The Walt Disney Company, among the most fiercely protective owners of intellectual property in the entertainment industry, has chosen Adobe as its partner for building artificial intelligence tools trained on its own characters and worlds, in a deal that could set a template for how Hollywood embraces generative AI.
Adobe and Disney announced a multi-year strategic alliance on Monday, November 9, at Adobe MAX, the software company's annual creativity conference in Miami Beach, Florida, according to Adobe's announcement. Under the agreement, Adobe becomes Disney's Official AI Innovation Partner. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Custom models trained on Disney's worlds
At the heart of the deal, Adobe will build custom Firefly Foundry models on Disney properties, trained on character attributes, environments and visual styles, according to the announcement. Adobe said these models are designed to produce "commercially safe and production-ready outputs," and described them as human-centred and artist-led.
Firefly Foundry is Adobe's service for creating proprietary generative AI models for individual companies, trained on content they own or license. This allows companies to generate images, video and other content in their own style without relying on general-purpose AI models trained on data scraped from the internet.
Across Disney's businesses
The alliance spans much of Disney's empire. It covers Walt Disney World Resort and Disneyland Resort, Disney Cruise Line, ESPN Edge, the StudioLAB innovation unit of The Walt Disney Studios, and Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development, which already uses Adobe Firefly Foundry for theme park concept development, according to Adobe.
Adobe technology will support concept exploration in Disney's innovation labs and in the development pipelines for its parks and cruise ships. Adobe will also become a StudioLAB Innovation Partner, working with Disney creatives on internal workflows.
ESPN and Adobe will explore how AI can enhance fan engagement, shape content delivery and bring ESPN's archive to life. Adobe will provide early access to its latest AI, creative and media technologies, along with dedicated engineering and research resources, and will expand its presence across Disney's media platforms through marketing activations and events.
The Adobe products named include Firefly, Firefly Foundry, Premiere for video editing and Photoshop for digital imaging.
What the executives said
"Today's announcement marks the next chapter of the relationship," said Hannah Elsakr, vice-president of GenAI new business ventures at Adobe, according to the announcement.
Becca Vodnoy, senior vice-president of corporate alliances at Disney, said: "We have an exciting opportunity to give our creative teams new ways to explore and develop their ideas."
Hollywood's AI dilemma
The alliance comes as the entertainment industry wrestles with generative AI. On one hand, AI tools promise to speed up concept art, visual effects, animation and marketing, reducing costs and allowing creative teams to explore more ideas. On the other hand, studios worry about AI models trained on their content without permission, and about the impact on jobs for artists, animators and writers.
Disney has been at the forefront of efforts to protect its intellectual property from unauthorised AI use. It has taken legal action against AI image generation companies over the use of its characters, arguing that their models were trained on its copyrighted material and can generate images of its characters.
