Adobe clarifies its terms, saying it does not train Firefly Gen AI models on customer content and will never assume ownership of a customer's work
A change to Adobe terms set the internet alight yesterday, after a number of pro users of the company's apps reacted with anger and confusion to the scary-looking wording.
The dispute also lands after reporting that Firefly’s training set included some AI-generated images contributed to Adobe Stock, sharpening scrutiny of how Adobe defines acceptable training inputs.
First-order effects
Adobe must reassure Creative Cloud users that their work remains theirs and is not a source of Firefly model training.
The clarification narrows the practical interpretation of the contested terms, but leaves Adobe’s content-access wording under closer customer scrutiny.
Second-order effects
Rival creative-AI providers face more pressure to state separately what content they may access, retain, and use for model improvement.
Creative-software companies may need to separate service-operation permissions from model-training rights in contracts and product controls; broad bundled consent increasingly creates adoption risk.
If this pattern persists, governed training corpora—not merely model features—will become a durable competitive differentiator for generative-AI tools used on proprietary work.
The trend: Generative-AI vendors are being pushed to make data-use boundaries, ownership rights, and training provenance explicit conditions of customer trust.
This happens incredibly frequently: a company posts (or updates) Terms of Use, the Internet freaks out about the teens suggesting the company is claiming an infinite license, the company clarifies the terms after days of bad press. …
I have to say that it's quite fun seeing Adobe, who have been “customer hostile” for quite some time, finally being taught they are no longer going to get the benefit of the doubt from people who have had enough of big tech. — https://9to5mac.com/...
unfortunate state of the world (with many co's scraping IP content without any permission or compensation) that Adobe needed to clarify this. but glad we did. side note: so much innovation needed in how “terms of service” are designed/explained in modern day.
I just cancelled my Adobe licence after many years as a customer. The new terms give Adobe “worldwide royalty-free licence to reproduce, display, distribute” or do whatever they want with any content I produce using their software. This is beyond insane. No creator in their [imag…
We recently made an update to our Terms of Use with the goal of providing more clarity on a few specific areas. We have received a number of questions resulting from this update and want to provide some clarity.
Adobe just made a blog post with more information about the recent TOS update. This includes what actually changed (not much), as well as clearer statements on what Adobe can and cannot do with your content. https://blog.adobe.com/...
Adobe will never assume ownership of a customer's work. Adobe hosts content to enable customers to use our applications and services. Customers own their content and Adobe does not assume any ownership of customer work.
@virus69 @Adobe we've clarified the need for a limited license “solely for the purpose of operating...” that has been there for over ~11 years - like any other company that needs to host content in cloud on behalf of users and make thumbnails and sharing links etc: https://blog.a…