Adobe Photoshop Generative AI
Adobe recently updated their AI image generation, integrating it further into Photoshop.
Is Photoshop’s new Generative AI feature any good?
Yes, it’s actually quite well done.
Does that mean I’m going to use it?
Most probably not! With certain caveats.
Reasons follow.
The first thing to note is that Adobe has actually done a good job of integrating its Firefly generative AI into Photoshop. The most versatile use is Generative Fill – you select an area of a layer, type a prompt in for what you want, and 5 to 15 seconds later, an AI-generated image appears in the selected area. Like with the Firefly web interface, you can choose between four options, and pick the the result that best matches your prompt.
You can also use Generative Fill to expand an image. Let’s say you have an image that is 1000 x 2000 pixels but it needs to be 3000 x 3000. You can have Generative Fill expand the image, and it usually does a good job of generating enough stuff to match the original image. Overall, Generative Fill is a powerful tool that can nonetheless be as precise as you need it, so long as you make careful selections and are willing to experiment with prompts.
That said, I’m not going to use it for any of my ebook projects. Possibly ad images, but definitely not ebook covers or any images I will have on my websites.
The first reason is that Amazon has been making some changes to deal with the flood of AI-generated books that are turning up on Kindle Unlimited. I opted mostly out of Kindle Unlimited back in April, which turned out to be a good idea, because over the summer the KU payment rate dropped to its lowest level in the history of the program. Amazon didn’t release any details, but the prevailing theory is that the Kindle Unlimited section of the store got flooded by AI-generated scam books. The business model for this scam works like this – you use ChatGPT to crank out some text, you use Midjourney or a similar tool to generate a cover, then you post the resultant book on the Kindle Unlimited store and have your click farm generate page reads. The best time to do this is on a Friday, since many of the higher-ranking Amazon support people often have the weekend off.
Because of this, for several weekends in the summer of 2023, the entire Top 100 category of various genres on Amazon was filled up entirely with scam AI books. They would all disappear on Monday when Amazon support realized what was happening and started banning scam accounts, but it happened often enough that the KU payment rate dropped very low.
Amazon is in a constant game of Whack-A-Mole with scammers, much like the US government with Medicare fraud, so after the summer some changes came to Kindle Unlimited Publishing. (I once heard an Amazon employee liken it to trying to keep rabbits from digging under your garden fence. As soon as you patch one hole, the rabbits have already excavated another.)
The first change was upload limits. Amazon limited the daily number of new books you could upload to the store to three. This was to keep scammers from uploading hundreds if not thousands of new books a day for their click farms to use. I think this is a reasonable limitation. Even as fast as I write, I tend to only upload two new titles a month, a novel and a bonus short story.
The second change was that on the publishing page, Amazon now makes you state whether or not any AI tools were used in the creation of your book or its cover. There doesn’t seem to be any detection attached to this, so I suppose you could lie if you wanted, but it’s never good to lie in general (ethical considerations aside) since the truth often comes out at very inconvenient times. No one also seems to know why Amazon has done this. Gathering market data? Protecting the Kindle store? Covering their bases in case of a sudden change in the legal or regulatory environment?
Which brings us neatly to the second reason I won’t use AI for ebook or cover projects – the copyright question.
The copyright situation around AI-generated stuff is currently unsettled, and every actual lawyer and expert I’ve heard on the topic agrees that copyright law was not intended to address the technology and will probably have to be updated. The flip side of that is that the courts and the US Copyright Office have consistently maintained that human authorship is required for copyright. You might recall a news story from a few years ago where a monkey took a selfie, and the courts decided that the photo wasn’t copyrightable because a human person has to create something in order for it to be copyrightable. So far the Copyright Office and the US courts have ruled against people seeking copyright for AI generated works, which means there is a small but steadily growing collection of precedent against it.
And courts love precedents and default to it whenever possible.
So no one knows how the legal situation around AI generated art will turn out, though so far it’s not looking likely that it will be copyrightable. Granted, that might change in a few years – the whole thing might end up before the Supreme Court, or Congress will pass changes to copyright law. Admittedly, neither outcome seems terribly likely. Whatever one might think of the Supreme Court, nothing about the justices indicate they would look favorably on AI art, and it seems like the sort of case the Supreme Court would defer to the lower courts and decline to hear. The US Congress is too paralyzed to deal with an entire range of far more serious and urgent problems, let alone the less pressing and relatively arcane concern of copyright changes. There are also the large lawsuits against OpenAI underway right now. It’s not likely, but the courts could rule that all AI-generated art is infringement.
In which case the “does your book contain AI-generated material” prompt would provide Amazon a quick and convenient way to nuke a lot of the AI-generated content if something like that happened.
So that is why I won’t use any AI generated stuff for my books and book covers. Laying aside the ethical concerns of whether or not it would be plagiarism, I have too much professional pride to use AI generation for writing. For using AI art in a cover, suppose I use AI art for like eight or nine book covers, and then Amazon decides nope, we’re not doing that any more. I would have to redesign those eight or nine covers pretty quickly. That’s a lot of unnecessary work I could have avoided.
One possible exception would be for ad images. Facebook’s primary rule for ad images is that they don’t show violence, don’t show nudity, don’t encourage ethnic or sectarian hatred, and don’t infringe on anyone’s copyright or trademark. Given that fairly closely matches Adobe’s policies for Firefly, it would be easy to create ad images that remain within those bounds. If AI art isn’t eligible for copyright, that doesn’t particularly matter for an ad image, since those get swapped out so quickly.
So AI artwork is a tool that most likely won’t explode in your hand. However, if I’m using a tool, I prefer it to have reached the “this definitely won’t explode in your hand” phase, rather than just “probably won’t.”
All that said, Adobe is probably in a better legal position with AI instead of OpenAI and Midjourney and the other AI sites. When Adobe started developing AI generation, the company made sure to emphasize that its models were only trained on public domain photos or Adobe Stock photo images. Adobe also is confident enough in its AI image generation model that it has offered to indemnify anyone who gets sued for using it. That’s a big show of confidence, though that might turn out to be a bad idea, akin to designing a new kind of bulletproof vest and insisting that people shoot at you to test it out. You’d better really hope you knew what you were doing when you built that bulletproof vest!
So, if you’re running any kind of commercial enterprise, it is probably best to avoid AI in any of your products for now. I suspect if you’re using it for non-commercial applications, like character portraits for your homebrew D&D campaign or something, you’re probably going to be all right.
But note that I am not a lawyer and that none of this is legal advice!
-JM