Name: Turning AI Tools Into Profit Proves Tricky For Big Tech
Uploaded: 2023-10-12T18:17:00Z
Duration: 6 min 28 s
Description: The big tech companies behind new artificial intelligence tools are struggling to make money off them. WSJ reporter Tom Dotan joins host Zoe Thomas to explain the reasons why and how tech companies like Microsoft, Google and Adobe are changing their approach. Photo Illustration By Emil Lendof/The Wall Street Journal

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The big tech companies behind new artificial intelligence tools are struggling to make money off them. WSJ reporter Tom Dotan joins host Zoe Thomas to explain the reasons why and how tech companies like Microsoft, Google and Adobe are changing their approach. Photo Illustration By Emil Lendof/The Wall Street Journal

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Turning AI Tools Into Profit Proves Tricky For Big Tech

Zoe: Welcome to "Tech News Briefing." It's Wednesday, October 11th. I'm Zoe Thomas for the Wall Street Journal. At Adobe's annual MAX Conference, the company unveiled an update to its generative artificial intelligence image editing model Firefly and it plans to show off previews of other AI creative tools too. But it's doing this at a time when AI products are still facing concerns about copyright and whether they'll increase misinformation online. Ashley Still, Adobe's Senior Vice President of Digital Media, is at the forefront of how the company is dealing with these questions, and she joins me now from the company's ongoing conference in LA. Ashley, thanks for coming on "Tech News Briefing."

Ashley: Thank you for having me.

Zoe: I wanna start with this update of the Firefly program that you've announced at Adobe MAX. What is different in this version?

Ashley: We improved the photographic quality of the model as well as human rendering and added a bunch of exciting new features. So, generative match, for example, enables you to apply the style of an image that you have to generate new images. So, if you have a perfect scene that you love, you just love the color and the lighting, you can basically use that reference image to create new content in that style. New photo settings enable you to have new creative control just like you would with a manual camera. And we're always improving our text prompt capabilities.

Zoe: How do you differentiate this image generator from others that are already on the market that maybe folks are familiar with, like DALL-E, for example?

Ashley: One of the things that's really important to us is making sure that all of the content that Firefly creates is commercially safe. And a big differentiator for Adobe is how we train our models. So, we are fortunate that we have a service called Adobe Stock where it's hundreds of millions of great images, video, 3D models, lots of different types of content, and we actually have a license to train all of our AI models on that content, which means that the copyright is clear. We also have something called content credentials which you can think of as a nutrition label for content. We're adding a capability, a piece of metadata called the do-not-train tag to content credentials, and artists will be able to use that tag to make sure that their content cannot be used either for model training or for things like generative match.

Zoe: I wanna talk about something that is a little different but certainly related. We're seeing this war unfold in Israel, we are preparing for elections here in the US, and one big concern around generative AI images is how they could be used in misinformation. Firefly, for example, you're talking about all of these things to ensure that it's clear that these images are labeled as generative AI, but how do you ensure that the wrong actors don't change that, don't use your tools to, say, remove a background and make something that didn't happen look as though it did?

Ashley: I'll go back to this critical concept of this digital nutrition label for content. What's incredibly important to fight disinformation is transparency, and that is what content credentials enables, is transparency around how content's been edited, whether AI has been used as part of that editing process. And actually, one of the other things that we're introducing along with all of our industry partners at MAX is a very simple content credentials pin. It's effectively just a little icon that can be applied to images across the internet where consumers can actually just click on it and get information about how that content has been produced.

Zoe: But metadata can be changed.

Ashley: It can, but the metadata for content credentials is actually not editable and there are a number of different protections that we have to make sure that information is not stripped from the file.

Zoe: I wanna talk about a tool that you're launching today, Wednesday. You'll be announcing something called Dub Dub Dub which uses AI to automate voice dubbing, so maybe in the future people can hear me in French or something like that. Can you explain how that works, the tech behind it?

Ashley: Absolutely, and the example that you gave is great. What Project Dub Dub Dub does is make it incredibly easy, really instantaneous, to translate your audio into many different languages. And so what's exciting about it is it obviously uses your content and your voice.

Zoe: One thing that's interested me in terms of the dubbing technology is simply that languages don't always have exactly overlapping words. How does Adobe take into account something like that?

Ashley: Well, that's the power of training on all of this data, because you're actually getting that culturalization to your point, actually how someone would say something in another language. And so particularly with video and with a person that's speaking, there's a lot of innovation around lip movements as well, because it's not a direct word-for-word translation pretty much ever, right? It's never that simple.

Zoe: All right, Ashley Still from Adobe, thank you so much for joining us for this conversation.

Ashley: Thank you for having me.

Zoe: And that's it for "Tech News Briefing." Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with supervising producer Melony Roy. For more tech stories, you can head over to our website, wsj.com. I'm Zoe Thomas for the Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening.

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