Adobe Inc. will reimburse its large business users of Firefly against copyright lawsuits, the company announced Thursday.
The move comes as copyright lawsuits around AI-generated images are on the rise around other image generation tools like Stability AI and Midjourney, and it emphasizes Adobe’s confidence in its tool’s legal data sourcing.
Adobe, however, did not clarify what the extent of its budget was for coverage, what the associated qualifying legal conditions would be, nor did it address what protections would be afforded to non-enterprise Firefly users.
At the time of publication, it appears that only enterprise customers using its AI-powered image generation tool will receive the proposed financial support. The company did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
All that said, a company announcing it will eat legal fees as proof of its confidence in its AI’s data sourcing’s legality is a big step. Firefly is designed to be safe for commercial use thanks to AI trained on Adobe-owned imagery, licensed content and public domain content free from copyright restrictions. In other words, Firefly aims to avoid the pitfalls of other AI image generators that scrape info from vast data sets without properly ensuring said data is commercially permissible for training use.
“We financially are standing behind all of the content that is produced by Firefly for use either internally or externally by our customers,” Ashley Still, senior vice president of digital media at Adobe, told Reuters.
Firefly wasn’t the only AI news Adobe had for businesses. Its digital marketing tools will now sport AI-powered features enabling users to perform tasks such as generating custom data reports simply by asking for them.
“Rather than someone going over and pulling the data for a time range and generating the report, now you can see it,” said Suman Basetty, senior director of AI products for Adobe Experience Cloud. “This essentially democratizes the data across the enterprise.”
Adobe’s careful approach to AI is noteworthy given the legal uncertainties of the artificial intelligence landscape, especially after the Supreme Court’s recent verdict concerning to what degree transformative works are legally protected in the commercial space.
