The AIs have it! Adobe report reveals 86% of creators use creative generative AI

Adobe has drawn plenty of ire for its commitment to generative AI, but as it launches a huge barrage of AI-powered tools at Adobe Max 2025, a small collective of stats suggests that generative artificial intelligence might not be as controversial among creatives as I might have otherwise assumed.

The photo editing software colossus recently performed a survey of 16,000 creatives on their use of creative generative AI, and Adobe’s conclusion is that AI “has become an essential part of their toolkit and a key competitive edge helping them stand out”. Backing up that statement is 86% of creators, globally, who admitted to using creative generative AI. In addition, a slightly smaller percentage said that AI “helps them create content they otherwise couldn’t have made”. While 76% used AI to help grow their business/personal brand.

These results certainly do suggest that more creators are embracing the power of AI, and 16,000 creators is certainly a respectable sample size. The way I see it, whether or not you like generative AI, it’s not surprising that Adobe has chosen to embrace this emerging technology. It’s the godfather of personal digital image editing – its entire ethos is about pushing the boundaries of creative tech. Let’s not forget the world in which Adobe launched Photoshop in 1990. Suddenly, anyone with a compatible Mac could digitally manipulate imagery. Let’s not pretend that the emergence of digital image editing wasn’t controversial.

But the AI route hasn’t always been an easy one for Adobe. Despite the company enjoying record-breaking profits, a report by The Street appears to suggest that Adobe still isn’t keeping up with other major players in the AI sphere. I fear that the dilemma for Adobe is that the aforementioned positive shift in creative attitudes toward AI, might be related to the reason why it’s falling short of the big dogs: commercially safe AI models.

Adobe has made a huge deal about its commitment to commercially safe Firefly models, which draw from licensed content from Adobe Stock and the public domain. These self-imposed constraints are more likely to appeal to Adobe’s creative audience but arguably restrict the models' scope and effectiveness in terms of generative AI.

It’s not surprising, then, that Adobe has announced yet more partner AI models and the ability to select which model is used. So, if you only want to live off the new and commercially safe Firefly Image Model 5, you can. If you want to take models from Google and Topaz for a spin, you can do that too.

Adobe’s survey certainly seems to suggest that more creatives are warming to generative AI, which isn’t surprising since artificial intelligence is becoming more prevalent day to day. But being so aligned to the creative industry means that Adobe has to tread carefully; it’s got to turn a profit, but it’s also got to appease its creative audience – even if that might be to the detriment of its proprietary AI models’ capabilities.

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