ADOBE

Company Introduces generative AI Firefly, Adobe Stock photographers get commissions

Generative AI systems bring a lot of controversy. Applications such as DALL-E or Midjourney allow you to create various artificial images. Recently, images from a fictitious film have caused a bit of a stir, for example the arrest of Donald Trump. It is also a big topic in photo banks. Getty Images or Unsplash prohibit this content, Shutterstock went the other way and directly offered users a generator built on the DALL-E system and at the same time introduced a Contributor Fund, from which photographers photobanks receive commissions for providing images for training third-party systems or for creating images within the offered generator. Photo Bank

Adobe Stock has gone further, welcoming AI-generated content despite all the copyright controversies, and now offers a service Adobe Firefly. It is its own generative AI, which should compete with systems such as the already mentioned DALL-E or Midjourney.

For now, this is a beta version that you need to request access to. She was trained on content that was freely available, on content in the public domain, that where the copyright has already expired, part of the training content was also images of photographers and illustrators from the Adobe Stock photobank itself. Adobe has hinted that it is already working on a model that will earn photographers commissions for providing images for training. However, it is not yet clear what these commissions will be and how they will be calculated. In my opinion, we will never really know, because it will be an extremely complex problem and, above all, extremely difficult for users to measure and verify (a customer will want a picture of a cat that has been trained on tens of millions of pictures of cats, how is the photographer supposed to verify his share?). After all, even on Shutterstock, where the first payouts have already taken place, sums landed on photographers’ accounts, for which it is not at all clear how they actually arose.

Adobe Firefly will also offer an interesting function where it can be specially trained for a given user, i.e. over time create a specific style so that the AI ​​generates images in a recognizable style for the given customer.

by: Milan Šurkala