case that alleges they infringed on the rights of millions of artists by training their tools on web-scraped images. 

Image Credits: Adobe

Adobe and Google are clearly eager to distance themselves from the controversy — at least judging by the language in the blog post.

“Both Adobe and Google are approaching this partnership through a creator-centric lens,” Adobe writes. “We’re … empowering creators to tell their stories authentically while providing an avenue for content consumers to verify how and where content was created and modified.”

It’s not all marketing fluff. Adobe’s using technology from the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), an association founded to promote industry standard provenance metadata for media, to tag images created with Firefly via Bard with “content credentials.” These credentials, which are generated automatically and remain associated with content wherever it’s used, published or stored, contain information like which model was used to generate a piece of art; the name and date the art was created; and any edits made to that image.

Adobe claims that CAI, founded in 2019, now has over 1,000 active members, including Stability AI and Spawning AI, a startup developing tools to allow artists to “opt out” of generative AI training data sets. Among the others are media outlets, news publishers and Big Tech companies, such as the Associated Press, the BBC, Getty Images, Microsoft, Nikon, Reuters and The Wall Street Journal.

Notably absent from CAI’s membership is Google, ironically.

Having created more than 5,000 paintings in her lifetime, traveled the world, and shown in over 200 exhibitions, Pacita Abad (1946-2004) was one of the most prolific and lauded Filipina-American artists. Now on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, her first retrospective showcases over 100 of her bold, distinctive works.

Abad was born in Basco, Batanes, the northernmost province of the Philippines. As her parents were politicians, the young artist initially had the aspirations of following in their diplomatic footsteps, and she avidly organized student demonstrations against the authoritarian Marcos regime, which eventually led to the political persecution of both Abad and her family. To escape this unrest and find security, her parents urged her to move overseas.

During what was initially a pit stop in California, Abad’s amazement with the unencumbered vibrancy and freedom of expression in San Francisco acted as a catalyst for her abundant life-long career. Informed by her experiences with despotism, political refuge, and immigration, Abad began to create work underscoring these disquietudes.

Exhibition view at MCAD, Manila, (2018). Image courtesy of Walker Art Center, shared with permission

The years that followed involved travel, living in a number of different countries, and connecting with creative communities in every hemisphere. Abad was able to learn artistic techniques from different cultures and gather materials from diverse environments, which she would later incorporate into her own practice, especially her mask painting series.

Along the gallery’s pink walls at the Walker, hand-stitched meandering lines run across canvas hanging more than two meters high. Though it was not Abad’s intention for her art to be seen from both sides, viewers are able to experience her work in a more intimate way by observing the artist’s hand, evident from the delicate stitching on each backside. Part of her signature trapunto painting technique, these sewn sections of canvas puff up with padding as geometric patterns house vibrant areas of color. Calling to Africa’s masks and abstract carving, Tibet’s Thangka tapestries, and Italy’s trapunto techniques, Abad’s series of masks are a conglomeration of community encounters as well as real stories of strength and strife inspired by those that she met along the way.

Abad’s retrospective is on view at the Walker Art Center until September 3. Later this month, Tina Kim Gallery in New York will be showcasing Abad’s work in a solo exhibition, as well.

Image courtesy of Pacita Abad Art Estate, shared with permission

Exhibition view at the Walker (2023). Image courtesy of Walker Art Center, shared with permission

Image courtesy of Pacita Abad Art Estate, shared with permission

Abad with the work. Image courtesy of Walker Art Center, shared with permission

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Layered and Embellished Trapunto Paintings Exude Spirit in Pacita Abad’s First Retrospective appeared first on Colossal.

From the 17th through the 19th centuries, a genre of Japanese art called ukiyo-e—translating to “pictures of the floating world”—centered on colorful depictions of landscapes, performers and sumo wrestlers, and scenes from folklore and history in vivid woodblock prints. Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), one of the most renowned artists in the tradition—and one of the last—was famous for his chromatic vistas depicting recognizable features like blossoming cherry trees and the omnipresent snow-capped cone of Mount Fuji. His final project, an ambitious collection of 120 woodblock illustrations, became known as One Hundred Famous Views of Edo and depicts what is now Tokyo throughout the seasons.

A new reprint from Taschen pairs each of the artist’s remarkable prints with text by authors Lorenz Bichler and Melanie Trede, celebrating the scenery, the city’s history, and Hiroshige’s contribution to ukiyo-e. The authors highlight how the colorful depictions of the country helped define the Western world’s visual interpretation of Japan, referencing the influence of Japonisme on European decorative arts and painters like Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Degas, and James McNeill Whistler. The new edition is presented in a case and bound in a traditional Japanese style known as stab binding in which a series of holes are punched in the cover and the spine is elegantly bound with string.

Scheduled for release next month, you can pre-order One Hundred Famous Views of Edo: The Complete Plates on Taschen’s website. You might also enjoy Hiroshige’s instructional shadow puppet prints and a look back at a recent exhibition focusing on landscapes in the Art Institute of Chicago’s ukiyo-e archive.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article ‘One Hundred Famous Views of Edo’: Hiroshige’s Seminal Series of Woodblock Prints Gets a Vibrant Reprint appeared first on Colossal.