He Tried to Stop Adobe From Training its AI on His Photo Library – He Lost

Gerald Carter

The founder of an image archive called Diversity Photos is taking his fight with Adobe public after he attempted to stop the company from training its AI on his rare and valuable library.

Gerald Carter tells PetaPixel that Adobe fed every single image from Diversity Photos into its Firefly AI image model. After he protested, Adobe offered him a paltry fee for the AI training, which Carter rejected. Adobe then relied on its legal resources to successfully thwart Carter’s legal challenge and is now attempting to use the arbitration ruling as precedent for future disputes. The company also sent a process server to Carter’s home.

AI Ruins a Partnership

Carter spent years building up Diversity Photos, which he founded because minority communities have been historically overlooked in stock photography. Carter says the company invested heavily in recruiting real, everyday people and obtained proper consent for the photos.

After launching in 2016, Diversity Photos made strong growth and partnered with Adobe in 2018 via a Stock Contributor Agreement.

“The deal was a revenue-share arrangement,” Carter explains. “We’d supply the content, Adobe would distribute it through Adobe Stock, and we’d both benefit. We granted Adobe a license to distribute and promote our work to their end customers for mutual benefit — it literally says this in the contract.”

Diversity Photos

But everything changed in March 2023 when Adobe launched its AI model, Firefly, which was marketed as a text-to-image generator that didn’t steal work belonging to creatives. Carter quickly realized that the Diversity Photos archive was in Firefly’s training data and reached out in June 2023, asking to exclude the photos from the dataset and requesting that the two parties establish a licensing arrangement for AI training.

“I was met with months of non-answers,” Carter says. “They told me there were ‘pending decisions’ and to be patient.” In October 2023, Carter was told that the agreement he signed back in 2018 gives Adobe the right to use Diversity Photos as AI training data, confirming that they had used the dataset in at least two AI models, Adobe Sensei and Adobe Firefly.

Carter points out that the entire value proposition of Diversity Photos is its scarcity, along with the quality of the content. If a tech company wants to use the archive to train an AI model, Carter will charge a perpetual license premium.

‘Adobe did the exact opposite of what they told the public they were doing.’

“So when I found out that Adobe had fed our entire library into their AI training pipeline without asking, without a separate license, without any compensation — it was devastating,” Carter says. “They didn’t just use a few images. They ingested our content and used it to build products that now directly compete with us. Adobe’s AI can now generate the same kind of diverse imagery that we spent years and significant resources creating. They took our competitive advantage and turned it into their feature.”

Carter says it “really stung” when he saw Adobe telling the world that it respected creators’ rights, that it had permission to use the training data, and that contributors could opt out.

“None of that was true in our case. We were never asked. We were never given an opt-out. We were never given a ‘Do Not Train’ option,” Carter says. “Adobe did the exact opposite of what they told the public they were doing.”

To underline just how seriously Carter takes obtaining the correct permissions and licences, he tells PetaPixel that he sent back a five-figure sum to Shutterstock in 2021 after the stock photo company wanted to use Diversity Photos’ images to train its own AI model.

“Our content must be used for good and benefit our community,” Carter explains. “Many people have entrusted us with their likeness and their content — and we must fight for them and creators’ rights.”

Arbitration

After Adobe informed Carter that it had a right to train its AI with Diversity Photos, the company offered $1,173.93 as a bonus fee.

“Not compensation, not a licensing fee — a bonus,” says Carter. “As if they were doing me a favor. And they made it clear they didn’t even believe they were required to pay that under the agreement.”

“This was for nearly 12,000 images used to train AI models that Adobe is now monetizing through subscription fees,” he continues. “I didn’t accept it. I asked for it to be removed from my account because I did not want it to be perceived that we accepted that value at all.”

As well as licensing photos for editorial and commercial purposes, Diversity Photos also licenses its library for AI evaluation purposes, to test a dataset for unwanted biases in AI. A single one-year license can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars. Carter found that $1,173.93 to be an insulting number.

“It showed a fundamental disrespect for the value of what we’d created and the communities we represent,” he says.

Diversity Photos founder Gerald Carter

But Adobe didn’t budge. Calls and emails went unanswered; he says he was given the runaround. So in January 2024, Carter’s attorney sent a formal demand letter. Adobe once again stated that the original agreement gave them the right to do whatever they wanted with the Diversity Photos archive. So Carter and his attorney filed for arbitration in June 2024.

Carter says that the arbitration process, which is a way of resolving a private dispute with the help of a third party, was stacked against him from the beginning.

The arbitration process is expensive, and the contract Carter signed with Adobe back in 2018 had a clause stating Adobe would cover the cost of arbitration on behalf of Carter if he couldn’t afford it, which he couldn’t. But Adobe allegedly refused to honor the terms of the agreement and instead offered to pay the arbitrators’ fees to review Adobe’s motion to dismiss all claims against it. The arbitrator agreed to the arrangement.

Adobe then moved for a summary judgment on the case, which was fully granted except for one of Diversity Photos’ claims: negligence. The negligence claim stated that Adobe put Diversity Photos’ archive online without any watermarks or copyright management information. In doing so, other AI companies such as Midjourney, Stability AI, and Google were also able to train on the photo library without compensation. But even on that claim, Carter still didn’t win.

“Adobe’s strategy was to litigate every step. So, we had to file a second time to prove we cannot afford arbitration and that Adobe’s terms say they will pay if we cannot afford it,” Carter explains.

“But to have that reviewed by the arbitrator cost $24,000. Essentially, we must pay to show we cannot afford the costs. We had no choice but to withdraw. So even though we wanted to continue pursuing our last remaining claim, we couldn’t move forward because we could not afford the cost — this was economic exclusion from the legal process.”

Diversity Photos

Carter says Adobe weaponized the arbitration clauses in the original contract. “A small business that represents marginalized communities was effectively denied its day in court — or even its day in arbitration — because we couldn’t afford the toll booth,” he says.

Adobe allegedly made it clear that if the judge were to make the company pay for Carter’s legal fees, it would pay them at the end of the process — meaning Carter would have to pay the costs upfront.

Precedent

Adobe has since moved to have the arbitration award confirmed in court as precedent for future cases. In November 2025, a “hostile” process server arrived at Carter’s home with a petition from Adobe to confirm the Contractual Arbitration Award.

“We believe the arbitration process was fundamentally flawed,” Carter says. “The arbitrator refused to address the cost issue that was contractually required before ruling on Adobe’s motion to dismiss everything.”

‘It showed a fundamental disrespect for the value of what we’d created and the communities we represent.’

“He treated Adobe’s unsubstantiated assertions as established facts without any discovery. No documents were ever exchanged between the parties.”

Carter frets that his experience will impact other creators since the judge in his ruling said, “AI outputs cannot be proven to be the underlying copyrighted works.”

“This has nothing to do with any of our claims so he ruled on something that doesn’t pertain to our case but will be used and referenced against creators for decades,” Carter adds. “We’re asking the court to vacate the award on multiple grounds under California’s arbitration statute.”

A Warning

Back when Carter signed his agreement with Adobe in 2018, generative AI products didn’t exist.

“The contract I signed gave Adobe a license to use my images for ‘developing new features and services [to promote my work],’ Carter says.

But while he assumed that wording was there for Adobe to improve its platform, the company assumed otherwise.

“Adobe’s argument? The word ‘new’ means they can do anything new. Anything. Including something that didn’t exist when I signed the contract. Including AI training. Including building a tool that directly competes with the very content I licensed to them,” Carter says.

Diversity Photos

Carter says his story is a warning to other creators signing “standard, non-negotiable, click-through contracts.” The word new, he says, becomes a blank check.

“That’s why we’re fighting to have this ruling vacated,” he adds. “Not just for Diversity Photos, but because if this interpretation stands, it sets a precedent that guts creator rights across the board. No contract from the pre-AI era should be interpreted as a blank check for AI training. The creators who signed those agreements never could have imagined this use, and the platforms know it.”

Ultimately, AI has impacted Carter’s business. He calls the rise of generative AI an industry-wide crisis for content creators in niche markets.

“The irony is that our content is valuable precisely because it’s hard to create — real people, real diversity, real consent,” he says.

“Generative AI threatens to commoditize all of that. And the companies building these AI models are profiting from our work without compensating us.”

PetaPixel reached out to Adobe for comment but did not hear back as of publication.

Image credits: Diversity Photos