Adobe Limits Generative AI for Employees

Adobe is reportedly restricting the ability of employees to sign up for services with their personal emails. As per a leaked email obtained by Business Insider (paywalled), Adobe shared some do’s and don’ts, banning the use of personal email accounts and corporate credit cards when signing up for generative AI apps such as ChatGPT.

The company also launched an internal working group called AI@Adobe to supervise the adoption of AI apps.

Here are the most relevant points in the email:

• Opt out of having your data used for machine learning training, if that setting is available.
• Do not use a personal email account to log into any tools for work-related tasks.
• Do not purchase any work-related software and services on your corporate card or expense these purchases on a personal credit card for reimbursement.
• Do not take outputs and use them verbatim; review, motif, and add to them as needed.

Though Adobe doesn’t want to completely ban AI at the workplace, the company certainly wants to better regulate things, including warning employees to not put confidential company data for review, summarizing, analysis, comparison, etc.

The email, dated June 20, was written by Cindy Stoddard, the company’s Chief Information Officer.

Notably, Amazon has also warned employees to not share confidential information with ChatGPT. Apple also restricted employee use of ChatGPT, being concerned that workers could release confidential data while it develops its own AI tech (The Wall Street Journal). Google’s parent company Alphabet also advised employees not to enter confidential materials into AI chatbots (Reuters).

As I previously covered, Samsung also did the same.

Adobe has been working tirelessly to incorporate AI in its own products, including the highly efficient Generative Fill tool in Photoshop as well as other utilities in other apps and entirely new apps, such as Adobe Firefly—A Midjourney, Dall-E, and Stable Diffusion competitor.