Last month, Adobe announced the beta release of Firefly, a family of AI tools focused initially on image and text effect generation. In the press release, Adobe highlighted that the training corpus for Firefly consisted exclusively of "hundreds of millions of professional-grade, licensed images in Adobe Stock along with openly licensed content and public domain content where the copyright has expired." By leveraging this type of content, Adobe has dramatically mitigated the risk that the output generated by its customers would infringe the copyright rights of a third-party artist or creator. Other AI models, such as Stable Diffusion, have chosen to go with a more retrospective approach – they instead offer artists and creators an opportunity to opt-out of having their works used as training data. However, users of Firefly will still have to think through whether the image generated by it is even protectable and enforceable. See our article "Breaking Dawn: Understanding the Copyright Office's Policy on Works Containing AI-Generated Materials" for additional details about the Copyright's Office official guidance on this point, as well as useful tips for applicants.
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