Adobe terms & conditions

Delphin said:
I don't use Adobe myself, but I thought there would be some comments about Adobe's new T&Cs

9to5mac.com

Change to Adobe terms & conditions outrages many professionals - 9to5Mac

Update: Adobe has now clarified the meaning and intent. A change to Adobe terms & conditions for apps like Photoshop...
9to5mac.com 9to5mac.com
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I'm no expert but the first sentence which states "Solely for the purposes of operating or improving the Services and Software" would indicate that they can't use your images for monetisation of any kind. Happy to be corrected though.
 
Solely for the purposes of operating or improving the Services and Software, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free sublicensable, license, to use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, and translate the Content

seems they can do more or less what they want if my interpretation is correct.
 
Nikon f1.8 said:
Solely for the purposes of operating or improving the Services and Software, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free sublicensable, license, to use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, and translate the Content

seems they can do more or less what they want if my interpretation is correct.
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only if you don't understand the meaning of 'solely for the purpose of'
 
Dryce said:
Or perhaps not if you don't understand how open ended the purpose is ....
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The purpose of the change is for them to use your images to improve their AI.

All of the other ‘share’ etc is what’s required simply for them to show you or whoever you’ve chosen your images.

Back to the AI. It’s a bit odd to be using their AI algorithms for all these years but to object to them using our images to help that get better.
 
sirch said:
See also https://www.talkphotography.co.uk/threads/adobe-may-now-pirate-your-content.760269/#post-9496049


Improving as in training their AI for example

But also "publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on" ... so using your background in their AI generated image improves their software
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I’m not sure that could legally be argued.

‘AI’ ceases to be ‘artificial’ if all it does is copy and paste bits of your image (or as per your suggestion ‘all’ of it.)
 
Phil V said:
Back to the AI. It’s a bit odd to be using their AI algorithms for all these years but to object to them using our images to help that get better.
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The problem is that AI needs to learn. It needs o be fed.

If you create a unique image or manuscript and store it in the cloud then it's your image or manuscript. If you don't show it to anybody then it cannot be plagiarised.

But if the storage service reads or looks at your material to train its AI then you are basically allowing your work to be plagiarised by AI. Parts of your work can be recreated and published despite the fact you never explicitly published it.
 
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I wonder how this will work for people who edit or create images for exclusive use for a customer?.
Maybe a system where you can "op-in" to help the AI learn, but Adobe helping itself to it's paying customers images, I'm not so sure about that.
 
swanseamale47 said:
I wonder how this will work for people who edit or create images for exclusive use for a customer?.
Maybe a system where you can "op-in" to help the AI learn, but Adobe helping itself to it's paying customers images, I'm not so sure about that.
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All sorts of issues here for 'contractural' work, not specifically photographic!
 
Dryce said:
The problem is that AI needs to learn. It needs o be fed.
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Which was exactly my point.

It’s an odd world view to expect software to be useful to us by learning from the world but then to be upset if it wants to use our work to learn from.

A bit like expecting schools and the police to work but not wanting to pay your share of taxes.
 
Phil V said:
Which was exactly my point.

It’s an odd world view to expect software to be useful to us by learning from the world but then to be upset if it wants to use our work to learn from.

A bit like expecting schools and the police to work but not wanting to pay your share of taxes.
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The problem comes that what is fed into AI becomes processed and regenerated.

So your private work can be then used to derive third party AI work.

And that is to allow Adobe to sell on that service to others for their benefit - not yours.

Suppose you are a writer who saves manuscripts to the cloud and then the cloud storage provider allows its AI to train on your manuscripts - and before you have even published there's similar works being generated on demand for anybody who pays the storage provider to access their AI and simply asks the right questions of the AI.

So I think there are serious concerns and questions - private storage should be for private purposes by default.
 
Adobe have actually said it won't use your images to train it's AI

Scott Belsky—VP of Products, Mobile and Community at Adobe quickly clarified that Adobe would not use user generated content to train its Firefly AI model
 
Phil V said:
The purpose of the change is for them to use your images to improve their AI.

All of the other ‘share’ etc is what’s required simply for them to show you or whoever you’ve chosen your images.

Back to the AI. It’s a bit odd to be using their AI algorithms for all these years but to object to them using our images to help that get better.
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You pay them to use their software, they don't pay you to use your images.
 
seaodyssey said:
You pay them to use their software, they don't pay you to use your images.
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So now we've clarified that Adobe aren't asking permission to use our images to train their AI (Thanks @Delphin ) all of the 'image sharing' rights in the contract is you giving them permission to show you your images :)

This is back to the nutcase Facebook posts of 10 years ago
 
Phil V said:
So now we've clarified that Adobe aren't asking permission to use our images to train their AI (Thanks @Delphin ) all of the 'image sharing' rights in the contract is you giving them permission to show you your images :)

This is back to the nutcase Facebook posts of 10 years ago
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Adobe dropped the ball a bit on this one - someone should have realised the T&C could be read as a rights grab, and included the note that it wasn't from the start.
Of course, some will still believe that it was a rights grab, and that they've only backed down because enough people shouted about.
 
The way I see it in the interim you just have to use their desktop based software and avoid "cloud" as much as possible, and also minimise the use of "generative" function to bare minimum not least because it is actually quite poor for most things.

It probably also doesn't hurt to keep editing PC offline most of the time, which is rather easy for me for as long as my phone is not plugged in!

In the long term we should be supporting OSS projects and ideally have it not only as a backup option but a serious and risk-free competitor same as LibreOffice is now superior to M$ products that ironically now use unintuitive kinder-garten grade UI
 
It's a mess. Might be a USA only thing as I've not seen any European creators complaining about it, but This isn't the nutcase Facebook Ts & Cs - Adobe have screwed up. It might not be what they mean, but it's what they've said and they are being quite explicit. It looks like a rights grab. They'll use your work for whatever they want. and until they change the actual Ts & Cs to say otherwise (and there was talk that they were going to change their Ts & Cs yesterday?), then that "anything they want" could well be Gen AI. Hell, it could be to print it and sell it on street corners too looking at the wording!

I get the AI argument - AI needs to be trained. They say they used Adobe Stock and royalty free work to do that. (The Adobe Stock element of that raises questions all of it's own - did they ask? Did they pay? If they did, well great! Fine! No issues! But if they're using your content without you explicitly knowing it to produce elements of an AI image thats being sold commercially, taking work off you for little to no skill or effort, and you have no rights to? But then that's derivative work anyway isn't it)

I do photography and I'm not a pro (and I'm probably now glad I'm not a pro). It strikes me that this is a much bigger issue in the graphic design space right now - it's scary how easy it is to generate a half decent graphical image of anything in any style. There are apparently brands and manufacturers laying off their design teams and replacing them with AI. Trained on their work.

The problem here really is that Adobe have left themselves wide open to misinterpretation (or the correct interpretation?) in an industry sector that they almost created, that is already suspicious of them and annoyed at their business practices, and they apparently might now destroy. Taking it to the extreme - because why not ;) - You're paying them a lot of money for their software to steal your work to train the Gen AI models that will replace you. Or it'll make cloning out a bit easier. But....

The viral tweet written by science-fiction and fantasy author and artist, Joanna Maciejewska (@AuthorJMac) really does strike a chord for me,
"You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction .I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."
 
I gather Adobes shares were down something like 24% over the last 6 months before this broke. This might give the shareholders a few worries.
 
Or you could post an image in the cloud called ‘Tree’ when actually it’s a brick wall and let the AI algorithm make sense of it? :)
 
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