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Adobe Firefly: AI Art Generator

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Re: Adobe Firefly: AI Art Generator

#331
> Once Firefly is out of its beta stage, creators will have the option to use content generated in Firefly commercially.

The reason this sentence exists is because Adobe wants to create the impression among readers that it owns the output and that it's Adobe's choice how creators use those images. But under current copyright interpretation, Adobe doesn't own those images. So it's nice that it's giving permission, but that's not Adobe's permission to give -- so thanks but also heck off Adobe, nobody needed to ask you for permission in the first place. You can use any AI image commercially because AI images are not under copyright.

Of course, Adobe would love to have a world where most art is generated algorithmically and Adobe is in charge of deciding how that art gets used and what gets generated because it controls the tool. So it's in Adobe's best interest to pretend that it's granting artists a permissive right, rather than recognizing that it doesn't have any real legal argument to make that artwork generated through Firefly is owned by Adobe (or by anyone for that matter).

And that's good! It's not anti-AI to say that, because what you have to realize is that what companies want from AI image generation is a model where every single artist goes through them in order to build or generate anything. They want a model where creative tools are a service, for the same reason why Adobe wants its tools to all be subscription based. No SaaS company is getting into generative AI with the goal of increasing accessibility of art. They are (Adobe especially) interested in closing down that accessibility. They are all drooling at the opportunity to turn your workflow into a SaaS business that can only be run on extremely expensive hardware clusters.

So yes, the denial of copyright for AI-generated images does make it trickier to monetize those images, but denying that copyright has the much more important effect of making harder for these companies to lock out competitors and build services where they control/monopolize an entire creative market. You can still use AI during a creative process and end up with a thing that can be copyrighted. But Adobe can't release a tool and later on start to argue that nobody else can train competing generators using that tool, or that the tool can only be used in a particular way, or that everything the tool can generate is owned by Adobe. That matters.

It means that competitors can use Adobe Firefly output to train their own models (including locally run models like stable diffusion). It means that there's a limiting factor in place that keeps Adobe from making lazy grabs to assert ownership over large numbers of images. It means that you can pull images generated by Firefly into other pipelines without asking Adobe permission.

You can see the same thing playing out with ChatGPT. OpenAI's TOS states that you're not allowed to use OpenAI to help build something that competes with OpenAI. That's going largely unquestioned, but my strong suspicion is that it's only a TOS violation to break that rule, because again, OpenAI does not own the copyright on anything that GPT generates. So if you're not signing that EULA, it's not clear to me that OpenAI has any legal right at all to restrict you from using output that you find online as training data. As far as I can tell, current copyright consensus in the US is that the text that comes out of ChatGPT is public domain. But that's not what OpenAI wants, because if anyone can build anything using ChatGPT's output, then how is OpenAI going to build a moat around their service to block competitors? How are they going to eventually turn profitable by closing off access and raising prices once people start to rely on their service? So just like Adobe, they stick the language in and hope nobody calls them out on it.

Re: Adobe Firefly: AI Art Generator

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoever put the poster up for display and reaped some reward out of it is liable for damages. Everyone else is just doing their job in the supply chain. We want supply chains to work for the good of the economy, which is a proxy for increasing availability and reducing prices of "goods and services" to the average person.

Imagine a paying Adobe CC customer. They use Firefly to generate a poster, and unbeknownst to them, the image it generated is a reasonable facsimile of a copyrighted/trademark character. The person has inadvertently committed copyright infringement. So does Firefly need to come with a warning? The safer solution, to the chagrin of another commenter, is for Adobe to neuter the tool by only training on data in which Ad…

A simple warning that what’s been generated looks similar to something that’s copyrighted is not a bad idea. Then it’s up to the AI user to do their due diligence if they intend to use the resulting work for commercial purpose. Neutering the tool from the get go is a step too far.

Re: Adobe Firefly: AI Art Generator

#333
post #306

Yeah, Adobe, release a competitor of your own clients, they'll love it.

They'll have to buy it (or something like it), they won't have much of a choice. Artists that use this kind of tool will be so much more productive than ones that don't, that they simply won't be able to find employment otherwise.

Re: Adobe Firefly: AI Art Generator

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoever put the poster up for display and reaped some reward out of it is liable for damages. Everyone else is just doing their job in the supply chain. We want supply chains to work for the good of the economy, which is a proxy for increasing availability and reducing prices of "goods and services" to the average person.

Imagine a paying Adobe CC customer. They use Firefly to generate a poster, and unbeknownst to them, the image it generated is a reasonable facsimile of a copyrighted/trademark character. The person has inadvertently committed copyright infringement. So does Firefly need to come with a warning? The safer solution, to the chagrin of another commenter, is for Adobe to neuter the tool by only training on data in which Ad…

People accidentally recreate other companies logos in Adobe Illustrator all the time.

Re: Adobe Firefly: AI Art Generator

#335

While this is very exciting it's worth pointing out most of the page falls under "WHAT WE’RE EXPLORING." That is to say, these are from the marketing department and it's impossible to know whether they are strictly aspirational or just around the corner. From the page: > Looking forward, Firefly has the potential to do much, much more. Explore the possibilities below ... We plan to build ... We’re exploring the poten…

They do a highly rehearsed live demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3z9jYtPx-4

It's mainly just text to image, but the results are extremely impressive IMO. Probably best in class for a lot of usecases.

Re: Adobe Firefly: AI Art Generator

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoever put the poster up for display and reaped some reward out of it is liable for damages. Everyone else is just doing their job in the supply chain. We want supply chains to work for the good of the economy, which is a proxy for increasing availability and reducing prices of "goods and services" to the average person.

Imagine a paying Adobe CC customer. They use Firefly to generate a poster, and unbeknownst to them, the image it generated is a reasonable facsimile of a copyrighted/trademark character. The person has inadvertently committed copyright infringement. So does Firefly need to come with a warning? The safer solution, to the chagrin of another commenter, is for Adobe to neuter the tool by only training on data in which Ad…

Surely with all our contemporary AI prowess we can train a model that identifies "reasonable facsimiles of copyrighted/trademark characters" after generating them and alert the user that it could be argued as such. Still, let the user decide.

We do not need creative technology to regulate observance of copyright law.

(By the way I think the chagrined other commenter was yours truly ;-))

Re: Adobe Firefly: AI Art Generator

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not as far as I know. There needs to be one, and internet-scrapers need to be able to be sued for ludicrous amounts of money if they violate it, IMHO. Training AI models feels way outside the scope of what I think "fair use" should cover.

They do not currently operate on the basis of fair use. Operating as a human by looking at images and learning how to draw or paint is not 'fair use', it's a right given to you by either God or Mother Nature, so the legal basis for neural nets learning from other art is that it's learning like a human and creating new art from just knowing what art human think is good and optimizing its creation of art to mimic if no…

As far as I know there are no religions or legal systems that posit that there are any rights inherently given to machines.

Re: Adobe Firefly: AI Art Generator

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The team is going to great lengths to make this ethical and fair (try and generate a photo of a copyrighted character like Hello Kitty or Darth Vader) are you saying it won't work? if that's the case, that seems really silly. actually, it goes against everything I believe in (as well as my understanding of even the kindest meaning of the word "hacker"). it drives me up the wall, it makes my blood boil who is going…

There will be open source tools replicating this within months. You can build your own model based on billions of images on the web or use someone else's or contribute to one.

To expand on this, what we're seeing with LLaMa is that you can fine-tune your model using other models.

It's not clear that the quality will be exactly the same (in fact it will very likely be worse), but working generators are essentially ways to quickly generate training data. And I can't think of a legal argument for why generated output from a model would be less legal to use as training data than an unlicensed photo off of DeviantArt.

Nobody has really called out OpenAI on this, but OpenAI has a clause in it's TOS that you won't use output to build a competing model. But that's... just in it's TOS. If you don't have an OpenAI account, it's not immediately clear to me (IANAL) why you can't use any of the leaked training sets that other people have generated with ChatGPT to help align a commercial model.

Certainly if someone makes the argument that generators like Copilot/Midjourney aren't violating copyright by learning from their sources, it's very hard to make the argument that Midjourney/Copilot output is somehow different than that and their output can't be used to help generate training datasets.

Re: Adobe Firefly: AI Art Generator

#339

Adobe employee, not in Creative Cloud. We got access to this in beta a week ago and it was an instant hit across the whole company. This is just the tip of the iceberg and there is a lot of really cool, in-house products around generative AI. The team is going to great lengths to make this ethical and fair (try and generate a photo of a copyrighted character like Hello Kitty or Darth Vader). I'm excited to see the fi…

I know why, but why do you guys make your subscription management such an awful experience for users? I used to like Adobe, now I hate the company and will go as far as suffering massive inconvenience to avoid Adobe products.

Last time I canceled a subscription (can't do it through your website, only by talking to support) when I finally got in touch with someone it took several hours to actually convince them to cancel.

Re: Adobe Firefly: AI Art Generator

#340

Adobe has lost any good sentiment I had for them with their forced subscriptions and dark patterns. I use their products begrudgingly, it’s a sunk cost fallacy from decades of muscle memory. My reaction to seeing any announcement from them is, yeah whatever Adobe.

Agreed. Greedy company, no longer associated with cool creators. I hope people start to move away from their products.
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