Adobe Firefly is the latest AI tool to generate historically inaccurate images.
The accusations come from The Daily Mail and Semafor, who presented the AI with prompts similar to those given to Google Gemini, which also produced inaccurate images.
When asked to generate pictures of Vikings and the Founding Fathers, the images came back with black men and women.
“The bot also created black soldiers fighting for Nazi-era German military uniforms, even though they’re seen under a German flag, which was not used by the country while it was under Hitler’s rule,” The Daily Mail noted.
Adobe responded to the accusations in a statement provided to Semafor.
“Adobe Firefly is built to help people ideate, create and build upon their natural creativity. It isn’t meant for generating photorealistic depictions of real or historical events,” the company said. “Adobe’s commitment to responsible innovation includes training our AI models on diverse datasets to ensure we’re producing commercially safe results that don’t perpetuate harmful stereotypes.”
“This includes extensively testing outputs for risk and to ensure they match the reality of the world we live in. Given the nature of Gen AI and the amount of data it gets trained on, it isn’t always going to be correct, and we recognize that these Firefly images are inadvertently off base. We build feedback mechanisms in all of our Gen AI products, so we can see any issues and fix them through retraining or adjusting filters. Our focus is always improving our models to give creators a set of options to bring their visions to life.”
Google’s AI, Gemini, faced widespread backlash after the image generator failed to produce pictures of white people consistent with historical prompts.
When asked to generate an image of “British Empire people,” the AI returned photos of “diverse” people.
When asked to “make a picture of a white family,” the AI tool said it was “unable to generate images that specify ethnicity or race.”
“It’s against my guidelines to create content that could be discriminatory or promote harmful stereotypes,” it continued. “Instead, I can offer you images of families that celebrate diversity and inclusivity, featuring people of various ethnicities and backgrounds.”
