AI is setting off a great scramble for data

Not so long AIDALL-E 2AIAIago analysts were openly wondering whether () would be the death of Adobe, a maker of software for creative types. New tools like and Midjourney, which , seemed set to render Adobe’s image-editing offerings redundant. As recently as April, Seeking Alpha, a financial-news site, published an article headlined “Is the Adobe killer?”Far from it. Adobe has used its database of hundreds of millions of stock photos to build its own suite of tools, dubbed Firefly. Since its release in March the software has been used to create over 1bn images, says Dana Rao, a company executive. By avoiding mining the internet for images, as rivals did, Adobe has skirted the that now dogs the industry. The firm’s share price has risen by 36% since Firefly was launched.