Adobe AI now learns from YOUR art

Adobe has introduced customizable AI image generators, known as Firefly Custom Models, designed to replicate specific artistic styles and character designs. Now accessible in public beta, these models empower creators and brands to train them using their proprietary assets, thereby ensuring a consistent aesthetic across generated images for characters, illustrations, and photography.

This innovative tool is intended to optimize workflows for teams and individual creators tasked with generating large volumes of content. It establishes a reusable framework that maintains visual coherence across diverse projects, eliminating the need to re-establish aesthetics for each new endeavor. Adobe highlights that these custom models can precisely retain elements such as stroke weight, color palettes, lighting, and character attributes through successive generations. Furthermore, these custom models are private by default, ensuring that proprietary training images remain isolated and are not utilized to inform Adobe's broader Firefly models.

In a press release, Adobe emphasized the importance of consistent brand expression, stating, “To grow a brand, you need a steady stream of assets that consistently express who you are. Those assets should be yours and yours alone.” The company further elaborated on the integration of these models into creative processes: “Once trained, your custom model becomes part of your workflow. You can generate new ideas aligned to your aesthetic, reuse the model across projects, briefs and campaigns and produce at scale without losing what makes your work distinctive.”

While Firefly custom models were initially unveiled as a private beta during Adobe Max last year, they are now accessible to the general public. Adobe has consistently positioned its Firefly models, which draw upon a combination of licensed and public domain content for training, as an ethically sound and commercially secure option, contrasting them with competing services that may have utilized scraped copyrighted materials.

This expansion, granting creative professionals greater authority over the training of their AI models, appears to be a logical progression. However, Adobe has not explicitly stated whether it will restrict users from training custom models on content they do not own. Adobe’s help documentation indicates that users will be prompted to affirm they possess the requisite rights and permissions prior to training a custom model, and to confirm “that your use of custom models won’t infringe on the copyright, IP, likeness, or privacy rights of others.” We have contacted Adobe to inquire about any specific measures implemented to prevent custom models from being trained on a creator’s work without explicit authorization.