Adobe is Making its Firefly Generative AI Available to Big Businesses
Adobe has announced that it is making its Firefly generative artificial intelligence (AI) available to enterprise customers to allow brands to deploy it across their organizations and custom train it with their own assets.
The massive creative software company says that the new offering will help enterprises “streamline and accelerate” their content supply chain while “optimizing costs,” or — in short — reducing man-hours associated with content creation.
“The new company-wide offering enables every employee across an organization, at any creative skill level, to use Firefly as a standalone service, as well as with Express and Creative Cloud applications to generate, edit and share standout, on brand content quickly and easily,” Adobe says.
“As part of this new offering, Adobe plans to enable businesses to be able to custom train Firefly with their own branded assets, embedding the power of Firefly into their own ecosystem and generating content in the brand’s unique style and brand language. Firefly is designed to be safe for commercial use and enterprises also have the opportunity to obtain an IP indemnity from Adobe for content generated by certain Firefly-powered workflows allowing them to deploy it across their organization with confidence.”
Firefly, which was announced not even three months ago, separated itself from competitive platforms through the promise that its AI was not trained using stolen images. Instead, Adobe promised that Firefly was only trained on Adobe Stock images, openly licensed content, and public domain images where copyright had expired.
As a result, at launch, Firefly was woefully behind its competitors, especially Midjourney. Many of the issues PetaPixel experienced with Adobe’s generative AI were problems that had been solved in previous updates to competitors. Hands, faces, and environments all lacked cohesion and believability since the AI was young and had a far more constricted training set.
But Adobe has pushed Firefly despite these early issues, and its integration into Generative Fill at the end of May felt like the most impressive application of the technology yet.
Questions on Commercialization
It should be noted that Firefly is technically still in beta and, presumably, subject to the beta rules published on Adobe’s website. One of these rules directly addresses commercial use, which enterprise customers would absolutely fall under.
Right now, according to Adobe, Firefly can’t be used for commercial purposes.
“While generative AI features are in beta, all generated output is for personal use only and cannot be used commercially,” Adobe says.
Adobe is saying that Firefly is commercially viable while at the same time saying it’s not for commercial use. It reads like a direct contradiction. How a beta that can’t be used for commercial purposes can also, simultaneously, be sold to enterprise customers as a commercial software application is confusing and messy.
Allowing enterprise to train the AI with its own assets is also tricky, since once that becomes an option it’s not clear how Adobe’s claims of integrity in its training data set can be maintained. Adobe specifically says that users cannot participate in a wide variety of potentially harmful or misleading practices, so how will it police how companies not only use Firefly, but how they decide to train Firefly?
PetaPixel has posed these questions to Adobe and will update this story if it hears back.
Commercial viability of Firefly is, obviously, a huge part of Adobe’s plans for the software, it just seems like the steps the company is taking are out of order.
Image credits: Adobe
