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Winners and Losers: Adobe Firefly AI gets smarter as Biden signs TikTok ban
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It’s Sunday, meaning it’s time for us to pick our winner and loser of the week.
This week marked some exciting launches, including anaffordable tabletandsmartwatchfrom OnePlus, a nostalgic 6-disc CD changer from Bang & Olufsen, and theSnapdragon X Pluschip for future laptops.
Meanwhile, Meta teamed up with Microsoft to create a limited editionXbox-inspired version of the Meta Quest, while Apple is rumoured to havecut production of its own Vision Promixed reality headset due to low demand.
But who are our main winners and losers of the week? Keep reading to find out.
Winner: Adobe
It was a busy week for Adobe as the company hosted its annual Adobe Max conference in London.
No doubt the most exciting news from the event surrounded the company’s latestFirefly Image 3 modelgenerative image model, which marked some substantial upgrades for both Firefly and Adobe Photoshop.
The generative AI model is both better at understanding prompts and more skilled at structuring images and producing detail. These improvements should be apparent in instances that might usually be dead giveaways that AI has been used, such as wonky straight lines and a lack of detail in faces when generating crowds.
The new model is also capable of drawing from a broader range of art styles and producing a more varied range of human emotions.
For Photoshop users, Firefly Image 3 is the magic behind several new features rolling out in Generative Fill this week.
New tools include Reference Image, a feature that allows users to upload photos or illustrations as prompts instead of typing words. Photoshop will then generate an object with similar characteristics and place that item in the scene.
There’s also Enhance Detail, a tool that uses AI to improve the clarity of your image, and Generate Background which generates entire backgrounds from a written prompt. Lastly, there’s the Generate Similar tool to finetune generated images when the results aren’t quite what you wanted but are very close.
Despite what your opinion is on generative AI, there’s no doubt the Firefly Image 3 model is an impressive update with a huge amount of potential for Photoshop users.
Loser: TikTok
Our loser this week is TikTok, as US president Joe Biden signed a bill that will ban TikTok in the country if ByteDance does not sell the app in the next year.
The bill – which gained widespread support from US senators – was initially introduced to address concerns that TikTok shares user data with the Chinese government. This is something that the app has continuously denied, stating that ByteDance “is not an agent of China or any other country”.
Of course, TikTok is not going down without a fight. Singaporean businessman and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew posted a response to the news in a video titled ‘Response to TikTok Ban Bill’:
“Make no mistake, this is a ban. A ban on TikTok, and a band on you and YOUR voice. Politicians may say otherwise, but don’t get confused, many who sponsored the bill admit a TikTok ban is their ultimate goal,” said the CEO.
“Rest assured, we aren’t going anywhere. We are confident and we will keep fighting for your rights in the courts. The facts and the Constitution are on our side, and we expect to prevail again”.
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Hannah joined Trusted Reviews as a staff writer in 2019 after graduating with a degree in English from Royal Holloway, University of London. She’s also worked and studied in the US, holding positions …
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Founded in 2003, Trusted Reviews exists to give our readers thorough, unbiased and independent advice on what to buy.
Today, we have millions of users a month from around the world, and assess more than 1,000 products a year.
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
