Disney Takes Its Imagineering AI Pilot Company-Wide, Building Private Models on Its Own IP With Adobe
Disney and Adobe struck a multi-year deal, announced November 9, to co-develop custom generative AI models trained on Disney's intellectual property through Adobe's Firefly Foundry, Reuters reported. Work starts with Disney's parks division and StudioLAB, then ESPN; the models will be private and proprietary to Disney. It widens a collaboration Adobe announced with Walt Disney Imagineering in June. Financial terms were not reported.
Disney's answer to generative AI is to train on what it already owns. Its new multi-year deal with Adobe builds private models on Disney's own intellectual property, the opposite of licensing its characters to a general-purpose model, and extends a parks experiment from June across the company.
What was announced#
Disney and Adobe will co-develop custom generative AI models for Disney with the goal of scaling AI tools across its theme parks, studio and sports media businesses, Reuters reported on Monday, November 9, when the deal was announced. The work starts with speeding up project development at Disney's Experiences division, which runs its parks, resorts and cruise lines, and with concept exploration at StudioLAB, the innovation hub inside Walt Disney Studios. Adobe will also work with ESPN on fan engagement and on bringing more of ESPN's archive to audiences.
The models will be built through Adobe Firefly Foundry, trained on Disney's intellectual properties to generate production-ready outputs, and will be private and proprietary to Disney, according to Reuters.
From pilot to platform#
Walt Disney Imagineering has already deployed a custom image-generation model and a sketch-to-image model that turns hand-drawn sketches into rendered concept art, Reuters reported. That work began with a collaboration Adobe announced on June 16, in which Imagineering R&D would use Firefly Foundry models customised on existing Imagineering assets for park design and pre-production visualisation.
"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, Disney's senior vice president of R&D technology and engineering, told Reuters. He said the tools are "in no way meant to replace" roles at Imagineering. Reuters noted that Bloomberg reported earlier this month that Disney was considering cutting thousands of jobs and had asked some managers to target 20% in annual cost savings.
Disney has been choosing where its characters go in AI: last month it was named stalking-horse bidder for a licence of Character.AI's IP in that company's bankruptcy. A model it owns outright keeps the same characters inside its own walls.
Limits#
- Financial terms and the size of the models were not reported in what we read.
- We read Reuters' account of Monday's announcement; Adobe's November 9 release did not load for us. The June detail comes from Adobe's own release.
- The time savings are Disney's description, not a measured result.