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More. More Never Changes.
It's happened again. This time, Adobe scrambles to reassure marketers it's not going to steal their work in the service of AI training. But can its track record be trusted?
More. More Never Changes.
It's happened again. This time, Adobe scrambles to reassure marketers it's not going to steal their work in the service of AI training. But can its track record be trusted?
by Tod Maffin (email • LinkedIn • social media)
Today's News
Hi there — it’s Tod here. 🙂
Before we get into today’s issue, I wanted to remind you that you can listen to each issue in podcast form. It’s a great way to stay up-to-date while you commute home, mow the lawn, do the dishes, etc.
Just follow the podcast in your favourite podcast app, or just search for “Today in Digital Marketing” in your app.
The daily podcast comes out the same time as the newsletter does (5pm ET). Here’s today’s episode, as a sample:
Adobe Clarifies Terms of Use That Angered Many
Yesterday, the creative marketing community was up in arms after Adobe locked some of its users out of the company’s software until that user agreed to terms that appeared to hand over all rights for AI training.
Some said they couldn’t even get support, or cancel their subscription, or uninstall their apps until they agreed to the terms.
Hey @Photoshop what the hell was that new agreement you forced us to sign this morning that locked our ap until we agree to it?
We are working on a bloody movie here, and NO, you don’t suddenly have the right to any of the work we are doing on it because we pay you to use photoshop. What the f**k?!
At first, Adobe came out with a statement which was basically “Yo, what’s the problem? We’ve had these terms in there forever,” which of course didn’t do them any favours.
This policy has been in place for many years…
Adobe accesses user content for a number of reasons, including the ability to deliver some of our most innovative cloud-based features…
Adobe’s (late) explanation
Late yesterday, wiser heads in Adobe’s p.r. department apparently prevailed and they published a blog post offering more details.
Essentially, they said their updated terms were meant to offer some examples of how existing policy would play out, and that some of their need to review the data you upload to their cloud was about monitoring for child abuse imagery.
Most importantly, Adobe says regardless of how it may have sounded, it doesn’t use customer content to train its AI, which it calls Firefly:
Firefly generative AI models are trained on a dataset of licensed content, such as Adobe Stock, and public domain content where copyright has expired…
Customers own their content and Adobe does not assume any ownership of customer work.
The company said it would be tweaking those the Terms of Use acceptance screens customers see when opening applications to make them a little less scary.
A disappointing track record
This certainly isn’t the first time Adobe’s sold out some of its goodwill. It was only a couple of years ago when the company turned colours in its customers’ documents to black if they didn’t purchase an additional Pantone colour licence.
This might be a good time to remind you that there are plenty of outstanding Adobe substitutes out there which don’t charge you a monthly fee to use: the Affinity suite is an excellent replacement. I bought Pixelmator Pro for $25 about six years ago — it does pretty much everything Photoshop does, including reading and writing Photoshop files. Both products are low cost and pay-once lifetime models.
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