Adobe's image generator, which sells not better art but clean provenance - trained only on photos the company actually owns the rights to.
In practice it works inside the tools designers already use every day. You open a photo in Photoshop, mark an empty corner of the frame and write what to put there - Firefly fills in a background, adds an object, extends a photo beyond its original edges. No need to leave the program and go to a separate site. The same model stands behind Illustrator too, and behind Adobe Express, the app for quick graphics.
It exists because the other big generators - Midjourney, DALL-E - were trained by sucking up millions of images from the internet, including other people's drawings and photos, without permission from their authors. Lawsuits over this are already running. Adobe did the opposite on purpose: it built Firefly only on its own Adobe Stock library (a licensed-photo platform) and on material whose copyright has expired. A poorer dataset, but a clean one.
It's used by people who can't afford legal risk - ad agencies, publishers, big brands who can't let a product get stuck in limbo over someone else's photo inside it. Adobe backs it up with a technical stamp too - Content Credentials, an invisible tag in the file itself that shows where the image came from and what generated it. It's no guarantee against bad taste, but it is a guarantee against a lawsuit.
So the choice isn't between a good and a bad model by picture quality. It's more between licensed products and stolen ones - one comes with a receipt, the other doesn't. Firefly loses on imagination to the wilder generators, but wins on something a client never has to explain to a lawyer.
Here's the real question
Firefly's results feel it right away - more predictable, somehow combed. Midjourney gives you surprise, Firefly gives you certainty. That makes sense - it's trained on a narrower, more obedient set of photos, not on the whole chaos of the internet.
But that's exactly why I trust it for client work. Aesthetics get fixed later in my own hands. Legal risk doesn't get fixed. I'd rather have a tool that gives me more boring raw material and clean provenance than a tool that gives me a brilliant picture with an unknown price tag behind it.