Growing responsibly in the age of AI

Image source: Adobe Stock/Robert Kneschke.

It’s been over a year since generative AI began its path into mainstream conversations and creative workflows, and during this time we have witnessed rapid increases in technical capabilities and mainstream adoption across the world. The future role of generative AI across creative segments, and how this technology will impact creators’ livelihoods continue to be at the forefront of our discussions and strategic planning.

Ensuring that we approach generative AI in a thoughtful, transparent, and responsible way is critical to our mission of connecting businesses with the best content and creators in the world, in a way that helps to empower creators with more and better ways to earn a living with their work.

Growing responsibly

In the last 12 months, Adobe Stock submissions, licenses, and contributor payouts have hit an all-time high while new contributors are signing up and generating earnings at an accelerated rate. The combination of generative AI and Stock is enabling our customers to accelerate ideation, discussion, and decision making. Ultimately, Adobe Stock customers seek the perfect image for their project that balance composition, relevant trends, commercial viability, and impact — and these are areas the stock contributor community understands deeply.

As we watch the Stock business grow and the adoption of generative AI increase, we understand the importance of helping to ensure we continue to create trust and transparency around generative AI. Over the last several months we have made significant changes to our site, policies, and procedures. Some of those changes include:

• Enhancing our submissions guidelines:
  • Contributors must not submit generative AI content with titles that imply that it is depicting an actual newsworthy event
  • Contributors must not submit work created with prompts referring to people, places, or property unless they have the legal right to do so (e.g., via a model or property release)
  • Contributors must acknowledge (via a check box) that content was "Created using generative AI tools” and that the "People and Property are fictional" if the image or video features a fake person or fake property before the content is made publicly available
• Scaling moderation capabilities by:
  • Doubling the size of our expert human moderation team who specialize in content review
  • Creating and training the team on new generative AI specific policies and best practices
  • Introducing specific generative AI moderation systems to efficiently categorize and review content for any potential policy violations
  • Refining our audit systems to monitor the existing collection more efficiently for content that may violate our new generative AI policies
  • Reviewing and removing thousands of existing assets from Stock and continuing to actively monitor the full Adobe Stock collection
• Updating our usage policies to make it clear that:
  • Editorial uses of Adobe Stock content must not be used to mislead or deceive as doing so is a violation of our terms of service
  • Stock content should always be clearly marked when used in editorial content to help ensure people are not misled into thinking a real event is being depicted by the stock content
  • If a publisher or other licensee is found to be using a clearly-labeled Stock asset in misleading ways to deceive people, we will review and take appropriate action including terminating their rights to that Stock asset
• More clearly labeling images created with generative technology by:
  • Having a generative AI specific watermark on all generative AI content
  • Clearly indicating an image was created using generative AI
  • Enabling search filters that allow users to identify generative AI content

These changes reflect our team’s concerted effort to maintain the integrity of our offerings while addressing the evolving landscape of digital content creation and consumption as generative AI content continues to transform the way we work, create, and communicate.

In addition to continuing to build a robust marketplace of content that meets our customers’ needs, we continue to explore ways in which our Stock contributors and the broader creator community can increase their earnings potential through Adobe.

Efforts such as this include leveraging Firefly to potentially lower production costs and increase submissions, understanding demand trends with more clarity, and increasing their earnings potential through initiatives like Adobe Stock Missions (targeted “asks for content” that yield direct earnings) and freelance hiring through Bēhance.

We’re committed to making creativity more accessible to all, and more powerful and productive for professionals. We’re also committed to innovating responsibly, in conversation with creators, and customers.