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Adobe’s ‘Ethical’ Firefly AI Was Trained on Midjourney Images (www.bloomberg.com)

submitted 3 months ago by Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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When Adobe Inc. released its Firefly image-generating software last year, the company said the artificial intelligence model was trained mainly on Adobe Stock, its database of hundreds of millions of licensed images. Firefly, Adobe said, was a “commercially safe” alternative to competitors like Midjourney, which learned by scraping pictures from across the internet.

But behind the scenes, Adobe also was relying in part on AI-generated content to train Firefly, including from those same AI rivals. In numerous presentations and public postsabout how Firefly is safer than the competition due to its training data, Adobe never made clear that its model actually used images from some of these same competitors.

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[-] seaQueue@lemmy.world 149 points 3 months ago

Oh hey, look. The cycle of AI ingesting garbage output from another AI model has begun. This can't possibly impact quality or reliability in any way /s

[-] balder1991@lemmy.world 16 points 3 months ago

Time to save the models we have now, cause they’ll never the quite the same.

[-] h_ramus@lemm.ee 10 points 3 months ago

The AI centipede era has begun

[-] TheGiantKorean@lemmy.world 120 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

AI ingesting the output of AI ingesting the output of AI...

[-] DarkThoughts@fedia.io 33 points 3 months ago

Isn't this causing a huge degradation in quality? It's like compressing an image over and over again. Those "AI" models can only generate things on what they know, and already have a very real issue of looking samey because of it. So if we train models on that, and then another model on the new model, and repeat this over and over again, we'd end up with less and less quality & variety for each model, no?

[-] balder1991@lemmy.world 21 points 3 months ago

I suppose the AI images submitted are done so because they turned out good, so there’s still a human selection process there. It’s not as bad at automatically feeding random generated images into the training.

[-] PapstJL4U@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

But are they? The amount must be minuscle as searching and selecting costs time. What impact can thoughtful selected images have?

[-] General_Effort@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

Adobe trains on images submitted to their stock image marketplace. Deciding to submit is the first selection step. Then there is some quality control by Adobe; mainly AI powered, I'd guess. Adobe also has the sales data (again, human selection) and additional tracking data; how many people clicked a thumbnail and so on.

What people imagine here about quality loss is completely divorced from reality.

[-] Drewelite@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 3 months ago

Well that's what human knowledge is lol. This is the AI Internet 😂 My guess is they will begin to diverge from human interest/comprehension if they don't have enough of their training data be human created.

[-] General_Effort@lemmy.world -1 points 3 months ago

That's not what anyone would do in reality, though. In reality, when you train an AI model on AI output you get a quality increase, because the model learns to be better at doing the things it's supposed to do, while forgetting the irrelevant. Where output looks samey, it's because different people are chasing the same mainstream taste.

[-] DarkThoughts@fedia.io 5 points 3 months ago

How do you get a quality increase if you by definition cut down on the variety of the generative aspects? That doesn't make any sense.

[-] General_Effort@lemmy.world -2 points 3 months ago

Put like this, because too much variety is the biggest problem in terms of quality. People don't want variety in terms of, say, number of limps or fingers. People have something specific in mind when they prompt an AI. They only want very limited and specific variability.

In a sense, limiting variety is the whole point of the AI. There is a vast number of possible images. Most of them would be simply indistinguishable noise to us. The proportion we would consider a sensible picture is tiny. We want to constrain the variety to within this tiny segment.

[-] DarkThoughts@fedia.io 4 points 3 months ago

But "AI" generated images don't suffer from too much variety, they suffer from looking samey. It's the opposite of what you're arguing about. Limbs aren't really the issue here since this is about Midjourney, which handles that part fairly well already.

[-] General_Effort@lemmy.world -1 points 3 months ago

Adobe trained its AI "Firefly" on its stock library (and other images). Their library contains AI images. It's unlikely that these are all from Midjourney.

I'm not sure what you mean by samey. As I said, people chase the same mainstream taste. If the images from one service looks samey, then they probably figure that's what the customers want. It's also possible that you only recognize this type of image as AI generated.

[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 18 points 3 months ago

This actually leads to more conformist images with more errors, over time. Basically if an ai takes images from us, its gets loads of creativity, outputs less creativity, and more errors. So do they a couple of rounds and you indeed end up with utter crap.

[-] Mereo@lemmy.ca 54 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Garbage in -> Garbage out (x2)
Garbage in (x2) -> = Garbage out (x4)
Garbage in (x4) -> = Garbage out (x8)
Garbage in (x8) -> = Garbage out (x16)
...

[-] Beetschnapps@lemmy.world 14 points 3 months ago

Yea! Can you believe how long it took us to make garbage before all this?

[-] photonic_sorcerer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 3 months ago

Y'all never heard of recycling?

[-] alexdeathway@programming.dev 37 points 3 months ago

why would they do this, doesn't that reduce the quality of training dataset?

[-] cynar@lemmy.world 13 points 3 months ago

Depends how it's done.

Full generative images would definitely start creating a copying error type problem.

However it's not quite that simple. An AI system can be used to distort an image. The derivatives force the learning AI to notice different things. This can vastly extend the pool of data to learn from, and so improve the end AI.

Adobe obviously decided that the copying errors were worth the extended datasets.

[-] Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 3 months ago

Supplementary synthetic data increases the quality of the model.

[-] SomeGuy69@lemmy.world 9 points 3 months ago

Correct. To a certain extend one can add AI data into AI, too much and you add noise, making the result worse, like a copy of a copy.

[-] General_Effort@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

Yes, though that's not what they're doing. They train on images uploaded to their marketplace and, of course, some of these are AI generated.

[-] Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 months ago

It's fine as long as it's not the majority.

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[-] CosmoNova@lemmy.world 23 points 3 months ago

I said it around 2 years ago when the term "ethical" was first coined by media when talking about AI. Ehtical in this context just means those who own data centers and made a huge efford to extract and process user data (Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc.) have all the cards. Nevermind the technology being so new users couldn't possibly consent to it years ago. They just update their TOS and get that consent retroactively while law makers are absent as they happily watch their strocks go up.

[-] Grimy@lemmy.world 12 points 3 months ago

Its really frustrating to see people get riled up and manipulated into thinking legislating to make illegal anything "unethical" is in their interest.

Its a fantasy to think individual creators will get a slice of the pie and not just the data brokers. Its also a convenient way to destroy the competition.

People are getting emotional and they are going to use that to build one of the grossest monopoly ever seen.

[-] jimmydoreisalefty@lemmy.world 18 points 3 months ago

Adobe said a relatively small amount — about 5% — of the images used to train its AI tool was generated by other AI platforms. “Every image submitted to Adobe Stock, including a very small subset of images generated with AI, goes through a rigorous moderation process to ensure it does not include IP, trademarks, recognizable characters or logos, or reference artists’ names,” a company spokesperson said.

Adobe Stock’s library has boomed since it began formally accepting AI content in late 2022. Today, there are about 57 million images, or about 14% of the total, tagged as AI-generated images. Artists who submit AI images must specify that the work was created using the technology, though they don’t need to say which tool they used. To feed its AI training set, Adobe has also offered to pay for contributors to submit a mass amount of photos for AI training — such as images of bananas or flags.

[-] TheBat@lemmy.world 11 points 3 months ago

AIuroboros

[-] Zink@programming.dev 11 points 3 months ago

We always thought the singularity is when our technology would take off advancing without us.

Maybe that moment when it decides it doesn’t need us will be a rapid disintegration by machine circle jerk.

[-] uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 3 months ago

They [the Golgafrincham] sent the B ship off first, but of course, the other two-thirds of the population stayed on the planet and lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.

[-] 0nekoneko7@lemmy.world 7 points 3 months ago

AI daisy chain. One AI output is another AI input.

[-] airrow@hilariouschaos.com 7 points 3 months ago

the problem is "intellectual property" existing at all, just get rid of it entirely and make everything public domain

[-] SeaJ@lemm.ee 4 points 3 months ago

I've seen Multiplicity enough times to know how this turns out.

[-] GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

You've been watching the original movie multiple times? I just watch the most recent recording of myself describing the movie, and then record a new description over that, with each successive generation.

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this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2024

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