Adobe is launching a ChatGPT plugin featuring all 70 of its creative and productivity tools that handle creation of video, images, audio and more.
“We’re building ChatGPT to connect our users with the best capabilities for the task at hand,” said OpenAI product lead Vibhor Chhabra in a statement. “Adobe’s categoriy-leading creative and productivity tools help people express their creativity, communicate and be more productive…”
The new app brings together three ChatGPT Adobe apps released in December for photo-editing heavyweight Photoshop, social-media-focused Express and PDF document maker Acrobat Pro, along with dozens of other Adobe programs, including video-editing program Premiere, photo-management tool Lightroom, design tools Illustrator and InDesign, and its Stock stock-photo service.
The deal also includes direct access to Firefly, Adobe’s own in-house AI service released three years ago that is built on copyright-safe public-domain and Adobe-owned stock images. Firefly is now a standalone app and incorporated into many other Adobe programs.
The functions are accessed directly through the ChatGPT interface, but users have to start a new chat, type @Adobe and select Adobe from the menu. Users can access the tools as a guest or go more deeply with an Adobe account log-in.
Among Adobe-provided examples of what will be possible is batch processing of photos. Type into the chatbot the desired look, tweak lighting and color, add or subtract elements, and resize or expand images.
Videos can be reformatted from horizontal aspect ratios for distribution in vertical outlets such as YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. It’s a function that a number of specialized services provide for enterprises such as major TV networks trying to quickly generate social-media posts from their live sports content.
ChatGPT can also be used as a search function in users’ Creative Cloud asset libraries, finding assets by even such loose categories as style or mood. Users can take all the resulting output and further tweak it directly in Adobe apps.
“Over the past few months, we’ve expanded access to Adobe’s tools across leading AI chatbot platforms, including ChatGPT, Claude and (Microsoft’s) Copilot, with Slack and (Google) Gemini coming soon,” Adobe said in a blog post. “The Adobe plugin in ChatGPT builds on that work by bringing the power of our creative and productivity apps together in one unified plugin that draws on the same tools and capabilities that power our own agents in Adobe apps.”
ChatGPT helped ignite the still-hot AI frenzy when it launched as a chatbot nearly four years ago. Since then, owner OpenAI has pivoted away from its original consumer focus to more enterprise-oriented approaches through its Codex and ChatGPT Work. The company no longer says it has more than 1 billion users, but claims “hundreds of millions” of regular users.
Adobe has been one of the highest-profile victims of the “vibe coding” revolution fueled by Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code, which many believed would allow relatively easy duplication of Adobe’s sophisticated software, and per-seat licensing business model. Others hit by the stampede out of software included heavyweights such as ServiceNow, Applovin, and Salesforce. Even enterprise security companies were temporarily hit, but have since largely recovered.
Wall Street investors sent Adobe shares tumbling from a 2021 high of $661 per share to as little as $202 in mid-June, when CFO Dan Durn announced his departure for a similar position at chipmaker Marvell. Shares have since perked up along with those of other software stocks, but in March, long-time CEO Shantanu Narayen said he would step down once a replacement had been found while remaining chairman.
The company also announced plans to shift to a freemium mode similar to that offered by competitors.
The ChatGPT announcement recapitulates comments made by NVidia CEO Jensen Huang at Adobe’s marketing-focused Summit in Las Vegas last spring, where he joined Narayen in a sweetly nostalgic conversation about their shared history as immigrant kids who went on to run huge tech companies.
AI, Huang said, would soon allow him to use all the capabilities of Photoshop and other sophisticated Adobe tools at a level previously only available to specialists with years of training and experience. That, he said, would open the software’s power to millions of new users.
