Adobe Firefly vs Midjourney - The Training Data Showdown and Its Legal Stakes
Sources
When generative AI steps into your creative workflow, it brings along a pair of frenemies: Adobe Firefly and Midjourney. Both promise to conjure stunning visuals from mere text, yet they couldn’t be more different in pedigree and principle. Firefly is Adobe’s corporate-born wizard, trained on a strict diet of licensed images and aiming to be the “commercially safe” choice. Midjourney, by contrast, is the indie darling – a powerful prodigy nurtured on the wild scraps of the internet, community-driven and a touch anarchic in its approach. For marketing professionals, media agencies, and legal teams, this isn’t just an AI art style contest; it’s a high-stakes comparison of training data ethics, licensing models, and the legal groundwork that could make or break your next campaign.
So grab your judge’s wig (and maybe a paintbrush or two). In this 10-minute tour, we’ll dive deep into how these two AI image generators source their smarts, what that means for copyright and licensing, and ultimately which one offers safer ground for your brand assets. It’s Firefly vs Midjourney – a tale of curated content, web scrapes, lawyers, and a little bit of irony.
Training Data Diets - From Adobe Stock to the Web’s Wild West
Every AI artist is only as good – or as legal – as the training data it feasts on. And here our contenders differ dramatically.
Adobe Firefly was raised on a curated buffet of legally acquired imagery: primarily Adobe Stock’s hundreds of millions of licensed photos and illustrations, sprinkled with openly licensed and public domain content where copyrights have expired. In Adobe’s own words, “Firefly… was trained on licensed content, such as Adobe Stock… to generate content for commercial use that does not infringe on copyright or other IP rights”. This was no accident; it was a selling point. Adobe essentially put Firefly on a strict data diet to ensure it wouldn’t belch out a Mickey Mouse or a Nike swoosh and land clients in hot water. Think of it as the farm-to-table approach to AI training – every ingredient vetted, nothing mystery-meat about it.
Midjourney, on the other hand, is the AI equivalent of an all-you-can-eat street buffet. The company has never fully disclosed the secret sauce of its training set. But industry consensus (and a few lawsuits, which we’ll get to) suggest that Midjourney “likely used images scraped from the open web without permission from the creators”.
In plainer terms, if Firefly’s diet is a neatly curated Adobe Stock salad, Midjourney’s is a heaping plate of everything – from fine art to random Flickr photos – scraped and sampled with little discrimination. Adobe itself contrasts Firefly’s “licensed” training data with “competitors like Midjourney, which learned by scraping pictures from across the internet”. No permission slips, no handshakes – just crawl, ingest, and learn.
The ethical contrast here is stark. Firefly’s approach was a direct response to nervous enterprise customers who, as Adobe’s chief strategist noted, were “very concerned about using generative AI without understanding how it was trained”. These big brands didn’t want a repeat of the early AI art controversies where models (like the open-source Stable Diffusion) were caught regurgitating artists’ signatures or Getty Images watermarks. They demanded a tool that felt as safe as using a paid stock photo – “if you’re going to use it in a campaign, you better have the rights for it”.
Firefly was Adobe’s answer: transparency, accountability, and a clean conscience. Midjourney, by contrast, emerged from the tech world’s move-fast-and-break-things ethos. Its creators prioritized raw creative horsepower and broad knowledge over tip-toeing around licensing. The result? Midjourney’s prowess in generating diverse, jaw-dropping imagery is undeniable – it has become the “darling of a new generation of AI artists” – but the origins of that talent are murkier.
An Ironic Twist - AI Feeding on AI
It’s worth noting that even Adobe’s pristine narrative hit an ironic snag. In early 2024, a Bloomberg report revealed that Firefly’s training wasn’t 100% organic after all – roughly 5% of its training images were AI-generated, including content from rivals like Midjourney. How did that happen? It turns out Adobe Stock accepts submissions of AI-generated art (as long as contributors label it), and some savvy contributors uploaded works they had created using Midjourney and other generators. Adobe, in good faith, paid those contributors for their images and fed them into Firefly’s training pool. In other words, Firefly learned a few tricks secondhand from Midjourney’s output – a bit like an art student unknowingly studying from a forgery.
This ironic twist slightly tarnished Adobe’s claim of a spotless training set, raising eyebrows (and a few smirks) in the industry. After all, Adobe had been touting Firefly as the righteous alternative to “unethical” AI art tools, yet here was proof that even its model had quietly sipped from the very well it vowed to avoid. Critics pounced, arguing that Firefly’s data transparency suddenly looked less transparent. Adobe’s defense? They clarified that AI-generated images were a “very small subset” of training data (5% or less) and that “every image submitted to Adobe Stock, including AI-generated ones, goes through rigorous moderation to ensure no IP or trademark violations”. In essence: Yes, we trained on some Midjourney-made pics, but we checked them carefully and anyway, 95% of our data is still the real (licensed) deal.
The takeaway for a professional audience is twofold. First, Adobe Firefly’s data is largely clean and rights-cleared, but not as immaculately pure as marketing materials implied. And second, Midjourney’s influence is so pervasive that even its competitor couldn’t entirely avoid indirectly learning from it. This ouroboros of AI — AI trained on AI — underscores how tangled the web of content has become. It’s a fascinating footnote, but it doesn’t entirely level the playing field. Firefly still comes out looking far more conscientious about where it learns its tricks, whereas Midjourney operates on a “forgiveness rather than permission” model at scale.
For brands and agencies, that distinction in training sources is not just academic — it’s the crux of legal risk vs. reward.
Licensing and Ownership - Do You Own What You Create?
Training data is one side of the coin; the other is what you can legally do with the images these AIs spit out. Imagine you’ve generated a brilliant campaign image – who owns that image, and under what conditions can you use it? This is where licensing models and usage rights come into play, and again, Firefly and Midjourney take divergent paths.
Adobe Firefly positions itself as a safe haven for commercial content usage. Adobe has been almost paternal in reassuring users: if you create something with Firefly, go ahead and use it for your business – we’ve got your back. In fact, Adobe is so confident in Firefly’s respect for copyrights that it’s willing to indemnify users against legal claims.
Starting in 2023, Adobe announced that enterprise customers of Firefly get “full indemnification for the content created” using the tool. Translated from legalese, that means if someone ever sues your company claiming a Firefly-generated image infringes their copyright, Adobe will cover the legal bills and damages. “Anything created using Firefly’s text-to-image tool will be fully indemnified by the company as a proof point that we stand behind the commercial safety of these features,” said Adobe’s VP of digital media. That’s a bold promise – essentially a financial vote of confidence in Firefly’s training data cleanliness. Adobe can offer this because, as noted, they own or have licensed the training inputs. Firefly’s model was built on content Adobe either had rights to or that was in the public domain. It’s akin to a restaurant saying, “All our ingredients are FDA-approved, so if you get food poisoning, dinner’s on us.”
Now, a quick reality check: at the time of writing, this indemnity is primarily an enterprise perk. Big companies with Adobe contracts enjoy it, while a lone freelancer playing with Firefly’s beta might not have a direct indemnity clause. Still, even for individual creatives and small businesses, Adobe’s terms assure that Firefly-generated assets are yours to use freely for commercial projects. Adobe imposes few if any post-creation restrictions (beyond common-sense ones like “don’t use it to break the law or spread disinformation”). In essence, using Firefly feels a lot like using a stock photo you licensed – you can integrate it into client work, print it on a billboard, sell it on a T-shirt, whatever – without constantly glancing over your shoulder for a cease-and-desist letter.
Over in the Midjourney camp, the situation is a bit more convoluted. Midjourney’s licensing model is tied to its subscription system, and it has evolved as the service grew. If you’re a paid subscriber to Midjourney, the company’s Terms of Service grant you broad rights to the images you generate. In fact, Midjourney’s policy explicitly states that “You own all Assets you create with the Services, provided they were created in accordance with the user agreement”. In practice, this means a pro user can use their Midjourney creations commercially – put them in ads, games, products – without owing royalties. Midjourney effectively gives you a license (or as they frame it, assigns you the copyright) to your AI-generated art as long as you’ve paid your dues. Free users, however, live under a very different regime: images made on the free tier come with a Creative Commons Noncommercial license by default. The company requires that if you’re not paying, any art you generate is openly viewable (Midjourney’s Discord community gallery ensures that) and not to be used for commercial purposes. It’s the classic freemium trade-off – you get to play with the toy, but you can’t turn around and sell what you made unless you buy a ticket.
On paper, Midjourney’s paid-license approach sounds generous: pay a modest monthly fee and get unfettered ownership of your outputs. In fact, the service even claims that “for paid accounts, you hold the copyright to the assets you create”. But – and it’s a big but – the legal reality of AI-generated imagery is not that simple. Under current copyright law in many jurisdictions, purely AI-created images aren’t eligible for copyright at all, because there’s no human authorship in the pixels. U.S. regulators, for instance, have repeatedly affirmed that works generated entirely by algorithms can’t be registered for copyright. So Midjourney can say you “own” the image, and contractually it can agree not to sue you or not to give others rights to it – but if push comes to shove in a court, the image might be deemed public domain the moment it’s created. This is a quirky situation: Midjourney’s intent is clearly to let creators feel safe using the art they generate, yet it can’t magically grant actual copyright if the law doesn’t recognize it. The company’s solution is essentially a policy band-aid – a promise that it won’t claim any rights over your paid outputs and that you’re free to use them commercially. And realistically, if you’re a subscriber, who else is likely to challenge you? The original artists who unwittingly “contributed” to Midjourney’s training data might have a gripe (as we’ll see below), but they can’t claim your specific output as theirs unless it’s a near pixel-perfect copy of a pre-existing work (which is highly unlikely). Still, the lack of formal copyright means you, as a business, might not be able to stop a competitor from using a very similar Midjourney image or prevent others from copying your AI-generated logo. It’s a strange new world: possession and use of the image are yours, but ownership in the traditional IP sense is fuzzy.
In summary, Firefly offers a more straightforward peace of mind: its outputs are meant to be treated like any other licensed creative asset – plus Adobe is willing to put skin in the game if something goes awry. Midjourney gives you freedom with asterisks: pay to play and you can use the art as you wish, but you’re relying on an honor-system version of copyright that hasn’t been fully tested in court. And notably, Midjourney (unlike Adobe) does not offer to indemnify users. If by some wild chance your Midjourney-generated marketing graphic did land you in legal trouble, you’d be on your own to sort it out. As one analysis bluntly put it, “AI platforms do not provide legal guarantees against infringement claims, meaning businesses bear full responsibility” for any copyright issues with AI-generated content. Midjourney’s terms explicitly shift all risk to the user – you agree that you shall not sue Midjourney for anything that happens, rather than Midjourney promising to defend you.
The Copyright Conundrum and Legal Implications
Beyond the fine print of licenses, a larger legal question looms: are these AI tools inadvertently infringing copyrights by their very design? For legal professionals and brand guardians, this isn’t a hypothetical worry – it’s playing out in courts right now.
Midjourney, along with other generative image AI like Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion, has been at the center of a first-of-its-kind copyright lawsuit in the United States. In early 2023, a group of artists sued Midjourney (as well as Stability and the art site DeviantArt) in a class-action, alleging that these companies violated copyright law by using millions of artworks in training without permission. The artists argue that mass-scraping their images to teach an AI is a form of infringement, essentially accusing Midjourney of building a commercial product on an unauthorized digital collage of human-made art. Midjourney’s defense, like others in the industry, leans on the concept of fair use and the transformative nature of training a model. They contend that an AI model does not store or reproduce images in a way that violates the original artist’s market – it learns from them to create something new, just as a human artist might learn by studying many paintings. This debate is far from settled. As of late 2023, a U.S. judge allowed portions of the artists’ lawsuit to proceed (particularly claims related to the training process potentially violating rights). In other words, the courts haven’t thrown out the idea that scraping images could be illegal – a sign that Midjourney and its peers are not out of the woods yet. The legal outcome, be it a firm fair-use victory for AI or a reckoning that forces licensing of training data, will hugely impact how “safe” Midjourney truly is for commercial use.
Adobe Firefly was engineered specifically to avoid this quagmire. By licensing its training data up front, Adobe can convincingly say that no artists’ rights were harmed in the making of this AI. You won’t see Adobe in court defending Firefly against claims it copied someone’s portfolio – at least not on the training-data front – because they preemptively paid for the images (or used public domain material). Ironically, the closest Adobe has come to legal drama here is the mini-scandal of those Midjourney images sneaking into Firefly via Adobe Stock. Some Adobe Stock contributors were apparently miffed, feeling that their work (or AI work they uploaded) was used to train an AI without a transparent heads-up. Yet Adobe did have those contributors tick a box agreeing to allow AI content and even set up a compensation fund to share some of the Firefly value with them. That might not soothe everyone’s ethical qualms, but it likely prevents successful legal claims by contributors. After all, if you upload images to Adobe Stock under Adobe’s terms, you’ve given Adobe the right to use them in “any way Adobe sees fit,” which now evidently includes training AI. So while Midjourney faces a direct legal challenge on behalf of artists, Firefly’s model is comparatively legally insulated.
The difference in risk profile is significant for commercial users. Using Midjourney to create marketing assets exists in a grey zone: the odds of any particular image causing a legal issue are slim, but not zero. Maybe an artist sees a Midjourney-generated design that uncannily mirrors their style and decides to make a public stink. Or a company like Getty Images (which famously sued Stability AI for cloning its watermarked photos in training) might find traces of its stock imagery influence in AI outputs. These scenarios are mostly theoretical right now – we haven’t seen a brand sued just for using a Midjourney graphic. But the mere uncertainty has led many companies to hit pause. As Fast Company reported, the unresolved “standards around generative AI and copyright” have caused companies to hold off on using these tools in earnest. No marketing director wants to be the test case in court.
Adobe understood this atmosphere of caution. By loudly advertising Firefly as “designed to be commercially safe”, and backing it with legal promises, Adobe is basically waving a green flag to businesses: go ahead, integrate AI images into your brand campaigns – we’ve minimized the legal unknowns. Firefly also actively filters and blocks certain outputs to prevent trouble. It won’t generate famous characters or trademarked logos; its moderation layer snuffs out prompts that might inadvertently produce something too close to protected IP. Midjourney, for its part, has community guidelines and some content restrictions (they don’t want violent or sexual abuse imagery, for instance). But on the IP front, Midjourney is far more permissive. It will let you attempt a Mickey Mouse or Marvel-style image – it might not do a perfect job, but it doesn’t outright refuse common trademarked terms. The responsibility is on the user not to misuse the output. Again, it’s freedom versus safety nets. If you have a visionary client who insists on a dragon in the style of Disney concept art, Midjourney will gladly oblige (and likely produce something stunningly on-brand, albeit unusable legally); Firefly will err on the side of “let’s not go there”. For brand and legal professionals, that distinction matters: Firefly won’t lead you into temptation in the first place, whereas Midjourney might – and it trusts you to know better.
Commercial Use in Practice - Which Tool Can You Trust?
All these differences in training ethics and legal frameworks boil down to a practical question every agency or business is asking: Which AI image generator can we actually use for our commercial projects without losing sleep (or losing in court)?
Adobe Firefly’s proposition to marketers and media agencies is essentially a promise of sleep soundly at night. Because Firefly’s training data is licensed and its outputs are reviewed for IP conflicts, the risk of a nasty surprise is minimal. Adobe even has an initiative to attach Content Credentials to images – metadata tags that indicate an image was AI-generated – to bolster transparency and help prevent inadvertent misuse. For companies, this means Firefly content can be traced and trusted, an important factor for brand integrity. Moreover, the integration of Firefly into Adobe’s Creative Cloud ecosystem (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) has made it a convenient tool for creatives. Teams can ideate with Firefly and then seamlessly refine outputs in Photoshop, all under the same Adobe umbrella. From a legal perspective, this also means usage is covered under familiar Adobe licensing terms. An enterprise using Adobe products will have standard agreements in place, and Firefly becomes just another feature under that contract, with the added bonus of the aforementioned indemnity for extra protection. In enterprise speak, Firefly de-risks generative AI. It gives brand managers and legal teams a warm, fuzzy feeling that this AI art won’t come back to bite them.
Midjourney’s appeal, on the other hand, has always been creative prowess and community, not corporate comfort. It’s beloved by designers, indie game developers, and digital artists who rave about its ability to produce breathtaking, imaginative images. For agencies, Midjourney can be that secret weapon for pitches and concept work – a way to generate mood boards and visual ideas that wow clients. However, when it comes to final deliverables and client-facing assets, cautious professionals often hesitate. Without a big company vouching for it or a clear paper trail of licensed data, using Midjourney commercially can feel like walking on thin ice. Plenty of smaller businesses do use Midjourney art in production (look at the explosion of AI-designed book covers, album art, and social media graphics). They bank on the low likelihood of any issue and the sheer originality of Midjourney’s output to carry them through. And so far, this guerrilla approach is working – we haven’t seen a wave of takedowns targeting brands for Midjourney images. Still, larger brands – the ones with targets on their backs – tend to be more gun-shy. It’s one thing for Joe’s Coffee to spice up its Instagram feed with a Midjourney-generated latte art dragon; it’s another for Starbucks to base a multi-million-dollar ad campaign on such an image. The bigger the brand, the more attractive a lawsuit (or bad PR) can be. So for big players, the calculation often goes: Why risk it? If we need AI art, let’s use the option that comes with a legal safety net.
There’s also the matter of control and confidentiality. Midjourney, as of 2025, operates largely through a public Discord server. Every image you generate (unless you pay for a higher-tier “stealth” mode) is visible to the community. This open approach is fantastic for collaboration and learning, but less ideal for, say, an ad agency working on a top-secret product launch. Firefly, integrated in Adobe’s apps, keeps your creations private by default. It’s a small but meaningful difference for professionals handling sensitive projects. Additionally, Adobe’s enterprise offering allows companies to essentially customize and host their own version of Firefly, pointing it at their proprietary asset libraries if they choose. This way, they can generate images in the style of their brand, trained on their own content, with zero outside material involved – the ultimate walled garden for AI creativity. Midjourney doesn’t (yet) offer such a service; it’s one model for all, take it or leave it.
Finally, consider the marketing optics. Brands care about their reputation, and supporting “ethical AI” can be a part of that image. Using Firefly allows a company to say: We support artists by using an AI that is only trained on licensed work and even compensates contributors. (Adobe has been sharing some revenue with Stock contributors whose images helped train Firefly, a gesture meant to keep the creator ecosystem happy.) Using Midjourney, conversely, might invite criticism from artist communities or savvy consumers who know about the dataset controversies. We’re already seeing some backlash against AI-generated content in certain circles. For example, a publisher had to pull an AI-illustrated children’s book after public outcry that it stole artists’ jobs. While that’s an extreme case, a brand using Midjourney art could become a talking point (“Did you know BigCorp’s latest ad background was AI-generated? Did they train it on real photographers’ work without asking?”). Firefly significantly blunts that angle: Adobe’s transparency and ethical positioning can be passed down the line, giving brands cover. “Firefly adheres to Adobe’s AI ethics principles of accountability, responsibility, and transparency”, the company proudly touts – a phrase that sounds tailor-made for a client pitch or an agency’s credentials deck.
Conclusion - Finding Safer Ground for Your Brand
In the grand Adobe Firefly vs Midjourney matchup, the winner depends on what game you’re playing. If it’s a pure art contest, Midjourney often dazzles with its uncaged creativity and diverse inspirations. However, our arena here is the professional and commercial world – a world that must balance creativity with compliance, imagination with intellectual property law. And in that arena, Firefly comes armed with the very assurances that corporate creatives need: clear training data provenance, a licensing trail, and even a legal safety net courtesy of Adobe. Midjourney brings a riskier edge – a creative thrill ride powered by an unlicensed dataset and no firm guarantees.
For marketing professionals and media agencies, using Firefly can feel like working with any other trusted tool in Adobe’s suite. It’s an extension of the familiar, wrapped in Adobe’s decades-long experience of licensing content (Adobe Stock didn’t become a massive library by accident – it was built on carefully navigating rights and royalties). Firefly inherits that DNA. It’s not without flaws or asterisks (we saw how some AI-generated data slipped in, and remember that Firefly’s outputs, like all AI, still aren’t magically copyrightable). Still, it’s about as close to “brand-safe” AI art as you can get today. The content it produces is meant to be ready for your brand’s website or your client’s billboard, with minimal legal review beyond what you’d do for any stock image or commissioned work.
For legal professionals, the contrast is similarly clear. Advising a client on Firefly usage is straightforward: ensure you follow Adobe’s normal terms, and you’re fine. Advising on Midjourney involves a preamble about uncharted territory: “We believe it’s low risk, but there’s some chance of issues; no, you likely can’t claim copyright; yes, you should keep records of your prompts; no, the vendor won’t indemnify us if something goes wrong.” It’s a longer conversation, and not one every lawyer (or client) has the appetite for when deadlines loom.
None of this is to cast Midjourney as a pariah – far from it. Many creatives will continue to use Midjourney for what it’s phenomenal at: unrestrained visual ideation. Some will even dare to use it in final deliverables, especially in smaller-scale projects or where the content is uniquely tailored. Midjourney’s “murkier origins” come with the flip side of remarkable originality. It draws from a vast, uncurated well of styles and references, which means it can sometimes produce things that feel startlingly fresh or edgy – attributes that can be gold in advertising and media, if harnessed wisely. The key is knowing the stakes. A savvy agency might use Midjourney to brainstorm ten campaign concepts internally, then recreate the chosen concept with Firefly or via traditional methods for the final execution to ensure all rights are clear. Or they might restrict Midjourney to non-public-facing work (like internal mockups or inspiration boards).
As of 2025, Adobe Firefly offers the safer ground for brand assets and client work when legality and peace of mind are top concerns. Its very design and ecosystem placement target enterprise use, and it shows. Meanwhile, Midjourney is a powerful option when creative experimentation is paramount and when one is willing to navigate the legal grey areas, or when the use case is low-risk enough not to matter. It’s the difference between driving a car with full insurance and lane assist, versus driving a high-performance sportscar with no tags on a private road: one’s built for stress-free commuting, the other for thrill and exploration.
In choosing between Firefly and Midjourney, organizations must weigh their risk tolerance, the need for transparency, and the demands of their clients and audience. If your CEO, or your client’s legal team, breaks into hives at the mention of “unlicensed data,” you know which way to steer. If you’re under the gun to produce a knockout visual and are willing to take a calculated risk on novelty, Midjourney might be the ace up your sleeve.
One thing is certain: the legal landscape for AI-generated content is evolving rapidly. Lawsuits like the one facing Midjourney could rewrite the rules on training data; new regulations might mandate more transparency from AI makers on what goes into their models. Even Adobe isn’t resting – it’s lobbying for clearer guidelines and working on industry standards for content attribution. Both Firefly and Midjourney will undoubtedly iterate and adjust to these developments. Today, however, they stand as opposites in ethos: Firefly as the buttoned-up, by-the-book professional, Midjourney as the bold, untamed creative. Depending on whether your priority is staying out of court or pushing creative boundaries, you have a clear choice. And who knows – the savviest teams may well use both, Firefly and Midjourney in tandem, to cover all bases: one hand on the safety rail, the other reaching for the stars.
In the end, the best AI art tool is the one that empowers you to create freely without fearing the legal ghosts that might lurk in the machine. Adobe Firefly and Midjourney just take very different roads to reach that goal. As you embark on your next creative project, you’ll have to decide which road makes sense – the well-lit path with signposts and guardrails, or the scenic route with unknown twists. Just remember to keep your legal team in the loop either way, and happy creating!