Adobe Offers Subscription Service for Copyright Protection with AI Generated Content
Adobe Inc. intends to offer subscriptions for fresh artificial intelligence services, which will include legal protection against allegations of copyright infringement.
Business customers will be charged a flat-rate subscription for enterprise-wide access to new so-called generative AI tools — the types that can create content such as text or images at a prompt — across all Adobe products, Ashley Still, Adobe’s executive vice president, said in an interview. Still, pricing is negotiated with individual customers depending on the size of their organizations.
A key part of the offer: Licenses remove watermarks from created images, and if a customer sues for infringement, Adobe will pay damages and help in court, Still said. The company offers a similar service for its digital image library, Adobe Stock. Adobe shares rose 4.2% in New York on Thursday.
In the rapidly developing field of artificial intelligence, Adobe has tried to position itself as a responsible citizen of the industry by offering products that do not plagiarize or create offensive images. The longtime creative software leader calls its Firefly suite of tools, largely trained on its proprietary stock library, “the only commercially safe generative AI product on the market.”
Tools that create images from text prompts are available in the company’s flagship Photoshop software and through a separate image generator. Those features will also be in the new version of Adobe’s web-based design tool Express, the company said in a statement Thursday. Under the new business licenses, there will be a cap on how many images can be created, although “in normal use it would be unusual to hit the cap,” Still said.
As major software makers rush to add new AI features to existing products, few have figured out how to monetize them. The Information reported last week that Microsoft Corp. is charging some Office 365 customers a flat fee of $100,000 for up to 1,000 users a year to test its new artificial intelligence features. Analysts at Bloomberg Intelligence estimated earlier this month that generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots such as ChatGPT and image maker Dall-E, will become a $1.3 trillion market by 2032.
This issue of commercialization is urgent because generative AI – which uses large amounts of text and media – can be expensive to run due to the consumption of computing resources. More than 100 million images were created with Photoshop’s new creation tools in the first eight days, Still said. Although Adobe is not “too concerned” about the cost of computing resources, he added.
“The pricing model depends on the number of users and the number of images created,” said Anil Chakravarthy, Adobe’s director of digital experience, speaking in an interview on the sidelines of the company’s annual summit in London on Thursday. “We only owe it to generative artificial intelligence.”
Startup Stability AI charges $149 per month for nearly unlimited use of the image creation service. Competitor Midjourney’s top-tier plan costs $60 a month.
Adobe is also integrating Firefly image creation capabilities into marketing and analytics software, says director Amit Ahuja. Generative AI for text — like writing advertising language or summarizing conversations — will leverage large language models built by other companies, he said.
