keep getting an error telling me the image can't load and generate with firefly but allows me to use third party.

The guidelines don’t provide a sharp boundary between what’s okay and what isn’t. You might say that Firefly has more of a “strict” interpretation for its own models, where partner models (which have their own rules) allow more room for interpretation. Sometimes you can simply try again with the same prompt and have success. Keep in mind that any prompt calling for images of children is likely to be problematic, which is more of a sad comment on contemporary society than on Firefly.

We (the industry as a whole, not Adobe) are in the early days of generative AI. It will likely be a few years before things fully settle down and we finally all agree on how the guardrails need to work. It’s not just AI. The whole question of what is acceptable online is still not fully defined. Think of the furor a few years ago about the famous Vietnam War press photo that was briefly banned on Facebook. It would be impossible to recreate that with most generative AI models. You’d have trouble trying to generate an “anatomically correct” statue in the style of Michelangelo’s David.

I don’t agree with Firefly’s squeamishness in all cases, but I also recognize that this is a very hard problem. The possibilities for abuse are obvious, as the recent X.ai mess demonstrated.