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What’s new in Adobe Express?On the new tools, Govind Balakrishnan, SVP and General Manager, Adobe Express, said: “We’re excited to introduce new AI-powered video and animation capabilities to make it even easier for people to stand out and break through with their brands.”Here are the stand-out additions coming to Express.1. Turn long-form videos into short-form contentThis is my favorite new addition in Express. You can now cut down long videos at pretty much the click of a button with Clip Maker. This update is going to be a serious time-saver if you create long-form content for platforms like YouTube or you’re running webinars and presentations, and want to splice it up for the likes of Reels, TikTok, or Shorts. During my demo, I sawn an hour-long video cut into approximately ten-minute chunks that can be further edited.2. Create new AI images based on existing onesGenerate Similar lets you select existing images and, with a little prompting, create new images that maintain the same look and feel. It worked very well during my demo, where a heavily stylised image of a rose was used as a starting point, and using Firefly, a similar image of a tulip was generated. Color, style, and framing carried through, as if the work was by a single ‘artist’. Not a game-changer by any means, but it’ll help users stay on-brand and quickly create a library of images that sit well together.Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed!3. Turn still images into eye-catching animationsAdobe Express’s bread and butter is simple graphic design, but this is a really nice addition. You can now animate sections of a static image – for example, adding glittering stars, having your text pop in, or letting objects jiggle on-screen. I didn’t find it as high-powered as you’ll see in more advanced Adobe apps, but if you’re looking for more engaging content for your social platforms, this is a nice touch. For more image tools – although I didn’t get a chance to see them in action – you now have access to more than 30 new filters powered by Photoshop right inside Express.4. More AI video generationYou can’t go ten seconds without AI inserting itself into the workflow, but I think these are going to be welcomed by most users. You can now generate commercially safe videos in Express. I was told all the backgrounds and b-roll seen in the demo were created this way – and they looked pretty good to me.5. Improve audio with Enhance SpeechIf you use other Creative Cloud apps, you may be familiar with Enhance Speech – it’s already a part of Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Podcast. Effectively, this tool uses AI (of course) to clean-up sounds. So, if you record in an echo-y room or there’s a little too much background chatter in the office, this tool will strip out unwanted audio and standardize noise levels.6. Better, faster captioningAnother new tool is automatic captioning. Now, there’s nothing especially new about this tool – but it’s new to Express, and I found this one was pretty quick. On top of this, users now have more control over how those captions appear. Useful if you have brand colors and styles you want to apply.7. Record yourself and add it to the canvasI wasn’t expecting this, but you can now self-record videos and add them into Express. According to Adobe, this is built for “tutorials, video podcasts, reels and more.” In the demo, I liked how you can position the video anywhere on the canvas and resize it to suit your needs. You’ll find these types of webcam capture tools in the best screen recording software, but this seems like a seamless way to blend self-recorded videos to existing designs.You might also like

The announcement was included in a sweeping report on policy issues related to artificial intelligence, particularly its ability to be copyrighted—a flashpoint within creative industries in recent years.

The document states that despite its ongoing advancements, generative AI is liable to the United States’s current copyright principles, which take a strict stance on what material—human- or machine-made—qualifies for protection.

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Per the guidelines, AI prompts, such as text-to-image generator tools, don’t currently permit sufficient control to “make users of an AI system the authors of the output.” This applies unilaterally to simple text prompts and complex instruction. “No matter how many times a prompt is revised and resubmitted, the final output reflects the user’s acceptance of the AI system’s interpretation, rather than authorship of the expression it contains,” the report states.

The report illustrated how easily matters of authorship can be muddled with AI using the example of a Gemini-generated cat smoking a pipe and reading a newspaper. Gemini, the reported noted, ignored select prompt instructions and added elements of its own, including the cat’s “incongruous human hand.”

The unpredictability of Gemini was then contrasted with examples of human spontaneity, like the splatter technique of Jackson Pollock. The artist did not manage where or how the paint landed, but “controlled the choice of colors, number of layers, depth of texture, placement of each addition to the overall composition — and used his own body movements to execute each of these choices.”

“The issue is the degree of human control, rather than the predictability of the outcome,” the office concluded.

However, the department said that using such technology to assist in “human” creative expression does not necessarily preclude a work’s eligibility for copyright protection. Like a writer asking AI to create an outline for a book, the user is “referencing, but not incorporating, the output,” the report explained.

In 2022, for example, author Kris Kashtanova claimed to have received a copyright for an AI-created work when her request to register her comic book Zarya of the Dawn was approved. The Copyright Office, however, put its decision under review and requested additional information when it was discovered that the book’s images had been made using AI generator Midjourney.

The Copyright Office ultimately cancelled its original certification and issued a new one solely covering the elements that Kashtanova created.

The principle also applies to artists who use AI systems to modify preexisting work, like tweaking characters, or adding subtle design elements to an illustration. The AI-generated elements would be excluded from the copyright, but if the human-made product remains recognizable, the “perceptible human expression” can still be copyrighted.

Works that incorporate AI-generated elements can be protected if there’s been perceptible creative modification—if, say, an artist significantly rearranges elements of an AI-artwork or pairs it with text written by a human. In the same spirit, “a film that includes AI-generated special effects or background artwork is copyrightable, even if the AI effects and artwork separately are not.” 

The Copyright Office added that prompt-generated images could even receive protection—stressing the “case-by-case determination”— if the user adequately modified parts of the picture. In this case, the AI work could be considered like any derivative artwork, just derivative of a machine, rather than a human.

Since platforms such OpenAI Inc.’s ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Midjourney became accessible to the public, requests to copyright works with AI have risen dramatically—and so have legal challenges from digital artists who claim the platforms plagiarize human-made work. The Copyright Office has seemingly found a legal precedent in the issue of appropriation art, a tradition in which one artist repurposes another’s creation. 

Rulings in these cases often hinge on whether modifications to the original work have been deemed as sufficiently “transformative.” AI has raised those stakes. Where it was once two artists in contention, courts must now factor in the diffusion of millions of digital artworks by generative platforms, and, given the new guidelines, determine the boundaries “human expression.”

But even these principles, the report concludes, could change if AI evolves beyond past legal precedents: “In theory, AI systems could someday allow users to exert so much control over how their expression is reflected in an output that the system’s contribution would become rote or mechanical.”