Adobe Firefly for Generating Visual Illustration?

As we recently wrote about on the blog <a href="https://generative-ai-newsroom.com/a-primer-and-faq-on-copyright-law-and-generative-ai-for-news-media-f1349f514883" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">here</a>, legal concerns have created some uncertainty around whether popular image generation models like Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and Midjourney could be violating artists’ and creators’ copyright in the course of their training. Whether the fair use provision for text and data mining is valid will likely be decided in court cases. With that as background, Adobe has recently entered the market with its <a href="https://firefly.adobe.com/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Firefly</a> generative image tool, which they’re largely <a href="https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2023/03/21/responsible-innovation-age-of-generative-ai" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">touting</a> as a more responsible and ethically-conscientious alternative. Its <a href="https://firefly.adobe.com/faq" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">FAQ</a> notes that “The current Firefly generative AI model is trained on a dataset of Adobe Stock, along with openly licensed work and public domain content where copyright has expired.” The presumption then is that all of the content used to train their model has been used legally. They note, “For Adobe Stock contributors, the content is part of the Firefly training dataset, in accordance with Stock Contributor license agreements.” Here’s the <a href="https://wwwimages2.adobe.com/content/dam/cc/en/legal/servicetou/Adobe_Stock_Contributor_Agreement_Addl_Terms_en_US_20220415.pdf" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">license agreement</a> for Stock contributors. But as this <a href="https://twitter.com/DeanSamed/status/1638480079675183104" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">tweet</a> indicates, not every creator agrees it was kosher for Adobe to train on their Stock contributions. So, even if Adobe is legally covered, the ethics here are still murky. As a show of good faith, Adobe suggests that it is “developing a compensation model for Adobe Stock contributors, and will share the details of this model when Firefly exits beta.” TBD what actually happens here but it’s an interesting direction. <a href="https://generative-ai-newsroom.com/adobe-firefly-for-generating-visual-illustration-209d12e4457e">Click Here</a>