Adobe’s Firefly AI is getting competition at the worst time

For a hot second there, Adobe enjoyed a unique niche within the generative AI industry thanks to its Firefly AI and Stock image hosting platform, which was trained on the company’s proprietary and “commercially safe” dataset of licensed images. Now, Getty Images is getting in on the game and launching a rival model. On Thursday, PicsArt, the AI-powered online image and video-editing service, announced that it will be partnering with Getty to build and train a generative AI based on Getty’s exclusive library of photo and video content.

“This partnership connects Getty Images’ vast creative library with the next generation of marketers and creators, empowering them with high-quality content for use directly within the PicsArt platform,” Grant Farhall, chief product officer at Getty Images, said in a statement released Thursday. “It allows creators to bring their visions to life while maintaining the highest standards of commercial safety.”

Adobe recently found itself in hot water with its own user base after adding new rules to the terms and conditions for its Creative Cloud software suite that seemingly granted the company the ability to “access [user] content through both automated and manual methods, such as for content review.” What’s more, Creative Cloud users found themselves unable to log into the program, uninstall it from their systems, or even access customer support until they had agreed to opt in to the new rules.

However, following public outcries from some of the suite’s high-profile users, including director Duncan Jones, the company published a blog post clarifying precisely what and how the new terms and conditions will apply to users’ works and what access rights the company actually has with regards to art created on its platforms. “The focus of this update was to be clearer about the improvements to our moderation processes that we have in place,” the Adobe Communications Team wrote Friday. “Given the explosion of Generative AI and our commitment to responsible innovation, we have added more human moderation to our content submissions review processes.”

The new PicsArt model will be custom built from the ground up, the team wrote, enabling the site’s subscribers to produce generated images that shouldn’t violate copyright regulations. The generative AI industry has long struggled with adhering to modern copyright law, given that many of today’s largest models are trained on data scraped from the public internet. As such, lawsuits from those creators negatively impacted have become increasingly common — along with some more extreme alternative measures.

Like Apple Intelligence, the new PicsArt x Getty collaboration is expected to launch later this year as an API call through PicsArt’s site. There’s no word yet on what subscription level users will need in order to access the new model, as the recently announced Getty Images’ video integration demands a $5-per-month PicsArt Plus membership.

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