Back at Adobe we introduced Firefly text-to-vector creation, but behind the scenes it was really text-to-image-to-tracing. That could be fine, actually, provided that the conversion process did some smart things around segmenting the image, moving objects onto their own layers, filling holes, and then harmoniously vectorizing the results. I’m not sure whether Adobe actually got around to shipping that support.
In any event, StarVector promises actual, direct creation of SVG. The results look simple enough that it hasn’t yet piqued my interest enough to spend my time with it, but I’m glad that folks are trying.
Three years ago (seems like an eternity), I remarked regarding generative imaging.,
The disruption always makes me think of The Onion’s classic “Dolphins Evolve Opposable Thumbs“: “Holy f*ck, that’s it for us monkeys.” My new friend August replied with the armed dolphin below.
I’m reminded of this seeing Google’s latest AI-powered translation (?!) work. Just don’t tell them about abacuses!
Meet DolphinGemma, an AI helping us dive deeper into the world of dolphin communication. pic.twitter.com/2wYiSSXMnn
Wait, first, WTF is MCP? Check out my old friend (and former Illustrator PM) Mordy’s quick & approachable breakdown of Model Context Protocol and why it promises to be interesting to us (e.g. connecting Claude to the images on one’s hard drive).
The team showed of good new stuff, including—OMG—showing how to use Photoshop! (On an extremely personal level, “This is what it’s like when worlds colliiiide!!”)
As it marks its 50th anniversary, Microsoft is updating Copilot with a host of new features that bring it in line with other AI systems like ChatGPT or Claude. We got a look at them during the tech giant’s 50th anniversary event today, including new search capabilities, Copilot Vision which will be able to analyze real-time video from a mobile camera. Copilot will also now be able to use the web on your behalf. Here’s everything you missed.
2025 marks an unheard-of 40th year in Adobe creative director Russell Brown’s remarkable tenure at the company. I remember first encountering him via the Out Of Office message marking his 15-year (!) sabbatical (off to Burning Man with Rick Smolan, if I recall correctly). If it weren’t for Russell’s last-minute intervention back in 2002, when I was living out my last hours before being laid off from Adobe (interviewing at Microsoft, lol), I’d never have had the career I did, and you wouldn’t be reading this now.
In any event, early in the pandemic Russell kept himself busy & entertained by taking a wild series of self portraits. Having done some 3D printing with him (the output of which still forms my Twitter avatar!), I thought, “Hmm, what would those personas look like as plastic action figures? Let’s see what ChatGPT thinks.” And voila, here they are.
Click through the tweet below if you’re curious about the making-of process (e.g. the app starting to render him very faithfully, then freaking out midway through & insisting on delivering a more stylized, less specific rendition). But forget that—how insane is it that any of this is possible??
Can you show ChatGPT 5 portraits of legendary Adobe creative director Russell Brown and get a whole set of action figures? Yep! pic.twitter.com/gLTIcGqLJ0
It’s pretty stunning what a single creator can now create in a matter of days! Check out this sequence & accompanying explanation (click on the post) from Martin Gent:
I tried to make this title sequence six months ago, but the AI tools just weren’t up to it. Today it’s a different story. Sound on!
Since the launch of ChatGPT’s 4o image generator last week, I’ve been testing a new workflow to bring my characters – Riley Harper and her dog,… pic.twitter.com/SMgjDnJWH1
People can talk all the smack they want about “AI slop”—and to be sure, there’s tons of soulless slop going around—but good luck convincing me that there’s no creativity in remixing visual idioms, and in reskinning the world in never-before-possible ways. We’re just now dipping a toe into this new ocean.
ChatGPT 4o’s new image gen is insane. Here’s what Severance would look like in 8 famous animation styles
1/8: Rankin/Bass – That nostalgic stop-motion look like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Cozy and janky. pic.twitter.com/5rFL8SGttS
It’s worth noting that creative synthesis like this doesn’t “just happen,” much less in some way that replaces or devalues the human perspective & taste at the heart of the process: everything still hinges on having an artistic eye, a wealth of long-cultivated taste, and the willpower to make one’s vision real. It’s just that the distance between that vision & reality is now radically shorter than it’s ever been.
It’s funny to think of anyone & anything as being an “O.G.” in the generative space—but having been around for the last several years, Runway has as solid a claim as anyone. They’ve just dropped their Gen-4 model. Check out some amazing examples of character consistency & camera control:
Today we’re introducing Gen-4, our new series of state-of-the-art AI models for media generation and world consistency. Gen-4 is a significant step forward for fidelity, dynamic motion and controllability in generative media.
First impressions: I am very impressed! 10 second generations, and this is the only model that could do falling backwards off a cliff. Love it! pic.twitter.com/GZS1B7Wpq0
Currently asking ChatGPT for faux-German words like Überintelligenzchatbotrichtigkeitsahnungsscham:
“The bizarre cocktail of joy, panic, and existential dread a product manager experiences when an AI answers a tough product question better than they could.” pic.twitter.com/yVZVdoKZi9
Seeing this, I truly hope that Adobe isn’t as missing in action as they seem to be; fingers crossed.
In the meantime, simply uploading a pair of images & a simple prompt is more than enough to get some compelling results. See subsequent posts in the thread for details, including notes on some shortcomings I observed.
A quick test of ChatGPT virtual product photography, combining real shoes with a quick render from @krea_ai/@bfl_ml Flux: “Please put these shoes into the image of the basketball court, held aloft in the foreground by a man’s hand.” pic.twitter.com/k1AhTdHFcs
We’re speed-running our way through the novelty->saturation->nausea cycle of Studio Ghibli-style meme creation, but I find this idea fresher: turn Ghibli characters into Dorothea Lange-style photos:
In the first three workdays of this week, we saw three new text-to-image models arrive! And now that it’s Thursday, I’m like, “WTF, no new Flux/Runway/etc.?” 🙂
For the last half-year or so, Ideogram has been my go-to model (see some of my more interesting creations), so I’m naturally delighted to see them moving things forward with the new 3.0 model:
I don’t yet quite understand the details of how their style-reference feature will work, but I’m excited to dig in.
Meanwhile, here’s a thread of some really impressive initial creations from the community:
We launched Ideogram 3.0 just three hours ago, and we’ve already seen an incredible wave of striking images. Here are 16 of our favorites so far:
Nearly twenty years ago (!), I wrote here about how The Killing’s Gotta Stop—ironically, perhaps, about then-new Microsoft apps competing with Adobe. I rejected false, zero-sum framing then, and I reject it now.
Having said that, my buddy Bilawal’s provocative framing in this video gets at something important: if Adobe doesn’t get on its game, actually delivering the conversational editing capabilities we publicly previewed 2+ years ago, things are gonna get bad. I’m reminded of the axiom that “AI will not replace you, but someone using AI just might.” The same goes for venerable old Photoshop competing against AI-infused & AI-first tools.
In any case, if you’re interested in the current state of the art around conversational editing (due to be different within weeks, of course!), I think you’ll enjoy this deep dive into what is—and isn’t—possible via Gemini:
Specific topic sections, if you want to jump right to ’em:
00:00 Conversational Editing with Google’s Multimodal AI
The old (hah! but it seems that way) gal turns two today.
The ride has been… interesting, hasn’t it? I remain eager to see what all the smart folks at Adobe have been cooking up. As a user of Photoshop et al. for the last 30+ years, I selfishly hope it’s great!
In the meantime, I’ll admit that watching the video above—which I wrote & then made with the help of Davis Brown (son of Russell)—makes me kinda blue. Everything it depicts was based on real code we had working at the time. (I insisted that we not show anything that we didn’t think we could have shipping within three months’ time.) How much of that has ever gotten into users’ hands?
Yeah.
But as I say, I’m hoping and rooting for the best. My loyalty has never been to Adobe or to any other made-up entity, but rather to the spirit & practice of human creativity. Always will be, until they drag me off this rock. Rock the F on.
Man, I’m old enough to remember writing a doc called “Yes, And…” immediately upon the launch of DALL•E in 2022, arguing that of course Adobe should develop its own generative models and of course it should also offer customers a choice of great third-party models—because of course no single model would be the best for every user in every situation.
And I’m old enough to remember being derided for just not Getting It™ about how selling per-use access to Firefly was going to be a goldmine, so of course we wouldn’t offer users a choice. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Here’s a little holiday-appropriate experiment featuring a shot of my dad & me (in Lego form, naturally) at my grandmother’s family farm in County Mayo. Sláinte!
Speaking of reskinning imagery (see last several posts), check out what’s now possible via Google’s Gemini model, below. I’ve been putting it to the test & will share results shortly.
Alright, Google really killed it here.
You can easily swap your garment just by uploading the pieces to Gemini Flash 2.0 and telling it what to do. pic.twitter.com/pNPBkIdRqy
This temporally coherent inpainting is utterly bonkers. It’s just the latest—and perhaps the most promising—in myriad virtual try-on techniques I’ve seen & written about over the years.
I love seeing the Magnific team’s continued rapid march in delivering identity-preserving reskinning
IT’S FINALLY HERE!
Mystic Structure Reference!
Generate any image controlling structural integrity Infinite use cases! Films, 3D, video games, art, interiors, architecture… From cartoon to real, the opposite, or ANYTHING in between!
This example makes me wish my boys were, just for a moment, 10 years younger and still up for this kind of father/son play. 🙂
Storyboarding? No clue! But with some toy blocks, my daughter’s wild imagination, and a little help from Magnific Structure Reference, we built a castle attacked by dragons. Her idea coming to life powered up with AI magic. Just a normal Saturday Morning. Behold, my daughter’s… pic.twitter.com/52tDZokmIT
“Rather than removing them from the process, it actually allowed [the artists] to do a lot more—so a small team can dream a lot bigger.”
Paul Trillo’s been killing it for years (see innumerable previous posts), and now he’s given a peek into how his team has been pushing 2D & 3D forward with the help of custom-trained generative AI:”
Traditional 2d animation meets the bleeding edge of experimental techniques. This is a behind the scenes look at how we at Asteria brought the old and the new together in this throwback animation “A Love Letter to Los Angeles” and collaboration with music artist Cuco and visual… pic.twitter.com/3eWSdgckXn
A passing YouTube vid made me wonder about the relative strengths of World War II-era bombers, and ChatGPT quickly obliged by making me a great little summary, including a useful table. I figured, however, that it would totally fail at making me a useful infographic from the data—and that it did!
Just for the lulz, I then ran the prompt (“An infographic comparing the Avro Lancaster, Boeing B-17, and Consolidated B-24 Liberator bombers”) through a variety of apps (Ideogram, Flux, Midjourney, and even ol’ Firefly), creating a rogue’s gallery of gibberish & Franken-planes. Check ’em out.
Currently amusing myself with how charmingly bad every AI image generator is at making infographics—each uniquely bizarre! pic.twitter.com/U3cs8ySoVa
By combining @pika_labs Pikaframes and @freepik, I now have the magical ability to jump through space and time and in this example, music becomes a transformative element teleporting this woman to a new location. This is how it’s done. 1/6
Generate image (in this example, using Google Imagen).
Apply background segmentation.
Synthesize a new background, and run what I think is a fine-tuned version of IC-Light (using Stable Diffusion) to relight the entire image, harmonizing foreground/background. Note that identity preservation (face shape, hair color, dress pattern, etc.) is very good but not perfect; see changes in the woman’s hair color, expression, and dress pattern.
Put the original & modified images into Pika, then describe the desired transformation (smooth transition, flowers growing, clouds moving, etc.).
Another day, another ~infinite canvas for ideation & synthesis. This time, somewhat to my surprise, the surface comes from VSCO—a company whose users I’d have expected to be precious & doctrinaire in their opposition to any kind of AI-powered image generation. But who knows, “you can just do things.” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The capturing work was led by Harry Nelder and Amity Studio. Nelder used his 16-camera rig to capture the recent winners. The reconstruction software was a combination of a cloud-based platform created by Nelder, which is expected to be released later this year, along with Postshot. Nelder further utilized the Radiance Field method known as Gaussian Splatting for the reconstruction. A compilation video of all the captures, recently posted by BAFTA, was edited by Amity Studio
Check it out (probably easier to grok by watching vs. reading a description):
From the static camera feed, EditIQ initially generates multiple virtual feeds, emulating a team of cameramen. These virtual camera shots termed rushes are subsequently assembled using an automated editing algorithm, whose objective is to present the viewer with the most vivid scene content.
Tired: Random “slot machine”-style video generation Inspired: Placing & moving simple guidance objects to control results: Check out VideoNoiseWarp:
Every now and then something comes along that feels like it could change everything… NoiseWarp + CogVideoX lets you animate live action scenes with rough mockups!
Here’s the tutorial! This video combines AI-generated elements (balloon, kite, surfboard, and backgrounds) with my own real-world practical effects and stop motion.
The YouTube mobile app can now tap into Google’s Veo model to generate video, as shown below. Hmm—this feels pretty niche at the moment, but it may suggest the shape of things to come (ubiquitous media synthesis, anywhere & anytime it’s wanted).
For the longest time, Firefly users’ #1 request was to use images to guide composition of new images. Now that Firefly Video has arrived, you can use a reference image to guide the creation of video. Here’s a slick little demo from Paul Trani:
These changes, reported by Forbes, sound like reasonable steps in the right direction:
Starting now, Google will be adding invisible watermarks to images that have been edited on a Pixel using Magic Editor’s Reimagine feature that lets users change any element in an image by issuing text prompts.
The new information will show up in the AI Info section that appears when swiping up on an image in Google Photos.
The feature should make it easier for users to distinguish real photos from AI-powered manipulations, which will be especially useful as Reimagined photos continue to become more realistic.
But how do we go from ironic laughs to actual usefulness? Krea is taking a swing by integrating (I think) the Flux imaging model with the DeepSeek LLM:
Krea Chat is here.
a brand new way of creating images and videos with AI.
It doesn’t yet offer the kind of localized refinements people want (e.g. “show me a dog on the beach,” then “put a hat on the dog” and don’t change anything outside the hat area). Even so, it’s great to be able to create an image, add a photo reference to refine it, and then create a video. Here’s my cute, if not exactly accurate, first attempt. 🙂
Wow—check out this genuinely amazing demo from my old friend (and former Illustrator PM) Mordy:
In this video, I show how you can use Gemini in the free Google AI Studio as your own personal tutor to help you get your work done. After you watch me using it to learn how to take a sketch I made on paper to recreating a logo in Illustrator, I promise you’ll be running to do the same.
We propose MatAnyone, a robust framework tailored for target-assigned video matting. Specifically, building on a memory-based paradigm, we introduce a consistent memory propagation module via region-adaptive memory fusion, which adaptively integrates memory from the previous frame. This ensures semantic stability in core regions while preserving fine-grained details along object boundaries.
Users can enter search terms like “a person skating with a lens flare” to find corresponding clips within their media library. Adobe says the media intelligence AI can automatically recognize “objects, locations, camera angles, and more,” alongside spoken words — providing there’s a transcript attached to the video. The feature doesn’t detect audio or identify specific people, but it can scrub through any metadata attached to video files, which allows it to fetch clips based on shoot dates, locations, and camera types. The media analysis runs on-device, so doesn’t require an internet connection, and Adobe reiterates that users’ video content isn’t used to train any AI models.
Goodbye, endless scrolling. Hello, AI-powered search panel. With the all-new Media Intelligence in #PremierePro (beta), the content of your clips is automatically recognized, including objects, locations, camera angles & more. Just input your search to find exactly what you need. pic.twitter.com/cOYXDKKaFI
