Analyst(s): Keith Kirkpatrick
Publication Date: September 11, 2024
The News: Adobe has reinforced its commitment to the Adobe creator community, reiterating its policies around generative AI training policies, its core principles that guide how Firefly models are developed, and highlighting improvements to Adobe Stock to better protect the intellectual property rights and interests of creators. The company also highlighted its approach to engaging with its creator community through forums, social channels, and local community events.
Adobe Reinforces Messaging to Content Creators Around GenAI, IP
Analyst Take: Adobe has come under fire from some within its creator community, largely around Adobe’s approach to how its generative AI models are trained and how it protects the rights of its creators. While Adobe has always taken a responsible approach, the company hasn’t always communicated its stance clearly and effectively, particularly to its core base of creators.
In June, the company issued a minor change in the wording of its terms of service, which resulted in confusion around what content is used to train its AI models, and how creators’ rights are protected. While Adobe quickly came out and issued a revision and statement clarifying the terms of service, some users were left confused at best, with some creators assuming the worst about Adobe’s intentions around data privacy, IP rights, and model training.
Communicating to Key Stakeholders
Adobe has almost always done a solid job communicating to its corporate user base, which often has different priorities, concerns, and mindset than its base of creators. To that end, Adobe has released updates and resources that are designed to clearly articulate its approach to generative AI and are focused on the concerns of creators.
- Adobe’s approach to Firefly: Adobe has created a single source of information on Firefly so that users can always reference the company’s approach and the core principles that guide how we develop its Firefly models.
- Improvements to Adobe Stock: Adobe has made specific updates to better protect the intellectual property rights and interests of creators and highlighted the forthcoming issuance of its second Adobe Firefly bonus payment to Adobe Stock contributors in the coming weeks.
- Advocating for creator rights: Adobe reiterated its work around the Content Authenticity Initiative in 2019, which it says is now supported by over 3,300 members and aims to provide transparency on how content was generated and who created it. Adobe also mentioned that the company is actively helping to shape and advocate for policies and legislation such as the FAIR Act, which aims to help protect artists from the harmful and unfair use of AI to replicate their work.
Managing Perception Versus Reality Through Clean and Consistent Messaging
Like many larger vendors, Adobe faces the challenge of needing to communicate to several different audiences, often with different priorities, expectations, and pre-established notions. A vendor’s user community—particularly one that is directly impacted by a vendor’s policy around the usage of their intellectual property and data—is often rightly skeptical of a vendor’s motives whenever a new feature or service is offered.
That’s why I’m happy to see Adobe has taken a proactive step to review and refine its messaging to its core group of users. Providing a single source of information about how Adobe trains its models is a solid way of reestablishing trust through transparency and enables them to update information as technology advances.
Furthermore, the company deserves kudos for establishing a direct line to the company for creators to ask questions or provide feedback, via creativechat@adobe.com. This creation of a dedicated email address to handle potentially challenging questions from frustrated or perhaps even angry users will help generate more credibility and demonstrate accountability to its core users.
Meeting Customers Where They Are
Finally, Adobe has mentioned that it plans to be more active within its community forums and events, as well as at its annual Adobe MAX event. The key for Adobe, however, will be to engage with their customers within these forums, in addition to pointing them to official resources or fact sheets. By engaging in a dialog with users where they frequently convene, Adobe can establish itself as a partner to creators, much in the way it has partnered with large enterprise customers.
Ultimately, Adobe is taking the right steps to rebuilding trust with its user base. This is not only important to ensuring that its current base of creators accurately understands the company’s policies, but also potential new prospects that may be seeking to migrate from other platforms, such as Canva, and will want assurances that their IP and works are adequately protected.
You can read more about the company’s approach to generative AI and its Firefly models here, and you can view details about the company’s commitment to creators here.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
