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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