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Adobe’s Firefly video generator is a reality check for AI filmmaking

Adobe officially released its answer to OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo AI video generators this week: Firefly, which is now available in beta, allows filmmakers and other creatives to generate short video clips from simple text prompts or images. In addition to being available through a revamped Firefly web app, the video model has also been integrated into Adobe Premiere Pro. Firefly has been trained on both commercially licensed and public domain footage, with Adobe claiming that it is the “first commercially safe AI video model.”

There’s been a lot of hype around AI video over the past few months, and it’s easy to understand why: Some of the footage generated by Sora and Veo looks truly stunning, and Firefly does hold its own against the competition (check out Adobe’s announcement blog post for a few very impressive clips). But there’s also been a bit of a disconnect between those loud declarations that “AI just killed Hollywood” and the reality on the ground.

I recently had a chance to talk to Adobe VP of Gen AI Alexandru Costin as well as the company’s senior strategic development manager Morgan Prygrocki, who also gave me a demo of Firefly. This gave me a better understanding of what a video model like Firefly is capable of, and what its limitations to date are – and it reinforced what I’ve come to believe for some time: 

At least for now, AI is not a bomb that is going to blow up Hollywood. But it may just be the pyrotechnics that will help filmmakers get more bang for their buck, and in the end help dazzle us all with their craft.

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