Adobe Firefly used thousands of Midjourney images in training its 'ethical AI' model

Adobe has always sold its artificial intelligence image generator Firefly as a form of ethical AI, training it primarily on its own library of licenced stock images — millions of photos, designs and illustrations from the Adobe Stock library.

A new report by Bloomberg claims this squeaky clean image may not be as perfect as the Photoshop-maker would like us to think. The "commercially safe" model may have a few not-so-well sourced skeletons in its training data.

During the process of training the Firefly AI model, some of the images came from competitor Midjourney. The startup has never declared the source of its training data but many suspect it is from images it scraped from the internet without licensing.

Adobe says only about 5% of the millions of images used to train Firefly fell into this category and all of them were part of the Adobe Stock library, which meant they'd been through a "rigorous moderation process."