AI-Curious with Jeff Wilser
A podcast that explores the good, the bad, and the creepy of artificial intelligence. Weekly longform conversations with key players in the space, ranging from CEOs to artists to philosophers. Exploring the role of AI in film, health care, business, law, therapy, politics, and everything from religion to war.
Featured by Inc. Magazine as one of "4 Ways to Get AI Savvy in 2024," as "Host Jeff Wilser [gives] you a more holistic understanding of AI--such as the moral implications of using it--and his conversations might even spark novel ideas for how you can best use AI in your business."
AI-Curious with Jeff Wilser
Deep-dive on AI and Creativity, with The Man Designing the World’s Creative Tools (Eric Snowden, Adobe’s SVP of Design)
What happens when the world’s most-used creative tools get smarter — and creators worry they’re losing the wheel?
In this episode of AI-Curious, we talk with Eric Snowden, Senior Vice President of Design at Adobe, about how Adobe is weaving AI into Photoshop, Lightroom, Acrobat, and beyond — while trying to keep the tools respectful of craft, muscle memory, and the human spark. We dig into the bigger question beneath the feature releases: as AI accelerates creation, do we get more powerful… or do we become passengers approving machine outputs?
Key topics:
Two buckets of Adobe AI: upgrading existing tools vs building net-new AI products (00:04:55)
Photoshop “harmonize,” Lightroom auto culling, and Acrobat “PDF spaces” (00:04:55)
Why PDFs are a bottleneck for knowledge work, and how Acrobat can help you “get 80% of the way there” (00:07:18)
Project Graph explained: node-based workflows that stitch together building blocks like Firefly and Photoshop (00:08:25)
A concrete Project Graph example: 2D product photo → 3D asset → generated ad → multiple animated versions, with the user still in control (00:09:42)
Time saved vs creating more: how Firefly helped Adobe teams move faster and “make more things,” including “like 40% improvement” on time-to-market (00:14:28)
A Max London demo that captures the core principle: “his hand was on the wheel” (00:17:45)
“Quiet AI” in practice: enhanced audio in Adobe Podcast that can make phone-recorded audio sound studio-ready (00:19:57)
Respecting creative muscle memory: why “subtraction is not always good,” and why Adobe adds new workflows without removing old ones (00:24:43)
Firefly’s principles: licensed content, knowing what’s in the model, and compensating creators (00:29:29)
Content authenticity as a “nutritional label for AI”: immutable metadata describing what was done to an image (00:30:15)
The self-driving car analogy: creators need to be able to “grab the wheel” and tweak under the hood (00:36:00)
Vibe coding inside Adobe: designers using Cursor and internal tooling to build prototypes that hit real APIs (00:39:18)
A leadership playbook for AI adoption: focus the OKRs, make training practical, show examples, remove roadblocks (00:44:19)
The future of AI creative tools: communicating intent beyond text prompts, and shifting from “look what I do with AI” to storytelling (00:46:36)
Guest
Eric Snowden is the Senior Vice President of Design at Adobe, overseeing design and the AI-infused creative tools used by millions of creators.
Mentioned in this conversation
Adobe Firefly
Project Graph (node-based creative workflow building)
Enhanced audio in Adobe Podcast
Content authenticity / provenance metadata (“nutritional label” concept)
Cursor and “vibe coding” for rapid prototyping inside enterprise teams
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