Disney and Adobe have struck a multi-year deal to jointly develop custom generative artificial intelligence (AI) models for Disney, aiming to expand AI tools across its theme parks, film studios and sports media businesses.
Announced on Monday, the partnership will initially focus on accelerating project development at Disney’s Experiences division, which operates its global theme parks, resorts and cruise lines, and supporting concept development at StudioLAB, the innovation hub within Walt Disney Studios, reports Reuters.
Adobe will also work with Disney to use AI tools to increase engagement with sports fans at ESPN and bring more content from the network’s archive to audiences.
Through Adobe’s Firefly Foundry, which allows enterprises to build and deploy customised AI models, the companies will develop generative AI models trained on Disney’s intellectual property to produce production-ready outputs. The models will remain private and proprietary to Disney.
Walt Disney Imagineering, the creative, design and research and development arm behind Disney Experiences, has already deployed a custom image-generation model and a sketch-to-image model that converts hand-drawn sketches into fully rendered concept art.
“We talk about the time frames in our projects in years – it’s years’ worth of development. And what Adobe Foundry has allowed us to do is compress the creative process that would have taken months to now being able to do that in hours and days,” Kyle Laughlin, senior vice-president of research and development technology and engineering at Disney, said in an interview.
“We’re able to run through multiple iterations quickly with these tools. And that helps us reduce costly changes in the field once we get into the construction of these experiences,” Laughlin said, adding that the tools would accelerate creative development at Disney and were “in no way meant to replace” roles at Imagineering.
Earlier this month, Bloomberg News reported that Disney was considering cutting thousands of jobs and had asked some managers to target 20 per cent in annual cost savings.
