this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2024
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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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[–] alexdeathway 38 points 7 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Supplementary synthetic data increases the quality of the model.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] -4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

It doesn't really matter how much it is. An image is an image.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Data augmentation is a thing since a long time, but of course if the majority of your data is synthetic your model will suck on real world data. Though as these generative models get better and better at mimicking real world data and we select the results we want to use (removing the nonsense and hallucinations, artifacts etc.), we’re still feeding them “more data”.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see what effect it’ll produce on future models. I think overall the improvements on LLMs have been good, even at slow steps we’re still figuring out how to better turn them into useful tools. I don’t know how well the image generation models have improved in the last 2 years though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

we’re still feeding them “more data”.

Yes, that's one way of putting it. What gets into the Adobe stock database is already curated. They also have the sales and tracking data.

Though as these generative models get better and better at mimicking real world data

Also yes on this. It doesn't matter if your data is synthetic but only if it's fit for purpose. That's especially true in this case, where the distinction between synthetic and real is so unclear. You're already including drawings, renders, photomanips, etc. I have no idea what kind of misconception people have that they would think it matters if some piece of digital art is AI generated.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I'm just talking about synthetic images affect model quality.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It doesn't matter how the image was made. It only matters what it is like and how it is used to affect the model.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

That's what I'm saying. Synthetic images can help your model look better, but if you're aiming for “realistic” output, but synthetic images are fundamentally not real images and too many will bias your model in a slightly different direction.