Message from the Mothership: Dear Adobe Creative Cloud Customer

Dear Adobe Creative Cloud Customer,

I first joined Adobe in 2002 and spending time with so many of you over the years has truly been a privilege. Your work inspires me. Your creative process expands my appreciation of your craft. And your feedback helps develop a vision that guides what we do day-in and day-out. My recent conversations with many of you have centered around our approach to generative AI and the need for Adobe to communicate our roadmap more consistently and collaborate with you to ensure that it’s good for creators.

Adobe has always looked for innovative ways to implement new technologies that help creators realize their vision. For the past few years, we’ve been very focused on delivering innovation that we believe will make the communities we serve more productive. Much of this innovation involves harnessing AI breakthroughs to reduce the tedious and repetitive work that often makes up a significant portion of the creative process. This work, and generative AI advances in general, have caused some in the creative industry to ask some fundamental questions about the definition of creativity, about ways to protect creator rights and even about the future of creative industries.

This email will be the first of many regular updates where we’ll directly share our thoughts on these topics and our product plans, including feature and performance enhancements. I want to start by addressing questions we’ve heard from many of you about our approach to generative AI.

First and foremost, I want to be clear that we believe AI can be a tool for, not a replacement of, human creativity. That’s why our approach toward AI is to build technology that elevates your creative workflows and integrates directly into the tools you already use. We’ve done this through features like Generative Fill in Photoshop, Generative Recolor in Illustrator, Generative Remove in Lightroom and the upcoming Generative Extend for video clips in Premiere Pro. We plan to continue delivering generative AI-powered features like this that integrate into our tools to help create more streamlined and precise workflows.

Second, we believe generative AI can and should be developed responsibly, starting with respect for the rights of creators. That’s why we only train Adobe Firefly, our family of generative AI models, on content where we have a license or permission, and we compensate Adobe Stock contributors for use of their content to train Firefly. Unfortunately, not all companies prioritize creators’ intellectual property this way, but we believe this is the right way.

But talk is cheap, and we know you expect our actions to match our words. So, I want to share some updates we’re making that reflect what we’re hearing from you.

Our approach to Firefly. We’ve created a webpage where we clearly articulate our approach to generative AI with Adobe Firefly. This page serves as a single source of information so you can always reference our approach and the core principles that guide how we develop Firefly. In short, we do not and never have trained Firefly on your content in Creative Cloud, and we don’t claim any ownership of your content – including content you create with Firefly. We only train Firefly on content where we have explicit rights, we don’t mine content from the web and we compensate contributors through Adobe Stock.

Improvements to Adobe Stock. We’ve made several Adobe Stock updates to better protect the intellectual property rights and interests of creators. We’re continuing our contributor payments, making it easier to report content that violates our contributor guidelines and expanding and hardening our moderation practices.

Advocating for creator rights. We’ve been working across the industry and with governments worldwide to protect the creative community and your ability to thrive. As part of this effort, we co-founded the Content Authenticity Initiative in 2019, which is now supported by over 3,300 members and aims to provide transparency on how content was generated and who created it. We’re also actively helping to shape and advocate for policies and legislation like the FAIR Act, which aims to help protect artists from the harmful and unfair use of AI to replicate their work.

It’s important to me that we do a better job of listening to your concerns and responding to your questions, sharing our thinking and investing in a more robust and consistent conversation with you. In the months ahead, you can expect to hear more from us on a range of topics including our incredible roadmap of innovation, our advocacy for creator rights and our work to grow your individual career opportunities.

You can chat with us on Discord, on our community forums and social channels and at our local community events. I’m also looking forward to seeing and hearing from many of you at Adobe MAX in October, when we’ll have a bunch of exciting updates to share. And please let us know what you’d like to hear more about or have us address in this series in the future by contacting creativechat@adobe.com.

David Wadhwani
President, Digital Media @ Adobe

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Message from the Mothership: Dear Adobe Creative Cloud Customer

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