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 postsabout 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.
I suppose the AI images submitted are done so because they turned out good, so there’s still a human selection process there. It’s not as bad at automatically feeding random generated images into the training.
But are they? The amount must be minuscle as searching and selecting costs time. What impact can thoughtful selected images have?
Adobe trains on images submitted to their stock image marketplace. Deciding to submit is the first selection step. Then there is some quality control by Adobe; mainly AI powered, I’d guess. Adobe also has the sales data (again, human selection) and additional tracking data; how many people clicked a thumbnail and so on.
What people imagine here about quality loss is completely divorced from reality.