Artists lean in to experimentation at Adobe’s Make It with Generative AI workshop

Two days of artistry, creativity, and co-creation with Adobe Firefly

A photograph of two people (a woman with blonde hair and. a black man with glasses) with their backs to the camera, are looking at a computer screen. On the screen is a partial profile of a woman's neck and face against a mustard yellow background. Her face and hair (in a high bun) are in greyscale and her clothing (a green high-necked tunic) is in full color.

All photography by Myleen Hollero

Adobe Make It is a by-invitation workshop series that brings together creators and challenges them to explore, experiment, and create with new (and occasionally not-yet-released) Adobe tools. Earlier this month, Adobe hosted 20 artists, from around the world, and across disciplines (including illustration, design, photography, architecture, and video), for a two-day, in-person creative jam session in San Francisco’s SoMa district.

Adobe’s Principal Designer, Machine Intelligence & New Technology, Brooke Hopper, kicked things off with a history of the event, which we’ve been hosting in various iterations since 2016, that often take place around big moments in creative technology. She said, “We’ve been witness to another major shift in technology with generative AI and because it’s such a special time in the creative industry we knew it was time for another workshop—one that included Adobe Firefly.”

Director of Experience Design, Machine Intelligence & New Technologies at Adobe, Jason Linder defined the creative brief: Use Adobe’s generative AI tools to create full-color art that can be greyscale-printed on 2 pages of a 20-page generative art zine. Before dividing the roomful of people into ten teams of two, he shared a handful of prompts (with words like isolation, serenity, chaos, harmony) intended to ignite creative sparks, and asked everyone to rely on their intuition and artistry while leaning into the fun, weird, and unpredictable nature of generative AI.

From inspirational keynotes to the final print run, some highlights, in words and pictures, from the two-day event.

Bursts of inspiration: keynote speakers and a night at the museum

Ovetta Sampson, Director of UX Machine Learning at Google, urged everyone to dream with generative AI technologies, but to also be cautious of their capabilities (the ability for machines to understand human language) and limitations (that machines create without soul or morality) so their creations would be innovative, but also responsible. She ended with a reminder that although generative AI can seem creative, creativity is a uniquely human quality nourished by human abilities to take risks, break rules, daydream, and put lived experiences into our work.

A photograph of a Black woman with short hair, smiling and standing with her back to a presentation screen. She's wearing a black dress with a white print, holding a microphone with her right hand, and raising her left. In the foreground are the backs of the heads of the people in the audience.

Ovetta Sampson, Director of UX Machine Learning at Google.

Arist Sofia Crespo, whose art questions the potential of AI to reshape our understanding of creativity, shared a portfolio of work that reimagines the natural world. She views generative AI as an extremely powerful creative tool for visual artists who can use it to extract and generate patterns from data and create new work from combinations they may never have considered. As those outputs feed back into AI models, they’ll create increasingly unique data sets.

A photograph of a woman with long dark hair and bangs wearing glasses and a black top. She's smiling and standing with her back to a presentation screen. In the foreground are the backs of the heads of the people in the audience.

Artist Sofia Crespo.

The event coincided with the Asian Art Museum’s opening of Murakami: Monsterized, the first solo exhibition of Takashi Murakami in San Francisco. Viewing the exhibit was the perfect complement to the creative exploration of Make It, not just because of Murakami’s influence on pop culture but because of how he remixes present day media, Japanese art tradition, and modern motifs to create work that’s simultaneously joyful, fun, and complex.

Presentations, conversations, and a zine

After nine hours of creation time across the two days, teams shared their work and their process. Any hurdles they had to jump or limitations they’d bumped into merged to create unique artistic interpretations. There was talk of what they’d tried to do but couldn’t, what they were able to do that amazed them, which tools were the most expedient to use and why, and where they hoped generative AI technology would go in the future. Concurrently, in another part of the space, the zine team started printing, cropping, and stapling.

Temi Coker and Josephine Miller, who commented about the opportunities generative AI will create for a new generation of artists, made the most of merging their styles.

A photograph of a computer screen with a finger pointing at it. On the screen is a digital image of a friendly-looking lime green-furred monster with bulging eyes, sharp teeth, and cat-like ears, wearing a printed T-shirt. He appears to be trying to walk off the screen.

Marino Capitanio and Ethan Tran used multiple products to get exactly the characterization they were looking for, and wondered if future versions of Adobe Firefly would allow them to assign more weight to certain words in a prompt.

A photograph of a white man (wearing a white T-shirt and holding a microphone) and a Black woman (wearing jeans, a peach hoodie, and blue baseball cap). Both of them are facing an audience (whose heads are visible in the foreground) and the man is speaking and pointing to a large presentation screen with a friendly-looking sea creature and the word ABYSS on it.

Ben Johnston and Lady Pheønix generated text effects with Adobe Firefly then continued their work into Adobe Photoshop.

A photograph of a computer screen with a finger pointing at it. On the screen is a digital image of ram's head on a robot body. The ram has pink horns, pink ears, and is wearing pink wraparound ski goggles with sky blue lenses.

Russell Klimas and Don Allen Stevenson III’s “Synthetic Reveries” was inspired by 1980’s concept art.

A photograph of a white man (wearing a dark shirt and pants and holding a microphone) and a white woman (wearing jeans, and a white T-shirt). Both of them are facing an audience (whose heads are visible in the foreground) the man is speaking and behind them is large presentation screen with a digital image of dog-shaped couch against a patterned wall.

For Hassan Ragab and Fabiola Lara (the only team to use it to design a piece of furniture) experimenting with the potential of generative AI was more important than their final output.

Zine production: Print, collate, staple, crop, review, done.

Every Make It workshop is distinct and different, but we always leave them inspired by the coupling of human imagination, ingenuity, and creativity and the capabilities of Adobe’s newest tools. For a look at the artistry of the 20 Make it with Generative AI participants, visit our Behance portfolio, and for a three-minute digest of the two-day event check out the video below.

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