Adobe pushes Firefly AI into big business, with financial cover

Adobe Inc. said on Thursday it will offer Firefly, its artificial intelligence tool for generating images, to its large business customers, with financial indemnity for copyright challenges involving content made with the tools.

The move to include compensation comes amid a rise in lawsuits around the image data used in AI services from companies such as Stability AI and Midjourney that can generate imagery from just a few words of text.

Adobe earlier this year released a test version of Firefly, its own service which it says was created with legally safe image data.

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On Thursday, San Jose, California-based Adobe said it will start offering Firefly to its corporate customers as part of Adobe Express, a tool aimed at helping business users who do not specialize in design to create images and documents.

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In an effort to give those customers confidence, Adobe said it will offer indemnification for images created with the service, though the company did not give financial or legal details of how the program will work.

"We financially are standing behind all of the content that is produced by Firefly for use either internally or externally by our customers," Ashley Still, senior vice president of digital media at Adobe, told Reuters.

Adobe said it will also let businesses customize the service by training it to use their own logos and products so that "when employees are creating content, it is literally within their brand guidelines," Still said.

Adobe on Thursday also added AI-based features to its digital marketing tools.

Suman Basetty, senior director of AI products for Adobe Experience Cloud, said any user will be able to generate reports from data in the system by asking questions in natural language, such as asking to compare online and offline sales over a certain period in a certain region.

"Rather than someone going over and pulling the data for a time range and generating the report, now you can see it. This essentially democratizes the data across the enterprise," Basetty said.