Our approach to generative AI with Adobe Firefly.
Adobe is focused on providing the world with the tools, resources, and solutions that empower and enable creative endeavors.
Generative AI is new technology with a lot of promise, but one that has also caused a lot of uncertainty and concern around the impact it may have on the creative industry. Our view is that AI is a tool for, not a replacement of, human creativity. We believe that generative AI can be developed responsibly, starting with respect for creators’ rights. Our generative AI solution, Adobe Firefly, is driven by our roots in the creative community and our respect for creators.
The vision for Adobe Firefly is to help people expand upon their natural creativity. As both a standalone website and a technology that powers features inside Adobe apps, Firefly offers generative AI tools made specifically for creative needs, use cases, and workflows.
We believe Adobe Firefly has the most creator-friendly approach in the industry. This page lays out our approach on how we develop the generative AI models behind Adobe Firefly. Our aim is to be clear about what we do and do not do, to differentiate our approach from much of the broader industry, and to provide an example that can hopefully guide the industry to a more responsible place.
Generative Recolor in Illustrator
Our Approach.
We do not and have never trained Adobe Firefly on customer content.
Adobe Firefly is trained on a dataset of licensed content, such as Adobe Stock, and public domain content where copyright has expired. Adobe Stock content is covered under a separate license agreement, and Adobe compensates contributors for the use of that content.
We do not train and have never trained Adobe Firefly on user content.
We recently updated our General Terms of Use to explicitly spell out this commitment (Sections 2.2F and 4.3C2).
We only train Adobe Firefly on content where we have permission to do so.
Adobe Firefly is trained on a dataset of licensed content, such as Adobe Stock, and public domain content where copyright has expired. Adobe Stock content is covered under a separate license agreement, and Adobe compensates contributors for the use of that content.
We do not mine the web or video hosting sites for content. We only train on content where we have rights or permission to do so.
We compensate creators who contribute to Adobe Stock for the use of their content in training Adobe Firefly.
Adobe Firefly is trained on a dataset of licensed content, such as Adobe Stock, and public domain content where copyright has expired. Adobe Stock content is covered under a separate license agreement, and Adobe compensates contributors for the use of the content.
You can find more information here.
We do not mine content from the web to train Adobe Firefly.
Many other companies train their generative AI models on content that is collected from the web without permission (often referred to as “publicly available online data”). We do not believe this is fair toward creators, and this is not our approach.
We only train Adobe Firefly on a dataset of public domain content where copyright has expired and licensed content, such as Adobe Stock, where Adobe compensates contributors for the use of that content.
We developed Adobe Firefly to prevent it from creating content that infringes copyright or intellectual property rights, and it is designed to be commercially safe.
Adobe focuses on training its models in a way that is responsible and respects the rights of creators. We deploy safeguards at each step (prior to training, during generation, at prompt, and during output) to ensure Adobe Firefly does not create content that infringes copyright or intellectual property rights and is designed to be commercially safe.
In addition, Adobe provides intellectual property indemnification for enterprise customers for content generated with Adobe Firefly.
We do not claim any ownership of your content, including content you create with Adobe Firefly.
You own your content. Adobe makes no claims, and never has, to owning your content, regardless of how it was created.
While this has always been our policy, we recently updated our General Terms of Use to make this clearer (Section 4.2).
Adobe makes no claims of copyright or ownership over content you create with Adobe Firefly.
We believe in protecting creators’ rights and founded the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) focused on ensuring transparency in content ownership and how it was created.
Adobe is a founding member of the Content Authenticity Initiative, which currently has over 3300 companies signed on and aims to provide transparency on how content was generated and on who created it.
Platform providers can display credentials showcasing provenance. Meta and LinkedIn are the two most recent sites to display Content Credentials.
You can find more information on the Content Authenticity Initiative here.
We defend the intellectual property rights of the creative community through advocating for the Federal Anti-Impersonation Right Act.
We explicitly prohibit third parties from training on customer content hosted on our servers (such as on Behance).
We have reinforced these approaches through a number of policy changes and updates:
We updated our terms of use to reflect the approaches above and make it clear that we do not train Adobe Firefly on your content and make no claims of ownership to your content.
We have overhauled our moderation policies on Adobe Stock, and made it easier to report content that violates the Adobe Stock contributor guidelines, particularly content that references and/or replicates other artists’ names and styles without their permission.
Generative AI within our creative applications.
For our apps, our focus is to continue to improve quality and performance, add the most requested features from the community, and incorporate generative AI when it can complement and improve workflows (with features like Generative Fill in Photoshop, Generative Remove in Lightroom, and Generative Recolor in Illustrator).
We also understand that the community has a wide range of opinions and needs around generative AI, may choose not to use generative AI features, or may want to use models other than Adobe Firefly. We will continue to listen to community feedback and give users flexibility and choice around generative AI within our tools.
If you have any questions, or just want to hang out and chat, you can join us on Discord or the Adobe Community forums.