Adobe explores OpenAI partnership as it adds AI video tools

SAN FRANCISCO – Adobe is in the early stages of allowing third-party generative artificial intelligence tools such as OpenAI’s Sora and others inside its widely used video editing software, the U.S. software maker said on Monday.

Adobe’s Premiere Pro app is widely used in the television and film industries. The San Jose, California, company is planning this year to add AI-based features to the software, such as the ability to fill in parts of a scene with AI-generated objects or remove distractions from a scene without any tedious manual work from a video editor.

Both those features will rely on Firefly, an AI model that Adobe has already deployed in its Photoshop software for editing still images. Amid competition from OpenAI, Midjourney and other startups, Adobe has sought to set itself apart by training its Firefly system data it has full rights to and offering indemnity to users against copyright claims.

But Adobe also said on Monday that it is developing a way to let its users tap third-party tools from OpenAI, as well as startups Runway and Pika Labs, to generate and use video within Premiere Pro. The move could help Adobe, whose shares have fallen about 20% this year, address Wall Street’s concerns that AI tools for generating images and videos put its core businesses at risk.

OpenAI has demonstrated its Sora model generating realistic videos based on text prompts but has not made the technology public or given a timeline for when it will be available. Adobe, which released a demonstration of Sora being used to generate video in Premiere Pro, described the demonstration as an “experiment” and gave no timeline for when it would become available.

Deepa Subramaniam, Adobe’s vice president of product marketing for creative professional apps, said that Adobe has not yet settled how revenue generated by third-party AI tools used on its software platform will be split up between Adobe and outside developers.

But Subramaniam said that Adobe users will be alerted when they are not using Adobe’s “commercially safe” AI models and that all videos produced by Premiere Pro will indicate clearly which AI technology was used to create them.

“Our industry-leading AI ethics approach and the human bias work that we do, none of that’s going away,” Subramaniam told Reuters. “We’re really excited to do is explore a world where you can have more choice beyond that through third-party models.”

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