Adobe Releases “Infringement-Free” AI Image Generator

Adobe recently released an AI image generator that it claims won’t infringe third-party intellectual property (IP) rights.

The new generative AI tool is called Abobe Firefly and it’s in beta for enterprise in Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Express.

According to Adobe,

Built with our AI ethics principles, our generative AI is designed to be commercially safe and trained on licensed Adobe Stock and public domain images where copyright has expired, so your enterprise can generate content for public and commercial use with higher peace of mind.

Adobe is so confident that its AI generator doesn’t infringe third-party IP that “Enterprises also have the opportunity to obtain an IP indemnity from Adobe for content generated by select workflows powered by Firefly.”

This is similar to the protection that Adobe offers users for use of its stock assets (such as stock photos).

As FastCompany notes, this indemnification is important

because of the challenges around the legal status of generative AI tools and their outputs. The standards around generative AI and copyright have not yet been settled legally, which is causing companies to hold off using generative AI in their business operations.

As Reuters reports, a group of artists sued Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt and accused them of committing mass copyright infringement by using the artists' work in generative AI systems. The companies have asked the court to dismiss the suit, on the grounds that “the AI-created images are not similar to the artists' work and that the lawsuit did not note specific images that were allegedly misused.”

Adobe automatically attaches Content Credentials to works made using its AI system to indicate when something was created or modified with generative AI. “That way, says Adobe, “people can see how a piece of content came to be and make more informed decisions about whether to trust it.”

Adobe said this is meant to act as a “digital ‘nutrition label,’” letting consumers know more about the provenance of generated content.

Adobe is also building features into its tools to allow creators to prevent their designs from being used by users to train AI content-generators:

Using provenance technology, creators can attach “Do Not Train” credentials that travel with their content wherever it goes. With industry adoption, this will help prevent web crawlers from using works with “Do Not Train” credentials as part of a dataset.

As FastCompany notes,

One question that hasn’t yet been answered: how the creators of the stock imagery used to train Firefly will be compensated for their work. In an FAQ on Firefly’s website, Adobe says only that it is “developing a compensation model for Adobe Stock contributors and we’ll share the details of this model when Firefly exits beta.”

Artificial Intelligence is a very hot topic in intellectual property law these days. As we wrote in this blog, the US Copyright Office has cancelled an attempt to register comic book images created using an AI tool.

The Copyright Office explained that

• The U.S. Copyright Office will register an original work of authorship only if the work was created by a human being.

Thus,

Consistent with the law, the Office will not knowingly register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without sufficient creative input or intervention from a human author.

What input or intervention is “sufficient” remains to be determined.