As we wrote before the weekend, Adobe has updated its user license (the “Terms of Service” or ToS) and has transformed its creativity software into a tool to train your machine learning and artificial intelligence systems: and the revolt broke out.
Although the company then clarified that this clause “has existed for years”, the reality is that there is a new phase of software development that is overwhelming everything and everyone.
It is caused by artificial intelligence, it requires companies (even giants like Adobe) to jump through hoops. And yet, very often it takes almost no account of the role and work of customers and users in general. What’s happening now is that users are no longer there. Is this the start of a revolt?
The casus belli
In practice, as we have written, Adobe has added, among other things, a mandatory clause to the user contract (that is, if it is not accepted, it blocks the possibility of accessing Photoshop and other software in the Creative Cloud Suite) which says that the company can possibly automatically or manually access user content and use them to train your “machine learning”.
One of many that summarizes clearly the problem Adobe got into is X user Sam Santala:
So, if I understand correctly. Adobe, I can’t use Photoshop unless I agree to give you full access to everything I created in it including work covered by confidentiality agreement??
But another is a rather well-known director, Duncan Jones (Moon, Source Code, Warcraft) as well as one of David Bowie’s sonswho writes much more critically:
Hey, photoshop, what was that new agreement you forced us to sign this morning that blocks our application until we accept it?
We’re working on a damn movie and NO, you don’t suddenly have the right to use all the work we are doing because we pay you to do it.
What happens now
The controversy affects Adobe, which is one historic creativity software company more than four decades old and extremely vital in this phase of great technological change due to artificial intelligence.
Adobe was indeed one of the leading legacy software companies to embrace generative AI and to make it accessible to users through the proprietary (and enterprise-safe) Firefly AI image generation model, the “Generative filling” (i.e. the ability to build pieces of images that cannot be obtained from anything other than the work of AI) and other generative artificial intelligence functions in Photoshop and, in recent days, an AI assistant for customer experience softwareplus much more.
The online revolt
This move by Adobe did not go unnoticed. And gradually the Creative Suite Cloud pop-up appears on Macs and PCs of the users who start one of the San Jose company’s software, there are those who simply click “ok” and those who instead go to see the fine print.
Thus discovering the surprise: in fact, access to the data now becomes irrevocable. And this, however apparently legal (otherwise the change probably wouldn’t have passed the scrutiny of Adobe’s internal lawyers) it’s not good according to some regulations (probably like the European one regulated by the GDPR) which according to some jurists who deal with privacy issues.
It is the case of Heather Burnsjurist and author of books on privacy, who always writes on X:
I say this halfway between serious and half-joking: at some point you will be better off using a 15 year old laptop with software that is 15 years old, not connected to the Internet, not updated and that does not spy on 1200 advertising partners via legitimate interests while scanning your content with artificial intelligence.
An extremely interesting position which actually might make sense, as we move forward with technology. So much so that there are those who have created a site where all the possible alternatives to Adobe’s creative suite software are indicated, software by software.
Adobe’s existential dilemma
Like these cases mentioned, dozens and tens of hundreds of others creative freelancers, companies and professional studios who use Adobe’s (and other companies’) creativity tools for their daily activities are getting pissed off. And with a certain reason, one might say.
However, the theme is not limited and limitable to Adobe alone. Which, in the end, is behaving in a rational manner and protecting its own interests. Given the race for artificial intelligence, which means the creation of systems that work better and better through training, it is obtaining the data necessary to build its artificial intelligences in order to survive.
In fact, it only takes a moment a new software maker arrives that, without any investment in all the software technologies, traditional algorithms and user interface, in which Adobe has excelled for decades, you create a fully AI-powered app that does as much if not more it’s done by Adobe’s creativity suite. And do it faster, better and also for people who don’t know how to use it, don’t want to use it or don’t even know it exists.
The cap of the port of Genoa
This is essentially the big problem: how to survive a technological discontinuity? It’s a huge problem also because, regardless of whether it is true or not that artificial intelligence can completely revolutionize both this type of application and the professions of those who use them to create and earn enough to live on.
The problem that Adobe addresses is this but it does so at the expense of another, even bigger problem: whose data the AIs are trained onwhat form of income should those who provide the raw material needed to create something have? And again, how to protect the privacy of these people and their work, how to opt-out (or rather, opt-in for those who want to do so) and all that long controversy that has been brewing for more than a year regarding the topic of data.
Artificial intelligence poses different problems for different subjects (companies, creatives, the public, regulators) but in the end it has one characteristic that unites it: despite not knowing how much he will actually be able to do (because most of the features either don’t work as expected or are still a promise to be kept, especially in the field of GenAI and ChatBots in particular), has already managed to impact the economic and organizational reality of all the big names in software.
Users of Photoshop and other Creative Suite software? They are the ones who feel like “collateral damages” in a conflict that apparently isn’t taking them into consideration. However, the protests mounting online they might lead to something soon. Although it’s too early to tell.
All the articles that talk about Artificial Intelligence in the dedicated section of macitynet.
