Adobe's 'Ethical' Firefly AI Was Trained on Midjourney Images

Source: Bloomberg

When Adobe Inc. released its Firefly image-generating software last year, the company said the artificial intelligence model was trained mainly on Adobe Stock, its database of hundreds of millions of licensed images. Firefly, Adobe said, was a “commercially safe” alternative to competitors like Midjourney, which learned by scraping pictures from across the internet.

But behind the scenes, Adobe also was relying in part on AI-generated content to train Firefly, including from those same AI rivals. In numerous presentations and public posts about how Firefly is safer than the competition due to its training data, Adobe never made clear that its model actually used images from some of these same competitors.

Massive amounts of data are needed to train AI models underlying popular content creation products, and there is increasing scrutiny on AI technology companies over their use of copyrighted materials in this process. Companies like Midjourney, Dall-E maker OpenAI and Stable Diffusion maker Stability AI built their media-generating models with datasets that pull imagery from across the internet, a practice that has led to outrage and lawsuits from a number of artists.

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Criticism of the practice has come from inside the company: Since the early days of Firefly, there has been internal disagreement on the ethics and optics of ingesting AI-generated imagery into the model, according to multiple employees familiar with its development who asked not to be named because the discussions were private. Some have suggested weaning the system off generated images over time, but one of the people said there are no current plans to do so.

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Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-12/adobe-s-ai-firefly-used-ai-generated-images-from-rivals-for-training?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTcxMjkzMjE2NSwiZXhwIjoxNzEzNTM2OTY1LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJTQlRYRTRUMEFGQjQwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiIyMjNDRDM2NDg0QzY0OTc3QjY5ODE0Rjc1MTYxNDRGNyJ9.ZEMMt3pXn7XBwGMx_dJBj0FTAMM8HRn2wM0SOSmK-OA

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