Adobe Firefly Is a Big Deal!

And thank you Squarespace for sponsoring this video.

Adobe Firefly is Adobe's response to many of the AI image generators that have been popping up in recent months. With one clear and important difference. Adobe has the rights toall the images they use in their training data.

-----------------------------------------------------

Twitter:

Instagram:

Drawing Tech Top 10 lists:

My Drawing and video gear:

[pixelpuppy]

about copyright: a new US policy came out that basically says any works generated by AI are considered public domain (not copyrightable). Because copyright only applies to works created by humans. That says a couple of things:
1. any piece of art created by AI can be used by anyone. So most companies/clients won't want AI art as part of their end product or branding.
2. Derivative works from AI generated works, if different enough from the AI work, can be copyrighted (as usual, to standard copyright law). This means artists will be hired to "paint over" or make tweaks to AI art, and AI art will be used to basically rapid prototype ideas and concepts.
Note I'm not a lawyer, these are just my findings, and this is just a quick tl;dr on the complex aspect of copyright.

[kreestuh]

"AI will let us automate labor so we can spend time creating art and music!" was the pitch for AI advancements. But now we're automating a huge part of the process of making art and music so we can spend more time on... what exactly? Creating more rapidfire "content" for corporations and social media?

[thataverageguy]

Everyday this AI thing make me feel that all my hard work in honing my skills in drawing is completely useless

[unaninated]

Watching your vid just wanted to make you aware of something. Adobe is not fully transparent about their dataset aside from using adobe stock. Although technically they have the right to use these images, that is only because the opt in the images by default without any option for uses to opt their images out. So not as ethical as they claim.

Also Kris is a the person who has been chasing copyright for ai and exposed as a grifter (many chat leaks showing how she is funded to normalise the tech and convince the public not to worry about datascraping issues). Constantly trying to get the USCO to green copyright for prompt base images despite their clear stance after her first attempt.

[ItsBrandonAllred]

This is evil. Soulless, evil. We work for decades to reach professional level and now we’ll be obsolete in 6 months.

[youshimimi]

I wouldn't call Firefly ethical in any way. The artists uploaded the images to sell them, under general TOS. Years before AI was a thing. Now Adobe took those stock photos and used them in AI, with no warning or any way to opt out or delete those images beforehand. The artists were not recompensed for this their photos being used in Adobe's *private commercial product* . After the backlash, after everything is already done, now Adobe said they will begin to think about giving some pennies to the artists whose work was taken. No way for the artists to have an opinion or opt out from this.
Adobe didn't care about the artist's consent or opinions. The artists were not uploading their works to be scraped or used in AI. This is just another case of a huge company screwing artists for profit. Nothing ethical about it.

[nemanjagrujic]

OK, but there are Midjourney pictures on Adobe stock. So, how exactly do they plan to solve that copyright nightmare?

[vezxzci]

I don't even get it how are the users even thinking thay they ll be appreciate d for their work when 99 percent of work is done by ai itself

[Redballoon]

what do you mean - SHOW A CLIENT? how can you show a client something you didn't create and pass it off as your own?

[jonathanpenn]

I want to generate a picture of Brad generating pictures of dogs wearing sweatshirts…on a sweatshirt…worn by a dog.

[kirillm]

I should have been doing sports, not creativity.
Machines negate the importance of the effort invested in training of drawing and painting.

[graphguy]

I dumped Adobe when they went to the subscription model. Was one of the first 100 owners of photoshop, but RIP.

[tristen_grant]

Isn't Adobe using images posted to Behance, etc? I know Behance mentioned something about art posted being used for AI.

[seiji_senpai]

This just fuels my depression even more, what's the point in trying to be better when someone can just generate art in seconds

[JH-pero]

I'm not convinced T2I by itself can save Adobe. As much as the ethical branding does seem to matter, too many startups in the past have succeeded by doing something borderline-illegal first and then patching it up after they get enough capital.

For artists who want to focus on art, I sense the most likely path forward will not be with T2I, but to take a sketch they drew themselves, paint in some flat color(easier than ever as of today since Meta put out "Segment Anything Model" which can recognize shapes pretty darn well, even as line art), and I2I it with a customized rendering model. That preserves many of their biggest skillsets - drawing as the interface, then training up a nice renderer(which they can spend a long time on, using whatever methods and materials they like as sources).

Many forms of software are going to converge into streamlined interfaces to various models: the distinguishing factor is just the interface, which might be primarily text, or it could be drawing or various forms of live performance. For branding, you could end up with models and prompts that can generate an entire design system...

...or you could see that market reverse direction from marketers building brands to advertise to consumers, towards individuals and communities commissioning personalized "browsing agents" that find people and organizations that service their needs. If the past is a foreign country, we're getting on the boat right now.

[AspLode]

Well that's a fast evolution from unrestrained lawlessness to an approach of ethics. It's going to be very gray, though, as it was determined a wholly AI-generated image could not be copyrighted, how many permutations of unattributable work will create enough layers of obfuscation such that an AI could be trained on those images and be technically free of conflict? Or, as the competition for the AI-generation space becomes more heated and there is more incentive to further-occlude the black box of the models, how will the training behavior of competing programs be made accountable, now that ethics IS a concern and primary objective for projects such as Firefly? If a competitor were to, in bad faith, poison a dataset with deliberately copyrighted (or AI generated) input, can an ethically-minded project successfully purge the influence from a dataset? If it ever happened, would they let customers know? Would they not want to know, because it's not about ethics but more about legal exposure? There's an entire new branch of ethics and philosophy being born parallel to this entire industry

[mr_don_key]

Firefly is a dangerous deal.. (think about it)

[AyoSoma]

Hate this, hate the coverage and the positive PR spin

[Poi-ullr]

This is legal, but not ethical. The artists uploading to Stock had the expectation that they would get paid when someone buys their image, now with this AI, all that business is effectively over. Adobe used their work in a new tech they had no idea their work was ever going to be used for, gives them no choice to opt-out their images, and completely killed off all the business they were making by having their images in Stock in order to pull a greater profit for themselves.

[LVEVR]

With their current dataset, Adobe will never compete. And with their hideous *software rental* model, more and more creators are leaving Adobe for Affinity and other traditionally-priced, non-subscription software. I started on Mac with Adobe everything, but have happily and successfully moved away from both.