Adobe Firefly Used Thousands of Midjourney Images In Training Its 'Ethical AI' Model

According to Bloomberg, Adobe used images from its competitor Midjourney to train its own artificial intelligence image generator, Firefly -- contradicting the 'commercially safe' ethical standards the company promotes. Tom's Guide reports: The startup has never declared the source of its training data but many suspect it is from images it scraped from the internet without licensing. Adobe says only about 5% of the millions of images used to train Firefly fell into this category and all of them were part of the Adobe Stock library, which meant they'd been through a 'rigorous moderation process.'

When Adobe first launched Firefly it offered an indemnity against copyright theft claims for its enterprise customers as a way to convince them it was safe. Adobe also sold Firefly as the safe alternative to the likes of Midjourney and DALL-E as all the data had been licensed and cleared for use in training the model. Not all artists were that keen at the time and felt they were coerced into agreeing to let their work be used by the creative tech giant -- but the sense was any image made with Firefly was safe to use without risk of being sued for copyright theft.

Despite the revelation some of the images came from potentially less reputable sources, Adobe says all of the non-human pictures are still safe. A spokesperson told Bloomberg: 'Every image submitted to Adobe Stock, including a very small subset of images generated with AI, goes through a rigorous moderation process to ensure it does not include IP, trademarks, recognizable characters or logos, or reference artists' names.' The company seems to be taking a slightly more rigorous step with its plans to build an AI video generator. Rumors suggest it is paying artists per minute for video clips.

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