Do you want allegedly useful "artificial intelligence" features in your face in every single service and tool you use, constantly, unceasingly, and demanding you pay more for it? The latest perpetrator is Adobe, who's now raising the price of its priciest Creative Cloud plans next month and justifying it by bundling in a bunch of generative AI tools. The Creative Cloud All Apps plan is being renamed Creative Cloud Pro, because apparently tools that cost hundreds of dollars a year and aren't available as full purchases aren't for "professionals" unless they're paying the maximum amount. If you're in the US, Canada, or Mexico, and if you're currently subscribed to All Apps, you'll be moved over to the Pro plan starting on June 17th… with a price bump from 60 per month to 70 per month for standard, yearly-subscribed users in the US. Month-to-month prices will jump from the already-sky-high 90 per month to 105 per month.

If you tilted your ears in a certain direction on Monday, you could make out a resounding cheer from the creative class across social media platforms and various Discord servers. That's because the Federal Trade Commission sued software company Adobe and two of its executives for "deceiving consumers" by all but forcing them "into year-long subscriptions through hidden early termination fees and numerous cancellation hurdles." "Adobe has had it coming for years," New York journalist Nolan Hicks stated. "I don't know of a single person who is rooting for Adobe on this," tweeted video essayist Scott Niswander. One viral meme urged the agency to "tear the bitch apart."

Adobe, the maker of Photoshop, Premiere, and other industry-standard tools in the Creative Suite package, has its foot in its mouth. Last week an update to the Creative Cloud terms of service set off alarms across the web as users interpreted the new wording to mean that the company was using their cloud storage files to train its generative AI systems. Not true, says Adobe in a non-apology post. According to the message from Creative Cloud design leader Scott Belsky and legal, security, and policy lead Dana Rao, it's all been a big misunderstanding. The language that customers had noticed, which said that the company's automated systems can "access, view, or listen to your Content," sure seems like the kind of thing that enables generative AI systems to be trained.

Just seven months, and reportedly 2 billion generated images, after first incorporating the beta AI into its suite of image and video editing tools, Adobe announced on Wednesday that its Firefly for Enterprise generative AI is now commercially available in Photoshop, Illustrator and Adobe Express workflows. And with the release comesa new Firefly web application as well, available as part of the company's Creative Cloud paid plans. The new subscription plan revolves around "generative credits" (GCs), which Adobe defines as, "tokens that enable customers to turn a text-based prompt into image and vector creations in Photoshop, Illustrator, Express and the Firefly web application." It's a made up currency that facilitates the transmutation of your money into faster access to the Firefly AI. Once users hit their monthly allowance of GCs, they'll be able to continue using Firefly, just at a slower rate.

Images generated using Adobe Firefly. Today marks the beginning of an important new chapter for our creative products with the introduction of Adobe Firefly, a family of generative AI models for creative expression. Firefly will mix the power of our applications with the promise of generative AI in ways that empower you to express your creative ideas with greater efficiency and without constraints. We're entering a world where you'll be able to bring your creative vision to life simply by describing what you want in your own words, or with a simple gesture in your app. A world where you can modify a video or cut an audio track simply by describing a desired mood.

Did you miss a session from MetaBeat 2022? Head over to the on-demand library for all of our featured sessions here. Today, at Adobe MAX, billed as the world's largest creativity conference, Adobe announced its commitment to support creatives by ensuring transparency in the use of generative AI tools. In a year dominated by the rise of generative AI tools – such as OpenAI's DALL-E 2, Google's Imagen, Stable Diffusion and MidJourney – Adobe, the world's leading computer graphics software company, said its approach to developing creator-centric generative AI offerings would leverage its Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) standards and invest in new research to support creatives' control over their style and work. The CAI is an Adobe-led initiative that enables creators to securely attach provenance data to digital content, helping ensure creators get credit for their work and audiences understand who made a piece of content and how it was created.

So you've heard of Adobe Sensei but don't really know what it is or how you can access it. Or maybe, you haven't even heard of it at all. With so much new software and tools constantly coming out, we know researching takes a long time and draws you away from your creative work. We've got all the answers right here to your questions about Adobe's artificial intelligence technology. Adobe Sensei is Adobe's artificial intelligence tool that integrates with Adobe software.

Adobe is one of those companies that I don't think we pay enough attention to -- it's been around since 1982, and the entire creative economy runs through its software. You don't just edit a photo, you Photoshop it. Premiere Pro and After Effects are industry-standard video production tools. Pro photographers all depend on Lightroom. We spend a lot of time on Decoder talking about the creator economy, but creators themselves spend all their time working in Adobe's tools. Adobe is in the middle of announcing new features for all those tools this week -- at its annual conference, Adobe Max. On this episode, I'm talking to Scott Belsky, chief product officer at Adobe, about the new features coming to Adobe's products, many of which focus on collaboration, and about creativity broadly -- who gets to be a creative, where they might work, and how they get paid. Scott is a big proponent of NFTs -- non-fungible tokens. You've probably heard about NFTs, but the quick version is that they allow people to buy and sell digital artwork and keep records of that ownership in a public blockchain. The idea is to create scarcity for digital goods, just like physical products -- to definitively say you own a digital piece of art, just like you own a physical piece of art. Of course, the internet is a giant copy machine, so it's a little more complicated than that -- but a lot of people, including Scott, think it's a revolution. In fact, Photoshop itself will be able to prepare an image to be an NFT very soon. I'm a little more skeptical -- so we got into it. Scott and I talk about all that. And we squeezed it into just about an hour. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. It's been a while since we've talked, I've always enjoyed our conversations. We have a lot to talk about. This episode of the podcast is coming out alongside Adobe Max, your big conference, and you're announcing a ton of new products there, including big features for Creative Cloud on the web. You're very bullish on NFTs, which I really want to talk to you about, and I have some big questions about the future of computing. I was looking at these topics and I was like, "Man, I need like two hours." But we're going to try to get it all in. Let's do it, a power hour. But I want to start with what I have come to think of as the Decoder questions; the basics of how Adobe as a company works. I think Adobe, as a company, we take for granted in the best way. The products are ubiquitous, they're famous, entire industries depend on them. But I feel like it's a company we don't know a lot about.

A blog post by Scott Belsky, chief product officer and executive vice president, Creative Cloud, Adobe, announced that the company acquired Allegorithmic, makers of Substance, the industry standard for 3D textures and material creation in game and video post-production. Hardcore gamers may be familiar with Allegorithmic's captivating 3D textures and graphics that are used in some of the world's most popular video games. According to an official Adobe press release, "By combining Allegorithmic's Substance 3D design tools with Creative Cloud's industry-leading imaging, video and motion graphics tools, Adobe will empower video game creators, VFX artists working in film and television, designers and marketers to deliver the next generation of immersive experiences." Allegorithmic is a fascinating company, but how does this acquisition fit in the Adobe ecosystem? Late last year, Adobe announced its intent on going all-in on augmented reality (AR) during its Adobe Max conference.

Adobe Sensei is one of the best AI platforms available in the market today. Adobe Sensei AI platforms lets its users make sense of the enormous data. Data is the most important commodity in this world. Major companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook are generating millions of GBs of data daily. Adobe Sensei platform makes sense of this data by using deep learning and contextual algorithms.