First, some stuff about the Photoshop Terms of Service

“To users, the access raised red flags, suggesting that Adobe could view customer content, including confidential projects, such as Hollywood productions. In response, Adobe says it updated the terms of use over concerns that some customers could harness Adobe products to create child sexual abuse material (CSAM). […] In the same blog post, Adobe also reassures users it’ll never use customer data to train its Firefly AI image-generation software.”

(Tangent: A thread from Denise about online CSAM trading. It’s not about bot-generated images, but it breaks down some relevant issues — the kind that aren’t intuitive for those of us who don’t Deal With This professionally.)

Sometimes I forget how much the modern Adobe suite is about “being online and storing everything in the cloud.” Of course if they’re hosting piles of user-generated content, they need to do standard scans to make sure they’re not hosting illegal content. Their TOS already included access to do it — that part wasn’t even new!

On the other hand — it is really striking that Adobe made all its cloud users click through a popup agreeing to this new TOS, without putting “To be clear, this does not give us the right to use your work to train AI art bots” right at the top.

Nobody on Adobe’s team is thinking about the major concerns of digital artists in 2024, if not one of them thought to say “hey, uh, we should lead with that. Boldface. Highlighted. In large friendly letters.”

That’s not a good look!

This tweet makes the same point, punctuated with examples of Adobe Stock marketplace selling AI-generated images…using the names of artists who didn’t authorize their work to be used.

Compare the policies of the Clip Studio asset marketplace: “For all users to use the service safely and with peace of mind, only materials whose intellectual rights belong to the poster may be uploaded to the service. Therefore, we now prohibit the posting of all materials created using AI image generation technology, as they have the potential to include elements of which the intellectual property rights are ill-defined or unclear.”

That’s a much better look.

The rest of this is fun links

This one’s from 2018, but the general issues with “computers just don’t process image data like humans do” are still relevant: “What is surprising to me is just how little the input data needs to be distorted to cause the neural networks to misidentify things. The stop signs with a few pieces of tape on are clearly just that to a human—a stop sign with a few pieces of tape. The images on the right in the 3×3 grid above look nothing like ostriches.“

“This was only the very first go; it’s not bad, and if you’d never seen the Mona Lisa before this is a perfectly acceptable face.” (Spoiler alert: it is not a perfectly acceptable face!)

“You are LITERALLY MAKING THE GARBAGE NOVELS FROM 1984 that are written by machines“

“Okay, but one of the most popular webcomics of all time was literally just stick figures. Another one is over 4000 strips of the exact same clipart of dinosaurs.”

“Miles Astray entered a real, albeit surreal photo of a flamingo into the AI category of the 1839 Color Photography Awards which the judges not only placed third but it also won the People’s Vote Award. ‘I wanted to show that nature can still beat the machine and that there is still merit in real work from real creatives.’“