Adobe is putting its money where its mouth is, where generative AI is concerned.
The company has already said that it’s using only fully-licensed images to train the generative AI models used in Adobe Firefly and the generative fill feature recently added to Photoshop.
Now, the company promises to cover any legal costs that companies might incur as a result of using the platform.
That could happen if, say, someone thinks their work was used without permission and sues.
In an announcement released yesterday, Adobe said that “Firefly is designed to be safe for commercial use and enterprises also have the opportunity to obtain an IP indemnity from Adobe for content generated by certain Firefly-powered workflows allowing them to deploy it across their organization with confidence.”
Adobe also added that hundreds of brands, including IBM, Mattel, and advertising firm Dentsu, are already using the technology and that more than 200 million images have already been generated.
However, Adobe still hasn’t released the pricing for the commercial version of the tool. It’s free while it’s still in beta, but the beta version of the images also aren’t allowed to be used commercially. There’s no word yet about exactly when the commercial version will be available.
The image quality is also still not great. It does a particularly bad job with faces. Hopefully, by the time the commercial version is available, the models will have been upgraded to the point where they’re ready for actual use.
Until then, book cover designers should start to experiment with the technology because it will dramatically increase their productivity and reduce costs for authors.
And for authors themselves, it could potentially be a good, though pricy, tool for generating book covers, though platforms like Canva are easier to use and much less expensive, while new entrants like Midjourney offer higher-quality images — but without the copyright protections promised by Adobe and other enterprise-focused players.
Photoshop in particular has a notoriously steep learning curve, though its generative fill feature is remarkably intuitive. Authors interested in trying it out can do so with a seven-day free trial. You can see how I used it to create a book cover here.
MetaStellar editor and publisher Maria Korolov is a science fiction novelist, writing stories set in a future virtual world. And, during the day, she is an award-winning freelance technology journalist who covers artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and enterprise virtual reality. See her Amazon author page here and follow her on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and check out her latest videos on the Maria Korolov YouTube channel. Email her at maria@metastellar.com. She is also the editor and publisher of Hypergrid Business, one of the top global sites covering virtual reality.