Adobe's Compensation: Artists Rewarded for Firefly AI Data

0:00So Adobe's Firefly Generative AI models have now transitioned from beta to a general release available across Adobe's Creative Cloud, Adobe Express, and Adobe Experience Cloud platform. So this groundbreaking move has really kind of made the technology more widely accessible than ever. And I think this is making a significant step in Adobe's quest for, you know, AI-powered creative solutions. So of course, the road to Firefly's commercial launch wasn't without its challenges. The company faced a whole bunch of questions around its compensation model for Adobe stock contributors, especially those whose content contributed to Firefly's training data.

0:38I think some of the tension kind of just revolves around the possibility of these photographers and kind of illustrators losing business as users turn to Firefly for generating unique images rather than just purchasing existing stock content. In my opinion, I don't know what they expect because the alternative is people are just going to go to like Mid Journey and everything else that's out now and just get it without them getting any compensation so in my opinion if they're getting compensated they should be happy um maybe in the future it can be kind of like spotify where artists complain and got the regulators or other people to kind of push up the the price that they get paid per stream but as it stands since the default would appear to be no one getting compensated i would take what you can get and then try to push the needle in the future that'd be my strategy if i was a creator kind of complaining about this but of course you know people just want uh maybe they just want their cake and they want to be able to eat it as well so in any case um i think you know kind of addressing this concern adobe has announced an annual bonus for eligible adobe stock contributors which is covering both standard and premium stock collections so this bonus aims to recognize the value these contributors bring to firefly's ecosystem specifically the initial bonus is going to go from i believe this uh like june of last year to June of this year.

1:59So essentially, that's kind of matching the data set Adobe used to train Firefly, aka, they used all of those things to train Firefly. So they're going to say like, hey, anyone that had content on the platform during between those two dates, we'll look at what the content was, and we'll pay you for I'm really curious, like what they actually will what the payout would be for that. But in any case, determining these bonuses definitely is not straightforward, given the difficulty in tracking how often and you know, a specific image contributes to a newly generated Firefly image. So Alexandru Kostin, who's Adobe's VP for generative AI and Sensei, provided a little bit of insight into the company's approach here.

2:37This is like actually so, so interesting, but this is what he said, quote, the formula we have is a mix of the total number of assets they have in the training data set and the number of assets licensed. So basically the popularity of the commercial success of their assets, which we take as a proxy of the value of their assets through the lens of the marketplace okay for those that weren't following i think essentially what he's saying is they're looking at like all of your assets that you have all the pictures that you've taken how many times those pictures have been paid for just by users that are like hey this is cool pay for it and they're like essentially they're not like assigning a value to everything and every time it goes through an ai model and trains something and gets spit out on the other end um they like track all the tokens and payments and then pay you it's not like that.

3:22It's, I guess, too complicated. It's not like streaming royalties on Spotify. What they're actually doing is just saying, you were like, you know, you sold a hundred a month of this picture before. So we're assuming you have like a popularity score of a hundred on this picture. Um, now, so now, you know, this, we're assuming that it's going to be when people are generating images with AI, like that is your popularity score on the image. And it's going to be the same for images generated. I know it's not scientific. Um, and so it's probably not close so like big kudos to adobe for kind of figuring out what i would call a a quick and dirty like approach to like they want to pay people they know this is controversial but they also don't want to be slow on the technology they're not going to rewrite like the the way these things whole models are rolling so in my opinion i think that that's an acceptable response that is kind of cool very interesting so adobe kind of remains coy about disclosing any figures tied to these bonuses right so they're going to pay bonuses but no one knows how much it is And they're mentioning that these are largely dependent on individual contributors and how their content is being utilized.

4:23So the company did promise to divulge more details about the overall size of the bonus pool in the future, whenever that is. So on the user side, Adobe has implemented a quote generative credits system to meet Firefly usage. So each time a user opts to generate an image using Firefly, it's going to consume one credit. And the company has also redesigned the Firefly web app to prevent automatic generation of images until a user finalizes their actual settings. so they have a bunch of different plans um with different amounts of these generative credits ranging from you know 25 for free users with an adobe id to you know 3 000 credits for creative cloud pro plus uh all apps subscribers right which is equivalent to like i believe if this is correct um what we're seeing here around like 3 000 images that you'd get a month that you could generate so really impressive in any case i think it's noteworthy to say right like this isn't they can't just like say okay pay 25 bucks a month and get as many images as you want it costs a lot of money people would exploit that and like abuse that so they really have to like just assign credits and you can buy credits this is how a lot of things in ai are happening makes a lot of sense you saw the same thing with like jasper the ai writing tool um yeah so i think this is the way it's going to go i think platforms are gonna have to do credits for uh generating stuff because everyone uses this stuff differently unless you know sometimes maybe they'll just like you say it's a flat fee and then they kind of are averaging some people are spending more than it's worth some people are spending less and it kind of averages out as a profit for the company you may see that as well but i think credits is going to be especially for big companies like adobe the way that this all ends up rolling out so i think you know running out of these credits doesn't lock users out of firefly instead the service is simply going to operate at a slower speed so that's another thing right adobe has also confirmed that additional subscription packs are going to be available, although specific pricing details are yet to actually be revealed.

6:16But I mean, that's kind of cool, right? Like, it's kind of like chat GPT, you only have so many uses of GPT four in an hour. But if you use them all up, it's not like you get locked out of your account. It's just like you get, you know, put on this the slower or worse GPT 3.5. So Kostin elaborated on the need for the system stating quote, all of these models are very large, they run in the cloud and are expensive to run and we are optimizing them for quality of output, not for inference. speed. Because of that, we need to protect the user base to make sure they have access to the service and to ensure fair use of the services.

6:49So Firefly so far has generated, I think, over 2 billion images. That's really impressive. And I think, you know, Costan kind of underscores that because AI was primarily trained using Adobe stock images, the generated content is commercially safe for business use. Also, this is massive, right? Like they have the licenses. So when you use this like no one's going to sue you and say hey like i don't know whatever people businesses were concerned there's going to be lawsuits like because this was trained on an artist data and the artist is going to go sue the business for generating something with ai based off of their stuff without getting permission this is all there's permission all the permissions done adobe had the licenses so this is good to go for businesses which i think is also a big move and another reason why adobe is going to see a lot of success here so adobe has also taken the extra step of indemnifying its enterprise users against potential lawsuits arising from the use of Firefly generated images.

7:42They said like, look, if we did something wrong in the copyright and you're getting sued because of anything that you generate on our platform, we're going to pay for the lawsuit. So like big kudos to Adobe again. So Adobe's dual focus rewarding content contributors and, you know, regulating user access, I think signals a balanced approach to ethical and business considerations as it scales its generative AI capabilities. The broader launch of Firefly showcases the company's kind of ongoing commitment to innovation. They don't want to be left behind pretty much, right? Like we're seeing massive innovation from all the top tech companies.

8:16Adobe doesn't want to be left behind. And I honestly think they've done an absolute stand-up job of getting this thing put together, doing it right, you know, paying creators, you know, like telling businesses they're not going to be liable to any lawsuits. Like they really, like no one else is able to do what they've just done here. And maybe it's because they have the deepest pockets so it's left to be said if they're going to completely sweep the floor when it comes to the enterprise use case right and and take some market share from mid journey who seems to be the market leader right now but very very well done i big kudos to adobe that's all i can say this is going to be an interesting product to follow as we see this get more features and get more usage and more rollout broadly