Adobe's Firefly Creates AI Art Without Copyright Worries
At least, that's the idea.
It had to happen eventually. Adobe is opening a public beta for its new "family" of AI image generation tools, called Firefly. Many of these tools rely on text input, similar to DALL-E. That said, Firefly is notable for several reasons, including how it handles copyright.
Adobe is releasing two browser-based Firefly tools today. First, there's the Text to Image tool, which spits out an image based on your prompt (and lets you edit the image using a suite of 'Style' and 'Concept' controls. ). And then there's Text Effects, a tool that creates stylized text and fonts based on natural language processing. Text Effects lets you ask for some pretty wacky stuff, including fonts that look like melting chocolate.
More Firefly tools will be coming in the future. And, naturally, Adobe plans to integrate these elements into its desktop applications. Some of the Firefly tools featured by Adobe include an image upscaler, an automated brush creator for Photoshop, a more advanced raster-to-vector algorithm in Illustrator, and a variety of image-editing tools that build on things like content-aware padding.
As for Firefly's training data, Adobe says it will respect the artists' copyright. All images used by Firefly are licensed for training, available on the Adobe Stock library or in the public domain. Adobe is also looking for a way to compensate Adobe Stock offloaders for training data, similar to what Shutterstock is doing with its AI program.
Additionally, Adobe wants to create a "not for training" tag that can be applied to customer images (especially images made without AI). This could reduce copyright issues in the generative AI industry, assuming other companies and individuals actually honor the “not for training” label. Presumably, such a tag would be included in an image's metadata (which may deter automated crawlers from grabbing images). Adobe may develop a similar tagging system to help identify AI-generated images.
While I appreciate Adobe's approach to copyright, I have one concern. Adobe wants to give customers the ability to create a data set using their own content. This could allow artists or businesses to create images that match their existing style or brand. But what's stopping me from taking someone else's art and putting it in a custom dataset? (For what it's worth, this feature is far from complete, and Adobe says it's trying to find a way around it.)
You can request access to the Firefly beta on the Adobe website. Note that Adobe will host a Firefly conference at 16:00 PM EST on March 21. We will update this message with any new information revealed during the conference.
Source: Adobe
