Adobe Firefly shows 'woke' photos of black Nazis

Adobe's Firefly AI art generator suffered a backlash after it was found to be producing 'woke' images of black Nazis, Vikings, and US Founding Fathers.

Tests by Semafor, the Daily Mail, and the New York Post revealed that Firefly was creating images of Black and Asian Nazi soldiers under a German (ie. Non-Nazi) flag, Black men and women inserted into scenes depicting the US Founding Fathers and the 1787 Constitutional Convention, pictures of Black Vikings, and a female Black Pope.

Adobe designers were seen as most likely trying to avoid racist stereotypes. However, the findings infuriated people on the right who saw it as the AI trying to rewrite history in line with today's politicised culture wars. Adobe said Firefly is not 'meant for generating photorealistic depictions of real or historical events.'

Google had earlier shut down its Gemini image creation tool after critics pointed out that it had been creating historically inaccurate images. However, the two services were trained on different datasets, with Firefly trained on stock images or images that it licensed.