Adobe has launched Adobe Firefly, yet another text-to-image tool that lets you turn any set of words you can think of into a picture, video, 3D model, and more. After some criticism, Adobe pointed out that it didn’t use any of your stored photos to train its algorithms. It relied only on the work licensed on Adobe Stock.

[Related reading: We aren’t using customer data to train AI, says Adobe]

What is Adobe Firefly?

Let’s start by presenting you with Adobe Firefly and what it’s capable of. Judging from the demo, it can do pretty much anything you can think of. It works like any other text-to-image generator: you type in your prompts and wait for the image to come to life on your screen. From there on, you can use a brush to paint away and modify any bit of the picture. You can also expand its borders, similar to DALL-E. Other than words alone, you can also use 3D models and turn them into pictures; or imagine anything and then turn it into a video.

And in addition to pictures, you can use textual prompts to create patterns, vectors, brushes, and templates. You can also take a sketch and turn it into a full-color image. It reminded me of Adobe Scribbler introduced back in 2017, and I assume that it builds upon it. All in all, Adobe Firefly seems like a pretty versatile and useful text-to-image tool.

Adobe’s algorithm training

“We have never, ever used anything in our storage to train a generative AI model, not once,” Adobe’s Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky said in an interview with Bloomberg earlier this year. He said that the company’s decade-old Terms of Service were misinterpreted, as they were in place “to allow products to be analyzed to improve features, not for image generation.” Belsky added that Adobe was rolling out a new iteration of this policy that is more specific. “If we ever allow people to opt in for generative AI specifically, we need to call it out and explain how we’re using it,” he said.

In a press release, Adobe explained that Firefly was based on Adobe’s first model. It was trained on Adobe Stock images, openly licensed content, and public domain content where copyright has expired. The company says they will “focus on images and text effects and is designed to generate content safe for commercial use.”

“Adobe Stock’s hundreds of millions of professional-grade, licensed images are among the highest quality in the market and help ensure Firefly won’t generate content based on other people’s or brands’ IP. Future Firefly models will leverage a variety of assets, technology and training data from Adobe and others. As other models are implemented, Adobe will continue to prioritize countering potential harmful bias.”

Adobe Firefly availability

Adobe Firefly has been launched in Beta, and you can subscribe here if you want to access it. Adobe is also planning to make Firefly available via APIs on various platforms to enable customers to integrate into custom workflows and automation. The first applications that will benefit from Firefly integration will be Adobe Express, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator.