Adobe Is Buying Banana Photos From Users To Train Firefly Generative AI Tool

Photo 368661 © Elena Elisseeva | Dreamstime.com

Adobe’s artificial intelligence is taking in a good dose of potassium, as the company is collecting photos of bananas, among other things, to train its popular AI tools.

The creative technology giant is asking for 500 to 1,000 pictures of the fruit per submission in hopes of enhancing the quality of tools like Adobe Firefly and Generative Fill, according to PetaPixel. As Firefly is trained on Adobe Stock, public-domain, and openly-licensed content, the company is handing out payouts of US$60 per bunch of banana photos depicting them “in real-life situations, on a table, on a counter,” and so on.

The payment structure was uncovered by stock photographer Robert Kneschke, who shared a screenshot of the price table. The scheme comes under Adobe’s beta Missions feature that rewards select contributors for sending in assets to train its machine-learning models.

Besides banana photos, Adobe is also looking for close-up shots of mouths of non-recognizable people eating and handling food. The company is shelling out US$80 for 500 to 1,000 of these pictures.

The photos do not need metadata or post-processing to be eligible for submission.

While the program is listed under the Adobe Stock website, Adobe reassures photographers that the assets won’t make their way to the royalty-free platform. However, contributors can choose to upload the images onto the site if they so wish.

It’s unclear if the call will bear much fruit, however, as US$60 for 500 banana shots means photographers will only be compensated US$0.12 per picture.

[via PetaPixel and The Messenger, images via various sources]