Adobe Brings Its Generative AI Tool Firefly To Businesses

Users have created about 200 million AI-generated images using Adobe’s in-house text-to-image model Firefly since it launched in March. After seeing broad consumer adoption, the creative design software giant announced Thursday that it plans to launch the features for its 12,000 enterprise customers.

Firefly is trained on more than 100 million images including Adobe’s stock images, licensed images and public images whose copyrights have expired. The company relies on its treasure trove of high-quality stock images sourced from contributors who typically get 33% of royalties when their images are sold or used. Adobe Stock consists of more than 330 million assets ranging from photos and illustrations to videos and music tracks. A recently added category of assets is AI-generated images submitted by contributors, which are accepted only if they have the rights to use them.

Multiple Adobe Stock contributors have expressed concerns over the use of AI-generated images to train their consumer-facing AI tool, Firefly, and that contributors can’t opt out of their work being used to train and create tools like Firefly. Fu confirmed that they are not able to opt out because contributors have signed licensing agreements stating that their images may be used for AI training purposes. But the company says it plans to compensate them in the future when Firefly comes out of beta (Fu declined to say how much it plans to pay the company’s contributors).

As some text-to-image AI models have faced legal ramifications for using copyrighted content to train their systems, enterprises want a guarantee that they will not get sued or face backlash for using generative AI tools to create images or content, Meredith Cooper, senior director of digital media business at Adobe, told Forbes in an interview. “Firefly is designed to be commercially safe and backed by Adobe via indemnification,” Cooper says.

Adobe, which counts Coca Cola, Walgreens, Home Depot, General Motors and U.S. Bank among its enterprise customers, recorded $17.6 billion in revenue in 2022. Its generative AI tools (still in beta) were rolled out to its Creative Cloud users through photo editing software Adobe Photoshop in late May. One user used Adobe’s Generative Fill tool to edit popular memes by expanding the images and showing what could have been beyond the original frame of the meme.

There is also potential for misuse. In response to people using its tools to create deepfakes and spread misinformation, Adobe in 2019 launched the Content Authenticity Initiative to appropriately label images or content produced by AI and tell if an image has been tampered with using AI. Any content created with Firefly comes with content credentials including metadata about the creation of the image such as name, data and any edits made to the image.

The company also announced in early May that it also plans to bring its prompt-based text-to-image tools to Google’s conversational chatbot Bard, where users will be able to create synthetic images within Bard using Firefly.

In addition to offering AI tools to create text, photo or video marketing copy for the web, enterprises will also be able to access language models from Microsoft Azure OpenAI service, Google’s language model Flan-T5 and others. Through its enterprise-focused product, Adobe Sensei, enterprise users can automate tasks like analyzing customer information, querying data and adjusting advertising budgets. Adobe did not disclose pricing for any of its enterprise generative AI services nor when it plans to launch them.