When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Adobe unveiled new AI additions to its Firefly image generation tool, plus Photoshop, Premiere, and Lightroom. First, there was generative AI, allowing creators, editors and memelords to create artificial worlds with just a few words. Now, Adobe is offering the ability to edit those worlds with Prompt to Edit, a new feature within Firefly, plus audio capabilities. Adobe announced the new capabilities at its MAX conference, where it typically rolls out new capabilities within its Creative Cloud suite as well as Firefly, its AI image generator -- which now includes soundtracks and AI voiceovers.

This pictorial aims to critically consider the nature of text-to-audio and text-to-music generative tools in the context of explainable AI. As a group of experimental musicians and researchers, we are enthusiastic about the creative potential of these tools and have sought to understand and evaluate them from perspectives of prompt creation, control, usability, understandability, explainability of the AI process, and overall aesthetic effectiveness of the results. One of the challenges we have identified that is not explicitly addressed by these tools is the inherent semantic gap in using text-based tools to describe something as abstract as music. Other gaps include explainability vs. useability, and user control and input vs. the human creative process. The aim of this pictorial is to raise questions for discussion and make a few general suggestions on the kinds of improvements we would like to see in generative AI music tools.