Adobe Says It’ll Cover Legal Bills for Its AI Tool

"The risk is never zero, hence why we offer indemnification."

Got Your Back

As the copyright controversy shrouding the use of generative AI tools continues to deepen, Adobe has planted its flag in the sand.

According to Fast Company, Adobe is so confident that copyright law won't be an issue for users of their new generative AI-powered "Firefly" product that they've promised to cover any and all copyright-related legal costs that users might incur as a result of using it.

Well, uh, some of its users, that is. The compensation — which will cover "full indemnification for the content created" according to Adobe VP of digital media Claude Alexandre — will reportedly only apply to users of Adobe's business-focused "Firefly for enterprise" offering.

In short, Adobe is ready to put its money where its mouth is.

Offering legal backing against alleged copyright violation is "a proof point that we stand behind the commercial safety," as Alexandre told Fast Company, "and readiness of these features."

Stocked Up

Firefly, which was recently released in beta form to Photoshop users, can reimagine highlighted sections of a given image by simply typing in a text prompt.

Per the report, Adobe's argument hinges in large part on the claim that their AI has been trained primarily on stock images that they already own, as opposed to the wealth of data and imagery being scraped from across huge swathes of the web by the likes of Stable Diffusion or Midjourney.

And Adobe has been in the stock image game for a while. Their new AI, they say, is really just an extension of that.

"Adobe claims that Firefly has been trained on entirely legal inputs, mostly from their own extensive image libraries," Andres Guadamuz, an intellectual property law researcher at the University of Sussex, told Fast Company. "This is an indication that they have conducted a thorough investigation of their training sources and are happy that they will not get sued."

Commercially Safe

Alexandre also emphasized to Fast Company that Adobe did its homework and found that Firely is "as good or better in terms of field compliance and IP checks."

"We feel very good this is totally and completely commercially safe," Alexandre added, although he did concede that "the risk is never zero, hence why we offer indemnification."

There's some precedent of the creators of AI image generators being accused of having their tools come up with infringing material. Stock image giant Getty, for instance, sued Stable Diffusion maker Stability AI earlier this year, arguing that it scraped millions of its images without a license.

But with the rights to its own extensive catalog of images in hand, Adobe is well-positioned to defend the output of its latest AI image generator — and it's ready to put money behind that conviction.

More on generative AI: Man Sues OpenAI after ChatGPT Claimed He Embezzled Money