Adobe says Firefly won’t generate content based on the intellectual property of other people or brands, and the company is developing a way for users to get paid for including their work in training models. — Photo by Emily Bernal on Unsplash
Adobe Inc. unveiled new image-generating artificial-intelligence tools designed for professionals to use without fear of plagiarizing material or creating offensive artwork, addressing a key concern facing such technology.
Dubbed Firefly, the tool creates images and text art based on user text prompts, drawing from Adobe’s portfolio of stock media and freely licensed images. It will be made available in programs such as Photoshop, typically used by professionals, as well as Express, which is aimed more at casual users, the company said in a statement Tuesday.
The software giant hopes to stand out in the rapidly evolving AI industry by offering tools that are legally bulletproof. The proliferation of AI-generated imagery has raised concerns about attribution and replication of bigoted imagery. In January, a group of artists filed a lawsuit against two companies that make AI art generators.
Adobe says Firefly won’t generate content based on the intellectual property of other people or brands, and the company is developing a way for users to get paid for including their work in training models. In a January interview, Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky said the company has never trained its generative AI services on customer projects, attempting to tamp down a fear that users raised.
Organizations and artists have been apprehensive about using AI tools because of the legal and ethical fears, said David Wadhwani, who oversees Adobe’s digital media business. With this release, Adobe is trying to make the technology commercially viable and mainstream, he said in an interview.
The newly released model – still in beta testing – was built in-house, said Chief Technology Officer of Digital Media Ely Greenfield. Adobe has long used AI for features such as automatic image detection and replacement. It is trained using images of a diverse group of people and built to avoid spitting out "harmful imagery,” Wadhwani said.
The company isn’t announcing whether Firefly will come with an additional charge once integrated into products like Photoshop. OpenAI’s Dall-E charges users per image credit.
For its line of advertising and marketing software, Adobe is also introducing text generating and conversational AI tools powered by models including Microsoft Corp.’s Azure OpenAI service. Salesforce Inc., which competes with some of Adobe’s Experience Cloud offerings, also announced new AI tools at a conference earlier this month. – Bloomberg
