Adobe’s ‘Ethical’ Firefly AI Was Trained on Midjourney Images
Company promotes its tool as safe from content scraped from the internet.
Adobe’s decision to build Firefly with content the company holds the rights to, or public domain content, was meant to differentiate Firefly in the fast-growing market for generative artificial intelligence.
Photographer: Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images)
When Adobe Inc. released its Firefly image-generating software last year, the company said the artificial intelligence model was trained mainly on Adobe Stock, its database of hundreds of millions of licensed images. Firefly, Adobe said, was a “commercially safe” alternative to competitors like Midjourney, which learned by scraping pictures from across the internet.
But behind the scenes, Adobe also was relying in part on AI-generated content to train Firefly, including from those same AI rivals. In numerous presentations and public posts about how Firefly is safer than the competition due to its training data, Adobe never made clear that its model actually used images from some of these same competitors.