Yahoo Finance Adobe jumps into generative AI era with new Firefly platform
Adobe (ADBE) is getting in on the generative AI craze with its new Firefly service. The app, part of the company’s Adobe Sensei GenAI platform, is meant to help designers and creative workers come up with unique images created using Adobe’s own AI model.
"Generative AI has the potential to transform what marketers and creative professionals do, and how they do their work. Make them much more productive and creative," Anil Chakravarthy, president of Adobe's digital experience business and worldwide field operations, told Yahoo Finance Live.
AI-generated images and videos are impressive, but have been met with heavy scrutiny from creators. Critics argue that such platforms merely scrap artists’ own works from the web and then reform them into “new” images without providing the original creators’ with the appropriate credit.
A handful of artists are already suing Stability AI, DeviantArt, and Midjourney over their alleged use of artists’ copyrighted content without their express permission.
To avoid those issues, Adobe says Firefly is only trained on Adobe Stock images, openly licensed content, and public domain content where copyrights have expired. The idea is to offer generative AI image and text effects for commercial use without running into ownership and permission problems.
According to Adobe, customers will also eventually be able to train Firefly on their own content, ensuring that outputs match up with a brand’s styling and needs.
One example Adobe offered is that of a media team developing new advertising content for a new TV show. With Firefly, the company says, the media team would be able to quickly put together new content based on its own assets.
Adobe’s offering isn’t exactly unique in its capabilities, though. OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 offers generative AI image capabilities, allowing you to type in something like “A dog riding a motorcycle,” and immediately generates images based on your prompt.
Microsoft (MSFT), which has invested billions in OpenAI, is using that company’s generative AI smarts for its new Bing Image Creator. Like DALL-E 2, Bing Image Creator pulls together images from existing content to provide you with a “new” image.
Ask Bing Image Creator to generate an image of a cat riding a dinosaur, and you’ll get images of just that. For its part, Microsoft provides a specific call out for artists to reach out to the tech giant to report if their own artwork is being used to generate AI images. What’s more, Microsoft positions a Bing logo in the bottom corner of each image to ensure people recognize they’re not wholly unique.
Generative AI is still a relatively new technology, so there are sure to be complications as more companies begin using such services. For now, however, it looks as though no firm is willing to risk being left out of the hype.
By Daniel Howley, tech editor at Yahoo Finance. Follow him @DanielHowley
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