Adobe reworks its apps for AI assistants, pursues ChatGPT integration

By Stephen Nellis

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Adobe said on Tuesday its video and image editing tools can be controlled by chatting with them, adding that it is working with ChatGPT creator OpenAI to let users directly control one of its apps with the popular chatbot service.

Adobe is the creator of Photoshop and Premiere, widely used tools in the photography and film industries. In 2023, it rolled out Firefly, a service for generating images and other content with text prompts.

On Tuesday, Adobe executives said the company overhauled its apps to work with artificial intelligence assistants that can create and edit content by having a conversation. Behind the scenes, multiple AI “agents” would tap buttons and move sliders in the app to make those changes happen, similar to how a human assistant would carry out requests.

But human users will still also be able to take hold of those sliders and buttons to make edits, rather than relying solely on a text chat.

Now that Adobe has revamped its apps to work with AI assistants, it can more easily integrate them with third-party services, said Ely Greenfield, Adobe’s chief technology officer for its digital media business. The company is working to integrate its Adobe Express app with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which will let users start a conversation in the chatbot to start a project there. It can then be edited in ChatGPT or finished in Adobe’s apps.

“You can adjust the edits that the agent in ChatGPT is making, so you can do a little bit of direct manipulation there,” Greenfield said. “And then, if you want, you can bring it into the Express app, where you can continue to have a conversation with it using the design agent that’s built into Express now, and you have access to the full suite of editing capabilities and tools that are part of Express.”

On Tuesday, Adobe said the AI assistant in Express is available now, but did not give a timeline for when the ChatGPT integration would become available.

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Thomas Derpinghaus)