For five years, the question every freelance designer asked was: "is my work in the training set?" In 2026 the question has moved on. The training sets exist. The models are trained. What freelancers can now influence is whether future training rounds include their work — and whether they get credit, compensation, or at least credit-and-opt-out for the rounds that already happened.
The opt-out landscape in 2026 is more developed than most designers realise. It is also genuinely uneven. Some controls do something. Some controls perform doing something. Telling the two apart is the first move.
Where Adobe actually sits
Adobe's official position is that Firefly is trained on Adobe Stock content, openly-licensed content, and public-domain content — explicitly not on the open web (Adobe AI overview; Adobe Stock contributor FAQ).
That is a meaningfully different position from OpenAI, Stability, and Midjourney — none of whom have ever published a clear training-data list. For freelance designers whose primary worry is "did my Instagram portfolio get scraped into a generative model," Adobe is structurally less of a threat than the other three.
The controls Adobe actually offers in 2026:
- Content Credentials' "Do Not Train" preference. Set on any image you push through Adobe Content Authenticity, this signal asks Adobe (and any aligned model trainer) to exclude that image from training. The catch: it is a request, not a hard block. Adobe honours it for Firefly Custom Models, Style Reference, and Structure Reference. Third parties that respect Content Credentials honour it too. The image still loads on the open web and other model trainers can — and do — ignore the signal.
