As the debate over intellectual property rights related to generative AI technologies heats up, Adobe has taken a stand.
According to Fast Company, Adobe is so sure that their new generative AI-powered “Firefly” product won’t violate copyright laws that they’ve offered to pay for any legal fees consumers may suffer as a result of copyright violations.
Okay, maybe not all of its users. According to Adobe’s VP of Digital Media Claude Alexandre, the payout will only apply to users of Adobe’s business-focused “Firefly for enterprise” product. This includes “full indemnification for the content created.”
Adobe is willing to back up its claims with action.
Copyright protection is “a proof point that we stand behind the commercial safety,” as Alexandre told Fast Company. “and readiness of these features.”
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Fully Stocked
Firefly, a new beta for Photoshop, allows users to reimagine selected regions of an image by entering new text.
According to the study, Adobe’s main line of defense is that their AI was trained mostly on stock photos that they already own, as opposed to the vast amounts of data and material being scraped from across vast swaths of the web by companies like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney.
To add, Adobe has been a player in the stock image market for some time now. They claim that their new AI merely builds on that.
“Adobe claims that Firefly has been trained on entirely legal inputs, mostly from their extensive image libraries,” Andres Guadamuz, a researcher in intellectual property law at the University of Sussex, told Fast Company. This shows they have looked into their training providers extensively and are comfortable knowing they are protected from legal action.
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Economically Sound
Also, Alexandre emphasized to Fast Company that Adobe has done its research and discovered that Firefly is “as good or better in terms of field compliance and IP checks.”
“We feel perfect this is totally and completely commercially safe,” Alexandre continued, adding that “the risk is never zero, hence why we offer indemnification.”
The developers of AI-powered picture generators have been accused of having their products produce illegal content before. For example, Getty, a significant stock picture provider, filed a lawsuit against Stability AI. This company developed Stable Diffusion, earlier this year, alleging that the company had illegally stolen millions of Getty images.
However, Adobe is confident in its ability to defend the results of its latest AI picture generator because it owns the rights to a vast library of photos.
FAQs
Adobe is offering to pay legal fees for its AI tool because it believes that the tool is safe to use and that users will not be liable for copyright infringement. However, Adobe is aware that there is some uncertainty about the legal landscape surrounding generative AI tools, and it wants to reassure its users that they will be protected if they use Firefly.
Adobe will cover legal fees for any user who is sued for copyright infringement as a result of using Firefly. However, there are some exclusions, such as users who use Firefly for commercial purposes or who use it to create content that is clearly infringing on someone else’s copyright.
