And here are links to the various Adobe plug-ins and connectors we are publishing which allow over 70 Adobe tools to be installed on OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic, Microsoft Copilot, Slack, and other marketplaces. These combine tools from Adobe Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, Frame.io, Lightroom, Acrobat, and Express among others, in a single installation that then provides a breadth of creative and productivity tools to your LLM of choice.
an abstract color image in a rainbow of geometric color
I chat a lot with creative professionals and am endlessly fascinated by the varying POVs and sentiments about AI and creativity. We’ve been building our creative agent around a clear premise: that creators want AI to help with the execution, not replace their judgment.
This morning we released Adobe’s 2026 Creators’ Toolkit Report — a survey of more than 16,000 creators globally on how they’re using creative AI and the findings reinforce that view.
87% of creators say creative AI has accelerated the growth of their business or audience. But what comes after that number is just as telling.
When we asked what would make creators most comfortable giving an AI agent more independence, the answers weren’t about more capabilities. They were about control: the ability to review and undo at any point, transparency into what the agent is doing and why. And 85% said the final creative decision should always remain theirs.
That’s creators telling us exactly how they want to work with agentic AI, and it describes precisely what we’ve been building with our creative agent, which powers the AI Assistant in Firefly. The agent handles orchestration and execution. You stay in the director’s chair. The goal isn’t to automate away creativity but to remove the friction that stands between a compelling idea and bringing it to life.
One more finding worth sitting with: 93% say creative AI helps them produce content faster, but 57% say outputs still need moderate or extensive editing before they’re ready to share. Faster to draft isn’t the same as ready to publish. The creators breaking through aren’t just producing more content, they’re the ones using creative AI to make the work actually theirs.
This is an awesome intersection of my day job and my volunteer work with CodeAI, not to mention my love for Indian storytelling which was born from my UCLA class in 1991 when i read the Mahabharata and Ramanaya!
My colleagues at Adobe just turned me on to a fun project called Kathāvatār- Indian folklore reimagined using Adobe Firefly. Kathāvatār is a collection of five short films created in partnership with India Film Project (IFP) and five visionary Indian filmmakers, exploring how timeless folklore can be reimagined through modern creative tools.
Rooted in Indian myths, folktales, and artistic traditions, each film blends human imagination, expressive storytelling, and AI-assisted creativity to build immersive, sensory-rich visual worlds.
From Himalayan legends and Panchatantra tales to regional folklore from Bengal and celebrations like Makar Sankranti, these stories reflect a balance between cultural heritage and contemporary filmmaking. The filmmakers utilized AI on Adobe Firefly, Photoshop, Premiere and After Effects as creative collaborators, helping visualize ideas, explore new aesthetics, and streamline production.
Here are the AI Short films from the Kathāvatār project :
Yapasouraus
Migoi
Language of birds
Uttarayan
The barbers secret
And here are the Behind The Scenes videos that show the production process and interviews with the creative teams that made the films:
And here’s my first run through of a demo i’m giving to friends of the Adobe Firefly AI Assistant, riffing on some graphic and logo concepts for a new Taco/Empanada stand in my beach town!
Having read and consumed a lot of media on psychedelics in the last year I must say I’m struck by how male dominant the space can feel, I’m sure April’s approach will enhance empathy and understanding for women seeking voices of women in this space.
I volunteered to help April improve the online presence for the 80+ episoides she had created from 2020-2023 and spent the last few weeks using a variety of fun tools to port the site, add a ton of rich meta-data, and do some SEO tuning to try to improve traffic and discovery.
I set out to enhance the visual appeal of the podcast series by creating all new episode covers/art to unify the look and feel of the series. I wanted accentuate the woman-first energy of the series and April’s vision for helping women learn and use these entheogens in their personal journeys. Using a combination of Adobe’s Firefly and Midjourney tools (AI image synthesis from text prompts) I iterated through several hundred prompts to generate really fun concept art.
Airtable was a fantastic tool to use as a collaborative space to gather meta-data for the podcast episodes and related art/episodes and URLs for Spotify and Youtube. I had been invited to use airtable dozens of times and always thought “what the heck, another collaboration app”–wow, so impressed–one of my new favorite tools! Will be using a lot in the future to collaborate and gather info and build project consensus with colleagues.
I primed the AI with a lot of variations to try to get more diverse and inclusive images out of the system. Midjourney was particularly problematic in giving me skinny, white, unhealthy looking “model” women that looked like they were straight out of a fashion shoot. To get more average/normal looking women of different ethnic/age/body types was a lot harder than it should be! I used yellow/green for Cannabis articles, purple/orange for Ketamine, and pink/red/blue for Shrooms. This color segmentation gave me groups of images that look great together on the landing pages.
Notice the AI images for Ketamine themed podcast episodes use purple and orange themes. Adding words like “middle-aged”, “curvy” or “plump”, and lots of “in deep thought, reflecting on an important memory, processing therapeutic thoughts in a therapy session” allowed me to get images that felt on brand to The High Guide’s podcast content — women discussing and sharing their experience with Psychedelics in their own mental health and wellness journeys.For the series of articles April has written on different psychedelic mushroom strains I generated variations on a illustrative theme that suggest mushrooms. This gave the group of articles a similar look/feel that works in the gallery control that groups these articles together. For each individual article the photography and more accurate depictions of each strain is important–which is within the body text on the page.Adobe’s Firefly AI tool was a great creative playground to generate on brand images for the podcast of women in “therapeutic introspection” or “reflecting on important thoughts”. Midjourney was another tool I used to create Podcast cover images for The High Guide podcast website. Midjourney’s UI was still chatbot based inside of Discord in Jan 2024 when I made the first batch of images–this is a HORRIBLE interface, i believe they are working on putting a proper UX/UI on the front end, more akin to Adobe’s already shipping Firefly. I think Adobe is super well positioned to get this right and to be the leading tool for creatives.
I had a lot of fun porting the website from Squarespace over to a Elementor hosted WordPress installation. We used Airtable to organize the meta-data for the 80+ episodes, a WordPress plug-in called AirWPSync to sync fields from Airtable into ACF custom fields in WordPress, and Elementor’s data-binding to connect template blocks to the fields. The result is the site is now database rendered and we can add podcast episodes and manage all episode pages, from a single template. Yay.
This is the new podcast episode template, which uses new fields for SEO optimized titles and excerpt blocks (which i batch generated with ChatGPT), and AI generated images for featured graphics which i used midjourney and firefly (adobe) ai image generation.
I’ll now keep an eye on how Google crawls the new content to see if we can improve organic discovery to this rich content. Super enjoyed this project and excited to update this post as I have more results to share.
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