BitDepth#1463
Mark Lyndersay
ADOBE, the market leader in delivering software for designers, photographers and creators in a range of fields, found itself in hot water with its customers when the wording of its new terms of service in the revised end user licensing agreement (EULA) struck a discordant note.
The EULA had apparently been changed since February, but this is a lengthy legal document that users skim idly before clicking acceptance, having read not a single word. It took months before anyone noticed a significant change.
In a dramatic rewording of its handling of customer content stored on its servers, Adobe seemed to claim a sublicence for the creative work uploaded to its servers. Speculation immediately began that it would use that work to train its image generation AI, Firefly.
As part of its now exclusively cloud-based, rental software business, Adobe offers service sweeteners in its plans which allow customers to store data for collaborative work and to create portfolio websites.
The company has since announced a reworking of the offending EULA to remove the inference of sub-licensing, but not before users past and present weighed in.
It didn't help that this revelation came on the heels of a conversation that Adobe's CEO Shantanu Narayen had with The Verge in which he rather proudly declared, "I think generative AI is going to attract a whole new set of people who previously perhaps didn't invest the time and energy into using the tools to be able to tell that story. So, I think it's going to be tremendously additive in terms of the number of people who now say, 'Wow, it has further democratised the ability for us to tell that story.'"
To be fair, Narayen is hardly the only person to be shoving rather startling amounts of money behind the idea that photographers are now largely disposable parts of the image-making process.
Once stock photography sites began including AI alteration and creation tools in their offerings, it was clear that even that wildly devalued photographic revenue stream was also going to dry up at the source.
A week ago, Adobe posted a statement on its company blog to clarify its position and unveiled new, more clearly creator-friendly wording for its EULA, noting, "We've never trained generative AI on customer content, taken ownership of a customer's work, or allowed access to customer content beyond legal requirements. Nor were we considering any of those practices as part of the recent Terms of Use update."
That' sounds good, but it presumes that Adobe can draw on a vast wellspring of customer goodwill to tide it over an incident that's shaken customer trust.
I've been an Adobe customer since 1995, when I bought my first copy of Photoshop, version 3, an upgrade from the limited edition copy that shipped with a scanner.
Technically I'm still a customer, because I have an active perpetual licence for version 13 of that software (CS6), though the company hasn't gotten a cent from me since it switched to renting its software by the month.
The activat
