Adobe announced Wednesday (September 13) that it was formally launching its Firefly generative artificial intelligence (AI) to the market in its Creative Cloud, Adobe Express, and Adobe Experience Cloud. The announcement was made after about a semester of the product undergoing beta testing.
What this meant was that Firefly features like generative fill and generative expand in Photoshop are now available without having to install the beta. In addition, the company is also launching Firefly as a standalone web app, officially making it a product within the Adobe product portfolio.
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How Would Firefly Users be Charged?
An important update regarding Firefly, Adobe added, was that they also announced how it would charge Firefly users moving forward, with the company detailing it would be using a system called "generative credits" to measure how often users interact with its models. This meant that a user would consume one credit every time a user clicks "generate" to create a Firefly image.
The company also retooled the Firefly web app so that it does not automatically start generating images before a user makes all of the necessary tweaks.
Those who are currently on existing paid Adobe plans would get access to some generative credits, with TechCrunch providing a full list of credits based on the plan users have. For example, users who have a full-suite Creative Cloud subscription would have 1,000 credits, while free users who have an Adobe ID for Adobe Express, Adobe Firefly, and Creative Cloud would only have 25.
Once users have run out of credits, those who are subscribed to a plan would not lose access to Firefly but it would run significantly slower. With this rationale. Adobe is expecting users who subscribe to Adobe Firefly and Adobe Express Premium would be offered additional subscription packs if they have exhausted their credits before the end of the month.
However, any specific pricing for such plans is yet to be determined and announced by the company.
Credit Limits
In addition, Adobe users subscribed to Creative Cloud, Adobe Firefly, Adobe Express, and Adobe Stock would not be subject to the credit limits until November 1.
"All of these models are very large," Adobe VP for Generative AI Alexandru Costin told TechCrunch. "They run in the cloud and are expensive to run. And we are optimizing them for quality of output, not for inference speed."
Because of such setbacks, Costin added, the company made it imperative to protect its user base to make sure they have access to the service and to ensure fair use of the service.
Costin also said his team looked at a token-based system, but the feedback from early testers was that it would be complicated to explain to customers. Costin additionally stressed that, since the company mostly trained the models with images from its Adobe Stock collection, they were commercially safe for businesses to use.
Meanwhile, Adobe said Firefly users have already generated over two billion images as of press time.
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