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Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant pilot program

SJSU faculty and staff now have access to an Acrobat Pro feature that essentially turns Acrobat Pro into a LLM trained only on pdf's you've uploaded. Acrobat Pro is a much more streamlined and privacy compliant way to gain insights on collections of PDFs.
painting, van gogh, green wheat field with sypress tree, expanded with photoshop generative image model

Cafe Terrace at Night, Van Gogh - With Adobe Photoshop Generative Expand

This pilot program will end May 31st, 2025.

On May 31st, 2025, the current understanding is Acrobat AI Assistant will be deactivated from our license and SJSU and Adobe will take usage information about how AI Assistant is being used on campus to negotiate a new license agreement for the continued use of AI Assistant.

Get access by filling out the form below.

After filling out the appropriate form below, ensure that you have Adobe Acrobat updated to the latest version. When AI Assistant is activated, restart your computer if you don’t see it in your desktop application.

Student form

Staff & Faculty form

How does Acrobat AI Assistant work?

Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant is powered by Retrieval Augmented Generation, or RAG.

  1. You give it documents: You upload your own files, like PDFs, into this library.

  2. You ask a question: You pose a question to the AI.

  3. The AI does some research: The AI then searches through your uploaded documents for an answer.

  4. Turning numbers into words: Computers only understand numbers. So, the AI takes your question and all the information it finds and turns them into number codes to understand them. Then, it translates those number codes back into regular language to give you an answer.

How is this different than using other LLM tools like ChatGPT? Acrobat AI Assistant gives you answers based on information mainly from the documents you've uploaded to each time you use the tool. Tools like ChatGPT gives you answers influenced by information scrapped off the internet as well, giving you much less control of the answer you receive from the LLM.

Below is online documentation relevant to Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant

Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant Security Fact Sheet
This document covers key points about how your data is used. Notably, data related to your conversation with Acrobat AI Assistant is cached for 12 hours. Uploaded documents, prompts you write, answers AI Assistant generates - are not trained on or used in any way by Adobe.
Read more here.

Adobe Generative AI User Disclosures
This document provides more information about AI Assistant’s generative AI feature. Because AI Assistant is powered by an OpenAI engine, it can generate answers outside of the scope of your uploaded PDFs. You can prompt AI Assistant to cite where it got its information from.
Read more here.

Frequently asked questions

Will Acrobat AI Assistant work with Optical Character Recognized documents?

AI Assistant can now analyze scanned documents. While some of the information below is outdated, the rest about OCR and its ability to accurately contextualize misspelled words remains important.

Some text will be garbled and gibberish, but the majority of the document has been OCR’d, and Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant can analyze the document. Now is the text accurate? It is hard to tell. If the OCR could recognize 99% of the document would it be 99% understood? What if the 1% of unrecognized text is the letter E, or some more consequential word.

As with using any AI tool, ChapGPT, or AI Assistant, it is always best to know the document you are working with and summarizing.

  1. Critical Reflection for Teacher Survival: Critical reflection helps teachers avoid self-blame and demoralization by understanding that not all problems in the classroom are their fault. It allows them to see the broader cultural, psychological, and political complexities of teaching.
  2. Hunting Assumptions: Critical reflection involves identifying and questioning the assumptions that underlie our teaching practices. These assumptions can be paradigmatic (basic structuring beliefs), prescriptive (what should happen), or causal (how things work).
  3. Power Dynamics in Education: Critical reflection helps teachers recognize how power dynamics influence educational processes. This awareness can lead to more democratic and cooperative teaching practices.
  4. Avoiding Hegemonic Assumptions: Teachers need to be aware of hegemonic assumptions—beliefs that seem to be in their best interest but actually serve to maintain the status quo and work against them. Examples include the idea of teaching as a vocation and the pursuit of perfect student evaluations.
  5. Benefits of Critical Reflection: Engaging in critical reflection helps teachers take informed actions, develop a rationale for their practice, avoid self-laceration, ground themselves emotionally, enliven their classrooms, and increase democratic trust.
  1. Importance of Critical Reflection: Critical reflection helps teachers take informed actions, develop a rationale for their practice, avoid self-laceration, ground themselves emotionally, enliven their classrooms, and increase democratic trust.
  2. Hunting Assumptions: Critical reflection involves identifying and questioning assumptions, which are categorized into paradigmatic, prescriptive, and causal assumptions. This process helps teachers understand the underlying beliefs that shape their actions and decisions.
  3. Power Dynamics in Education: Critical reflection illuminates how power dynamics permeate educational processes. Teachers must recognize that classrooms are not isolated from societal power structures and should strive to work democratically and cooperatively with students.
  4. Hegemonic Assumptions: Teachers need to uncover and challenge hegemonic assumptions—beliefs that seem to be in their best interests but actually work against them. Examples include viewing teaching as a vocation, striving for perfect student evaluations, and believing that external solutions can solve all teaching problems.
  5. Modeling Critical Inquiry: Teachers who model critical thinking and inquiry in their own practice create a stimulating and democratic learning environment. This approach helps students develop their own critical thinking skills and fosters a culture of trust and respect in the classroom.

Changelog

Update: 03.27.2025 - Migration from Google working doc to dedicated Libguides webpage.
Update: 12.20.2024 - Updated information about the duration and availability of the pilot program.
Update: 11.08.2024 - Added section about AI Assistant analyzing charts and graphs, as well as an update that AI Assistant can now analyze scanned documents.
Update: 11.07.2024 - Added section about RAG, and the different tech inside of Acrobat AI Assistant.
Update: 10.31.2024 - Added section about how Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant uses information from your PDF’s as well as addressing some questions in the FAQ.
Update: 10.23.2024 - Added additional questions in the Q&A and information about pilot program duration.
Update: 10.19.2024 - Added FAQ section regarding OCR’s compatibility with AI Assistant.
Update: 10.01.2024 - Document created.