Adobe runs what must be one of the largest deceptive rebills. The vast majority of users signing up for a monthly plan do not realize that it is actually an "annual plan, billed monthly" and thus that if they cancel after one month (for example) they'll be billed for the remaining 11 immediately. I honestly don't know how they haven't faced FTC action for this, as it's been their primary model for 5-10 years now.
vishnugupta 2 hours ago [-]
Almost every single one of Adbobe post on HN has a top comment about this evil subscription plan.
I fell for it once. But I’m in India so I just cancelled my debit card and that was that. Good luck to them to chase me through legal means in India. It was still bit of a hassle though.
SanjayMehta 14 minutes ago [-]
I had to cancel a card thanks to PayPal’s shenanigans.
Now it’s much easier to deal with the subscription problems due to the new RBI norms.
sanswork 2 hours ago [-]
I just went back through the sign up process to check and it seems pretty obvious these days? I got three options at checkout annual billed monthly, monthly, annual.
I hate annual billed monthly but the wording isn't hidden.
sepositus 3 hours ago [-]
Wasn't there some action around this like a year ago? Can't find it now, but I thought it was investigated at some point.
We all have access to chatgpt. If we want hallucination ridden bullshit, we'll find it ourselves.
bdelmas 42 minutes ago [-]
Yes. AI becoming the first place people go for information and replacing facts and first degree of source is going to be a scary world.
elaus 1 hours ago [-]
It doesn't seem to me like the linked page contains "hallucination ridden bullshit".
speff 2 hours ago [-]
I still don't see why this is a point against Adobe. When you select a plan, they very clearly give you 3 options. Monthly, Annual billed monthly, and Annual prepaid. The Annual billed monthly is just flat-out better for end users over prepaid. Why do people want to get rid of it? Because some people FAFO when trying to get an annual price while still being able to cancel any time?
I do not like Adobe in the slightest, but it's not because of their billing practices.
Interestingly, just fyi, they do a reasonable-person test when trying these cases. That means they literally pull 100 people off the street and ask each one to go through the funnel and then give them a quiz with questions like "How much am I going to be billed?"
So if people are confused, it's basically on you, regardless of whether you think you were being clear about the terms.
speff 2 hours ago [-]
That's fair - I don't know what their sales page looked like prior to the FCC investigation. However in its current state, I see no issues with the way the information's presented. If a majority of the 100 people can't figure it out, I'm not sure what else they can do other than remove the option which is better for the consumer. I wouldn't be surprised it that's where it'll end up
derefr 2 hours ago [-]
Signing a contract where, even if you stop using the company's service or having anything to do with the company, you still have to keep paying them nevertheless... sounds like one of those types of deals† that we invented the concept of "inalienable rights" to prevent companies from offering.
† I.e. the type of deal where the individual is being asked to trade away something they cannot reasonably evaluate the net present value of (their own future optionality in a future they can't predict) — which will inevitably be presented by the company offering the deal, in a way that minimizes/obscures this loss of optionality. In other words, it's a deal that, in being able to make it, has the same inherent flaws as indentured servitude does — just with money instead of labor.
jen729w 2 hours ago [-]
I just cancelled my house insurance plan as we're moving out. Actually my partner did it, and she told me that there was a ~AU$50 cancellation fee.
My natural instinct was to be ropable. But then I realised that I had actually been paying an annual insurance policy, monthly. I wasn't paying a monthly insurance policy.
Presumably when we signed up, there was a monthly option. Presumably it cost more. And so I can hardly be annoyed that they're essentially making up that difference now that I've chosen to terminate that contract early.
speff 2 hours ago [-]
You're not buying a monthly plan for their Annual billed Monthly option. You're literally buying a year's worth, but paying it off in 12 installments over time. If someone were to buy the monthly plan, cancel it, and still get billed for it, yes you would have a point.
derefr 2 hours ago [-]
You're not buying "a year's worth." Adobe can't roll a truck up with all your future project rendering hours on it and dump them on your lawn, such that they would have a valid legal argument of "you can't cancel, we already gave you the whole thing." What Adobe are giving you, each month — each second, even — is the DRM licensing functionality built into Photoshop continuing to spit out a "valid" signal. Because that activation is a continuous online process, you receive that service on a second-by-second basis (or maybe at most on an online-activation-check-granularity basis.)
That being said, maybe we're talking past one-another here.
Where I come from (Canada), even if you prepay for a service that charges annually (no "annual charged monthly" language needed), as long as that service can be common-sense-construed as delivering value on a finer granularity (by the month, by the second, etc), then if you only use that service for some fraction of the plan length, and then cancel it — you are then legally obligated to a pro-rated refund of the remaining plan length. So if you cancel an annual-billed service after a month? You get 11/12ths of your payment back. If you subscribe to a monthly-billed service on January 1 and cancel on January 2? You get 30/31ths of your payment back. Etc.
Under such a legal doctrine, there is no difference in the total amount owed between "billed monthly" when subscribed for one month, vs "billed annually" when subscribed for one month and then cancelled, vs "annual, billed monthly" when subscribed for one month and then cancelled.
If you're curious about the set of countries where this doctrine applies, here's a page from the Microsoft Store support outlining the set of countries where they will give out pro-rated refunds for subscriptions: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/account-billing/countrie...
(And if it isn't sickening to you that in general, corporations will write logic into their billing systems to support this, and then only activate that logic for countries where they're legally obligated to do so, while — now with intentionality — continuing to squeeze everyone else for services they've knowingly already cut off... then I don't know what to tell you.)
---
And yes, if you're wondering, there are a few exceptions to this pro-rated refund doctrine.
One is real-estate leasing — because chancery courts are weird and make their own rules; but also because a lot of the "work" of being a landlord is up-front/annual. (Though, admittedly, we also have laws here that force real-estate annual leasing contracts to revert to month-to-month after a low set number of years — usually 1 or 2 — with the month-to-month lease rate carried over from the "annual, paid monthly" rate.)
The other is for commercial leasing of assets like vehicles, construction equipment, servers, etc. This is because corporations have much more predictable optionality, sure — but it's also because corporations don't "deserve" protections in the same way individuals do. (Same reason investment banks don't get the protections of savings banks.)
aktuel 2 minutes ago [-]
Artists who hate Adobe should actively support the development of open source alternatives. That is the only way this situation is going to improve.
adzm 15 hours ago [-]
Adobe is the one major company trying to be ethical with its AI training data and no one seems to even care. The AI features in Photoshop are the best around in my experience and come in handy constantly for all sorts of touchup work.
Anyway I don't really think they deserve a lot of the hate they get, but I do hope this encourages development of viable alternatives to their products. Photoshop is still pretty much peerless. Illustrator has a ton of competitors catching up. After Effects and Premiere for video editing are getting overtaken by Davinci Resolve -- though for motion graphics it is still hard to beat After Effects. Though I do love that Adobe simply uses JavaScript for its expression and scripting language.
AnthonyMouse 7 hours ago [-]
> Adobe is the one major company trying to be ethical with its AI training data and no one seems to even care.
It's because nobody actually wants that.
Artists don't like AI image generators because they have to compete with them, not because of how they were trained. How they were trained is just the the most plausible claim they can make against them if they want to sue OpenAI et al over it, or to make a moral argument that some kind of misappropriation is occurring.
From the perspective of an artist, a corporation training an AI image generator in a way that isn't susceptible to moral or legal assault is worse, because then it exists and they have to compete with it and there is no visible path for them to make it go away.
Sir_Twist 5 hours ago [-]
I'd say that is a bit of an ungenerous characterization. Is it possible that it could be both? That while artists maybe do feel under attack in terms of competition, that there is a genuine ethical dilemma at hand?
If I were an artist, and I made a painting and published it to a site which was then used to train an LLM, I would feel as though the AI company treated me disingenuously, regardless of competition or not. Intellectual property laws aside, I think there is a social contract being broken when a publicly shared work is then used without the artist's direct, explicit permission.
AnthonyMouse 3 hours ago [-]
> Is it possible that it could be both? That while artists maybe do feel under attack in terms of competition, that there is a genuine ethical dilemma at hand?
The rights artists have over their work are economic rights. The most important fair use factor is how the use affects the market for the original work. If Disney is lobbying for copyright term extensions and you want to make art showing Mickey Mouse in a cage with the CEO of Disney as the jailer, that's allowed even though you're not allowed to open a movie theater and show Fantasia without paying for it, and even though (even because!) Disney would not approve of you using Mickey to oppose their lobbying position. And once the copyright expires you can do as you like.
So the ethical argument against AI training is that the AI is going to compete with them and make it harder for them to make a living. But substantially the same thing happens if the AI is trained on some other artist's work instead. Whose work it was has minimal impact on the economic consequences for artists in general. And being one of the artists who got a pittance for the training data is little consolation either.
The real ethical question is whether it's okay to put artists out of business by providing AI-generated images at negligible cost. If the answer is no, it doesn't really matter which artists were in the training data. If the answer is yes, it doesn't really matter which artists were in the training data.
card_zero 1 hours ago [-]
> But substantially the same thing happens if the AI is trained on some other artist's work instead.
You could take that further and say that "substantially the same thing" happens if the AI is trained on music instead. It's just another kind of artwork, right? Somebody who was going to have an illustration by [illustrator with distinctive style] might choose to have music instead, so the music is in competition, so all that illustrator's art might as well be in the training data, and that doesn't matter because the artist would get competed with either way. Says you.
DrillShopper 3 hours ago [-]
> So the ethical argument against AI training is that the AI is going to compete with them and make it harder for them to make a living. But substantially the same thing happens if the AI is trained on some other artist's work instead.
Why do we even have the orphan crushing machine?
becquerel 51 minutes ago [-]
It crushes the orphans very quickly, and on command, and allows anyone to crush orphans from the comfort of their own home. Most people are low-taste enough that they don't really care about the difference between hand-crushed orphans and artisanal hand-crushed orphans.
furyofantares 3 hours ago [-]
I've never seen anyone make the complaint about image classifiers or image segmentation. It's only for generative models and only once they got good enough to be useful.
kmeisthax 4 hours ago [-]
Artists do not want to get paid micropennies for use-of-training-data licenses for something that destroys the market for new art. And that's the only claim Adobe Firefly makes for being ethical. Adobe used a EULA Roofie to make all their Adobe Stock contributors consent to getting monthly payments for images trained on in Firefly.
Sir_Twist 3 hours ago [-]
Indeed, and I agree that Adobe is in the wrong here. For an agreement between Adobe and an artist to be truly permissive, the artist should have the ability to not give their consent. Ethically, I think Adobe is in the same position as the other AI companies – if the artist doesn't directly (EULAs are not direct, in my opinion) agree to the terms, and if they don't have the option to decline, then it isn't an agreement, it is an method of coercion. If an artist, like you said, doesn't want to be paid micropennies, they shouldn't have to agree.
I believe it is completely reasonable for an artist to want to share their work publicly on the Internet without fear of it being appropriated, and I wish there was a pragmatic way they could achieve this.
scarface_74 2 hours ago [-]
Adobe only trains its AI on properly licensed images that the artists have explicitly signed a contract with Adobe to train on.
mjmsmith 7 hours ago [-]
Most artists would prefer not to compete with an AI image generator that has been trained on their own artwork without their permission, for obvious reasons.
AnthonyMouse 6 hours ago [-]
That's exactly the moral argument Adobe is taking away from them, and the same argument has minimal economic relevance because it's so rare that a customer requires a specific individual artist's style.
mjmsmith 1 hours ago [-]
That must be why AI image prompts never reference an artist name.
__loam 2 hours ago [-]
Artists don't hate Adobe just because they're making an AI art generator, they hate Adobe because it's a predatory, scummy corporation that is difficult to work with and is the gatekeeper for common industry tools. Also, Adobe didn't take away the moral arguments against AI art, they just used previously liscened imagery that existed before they started making AI art generators. There's still an argument that it's deceptive to grandfather in previously licensed work into a new technology, and there's still an argument that spending resources on automating cultural expression is a shitty thing to do.
unethical_ban 5 hours ago [-]
He's arguing that artists are so scared of Adobe and AI that they actually want Adobe to be more evil so artists have more to complain about.
AnthonyMouse 4 hours ago [-]
They want AI image generation to go away. That isn't likely to happen, but their best hope would be to make copyright claims or try to turn the public against AI companies with accusations of misappropriation. Adobe's "ethical" image generator would be immune to those claims while still doing nothing to address their primary concern, the economic consequences. It takes away their ammunition while leaving their target standing. Are they supposed to like a company doing that or does it just make them even more upset?
crest 8 hours ago [-]
> Adobe is the one major company trying to be ethical with its AI training data and no one seems to even care.
It's sad that it's funny that you think Adobe is motivated by ethical consideration.
jfengel 7 hours ago [-]
They don't have to be motivated by ethics. I'm fine with them grudgingly doing ethical things because their customer base is all artists, many of whom would look for an alternative product.
djeastm 6 hours ago [-]
You are fine with it, of course, because you're reasonable. But OP's claim was that Adobe is "trying to be ethical with its AI training data and no one seems to even care" as if we're meant to give special consideration to a company for doing the only economically sensible thing when most of its customers are artists.
ambicapter 6 hours ago [-]
The great thing about loudly painting Adobe with the brush of "ethical AI training" (regardless of why they're doing it) is that the backlash will exponentially bigger if/when they do something that betrays that label. Potentially big enough to make them reverse course. It's not much, but it's something.
8 hours ago [-]
ahartmetz 7 hours ago [-]
Probably want to look good to their customer base - artists
XorNot 7 hours ago [-]
Where did the poster say they think Adobe is motivated by that? They said Adobe is operating that way.
bolognafairy 7 hours ago [-]
A strawman argument so you can condescendingly and snarkily lecture someone? I can see you were among those mouthing off at Adobe on Bluesky.
eloisius 2 hours ago [-]
“Mouthing off” is always uttered by someone with an undeserved sense of authority over the other party, like a mall cop yelling at a teenager for skateboarding
CursedSilicon 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ngcazz 7 hours ago [-]
Or that generative AI is ethical at all
esalman 7 hours ago [-]
It's funny pg once compared hackers with painters, but given how people abuse crypto and generative AI, is seems hackers have more in common with thieves and robbers.
labster 5 hours ago [-]
Hollywood was right all along then about hackers being outlaws, then. Hacker News must be the very heart of the Dark Web (where “dark” is short for late-stage capitalism).
jordanb 5 hours ago [-]
> hackers being outlaws
That gives them too much credit. "Outlaws" are folk heroes. Robin Hood was an outlaw, Bonnie and Clyde were outlaws. Luigi is an outlaw.
Nobody's going to be telling fables about the exploits of Sam Altman.
econ 2 hours ago [-]
AI could do it. Seems a good use of it.
f33d5173 13 hours ago [-]
Adobe isn't trying to be ethical, they are trying to be more legally compliant, because they see that as a market opportunity. Otoh, artists complain about legal compliance of AIs not because that is what they care about, but because they see that as their only possible redress against a phenomenon they find distasteful. A legal reality where you can only train AI on content you've licensed would be the worst for everybody bar massive companies, legacy artists included.
_bin_ 10 hours ago [-]
Right, but "distaste" isn't grounds for trying to ban something. There are all kinds of things people and companies do which I dislike but for which there's no just basis for regulating. If Adobe properly licenses all their training data artists don't have a right to say "well i think this is bad for creativity and puts my job at risk, ban it!!!" Or more precisely, they have a right to say that, but no moral justification for trying to ban/regulate/sue over it.
I hate Adobe's subscription model as much as the next guy and that's a good reason to get annoyed at them. Adobe building AI features is not.
TeMPOraL 9 hours ago [-]
> Right, but "distaste" isn't grounds for trying to ban something.
It isn't, but it doesn't stop people from trying and hoping for a miracle. That's pretty much all there is to the arguments of image models, as well as LLMs, being trained in violation of copyright - it's distaste and greed[0], with a slice of basic legalese on top to confuse people into believing the law says what it doesn't (at least yet) on top.
> If Adobe properly licenses all their training data artists don't have a right to say "well i think this is bad for creativity and puts my job at risk, ban it!!!" Or more precisely, they have a right to say that, but no moral justification for trying to ban/regulate/sue over it.
I'd say they have plenty of moral / ethical justification for trying to ban/regulate/sue over it, they just don't have much of a legal one at this point. But that's why they should be trying[1] - they have a legitimate argument that this is an unexpected, undeserved, unfair calamity for them, threatening to derail their lives, and lives of their dependents, across the entire sector - and therefore that laws should be changed to shield them, or compensate them for the loss. After all, that's what laws are for.
(Let's not forget that the entire legal edifice around recognizing and protecting "intellectual property" is an entirely artificial construct that goes against the nature of information and knowledge, forcing information to behave like physical goods, so it's not unfair to the creators in an economy that's built around trading physical goods. IP laws were built on moral arguments, so it's only fair to change them on moral grounds too.)
--
[0] - Greed is more visible in the LLM theatre of this conflict, because with textual content there's vastly more people who believe that they're entitled to compensation just because some comments they wrote on the Internet may have been part of the training dataset, and are appalled to see LLM providers get paid for the service while they are not. This Dog in the Manger mentality is distinct from that of people whose output was used in training a model that now directly competes with them for their job; the latter have legitimate ethical reasons to complain.
[1] - Even though myself I am for treating training datasets to generative AI as exempt from copyright. I think it'll be better for society in general - but I recognize it's easy for me to say it, because I'm not the one being rugpulled out of a career path by GenAI, watching it going from 0 to being half of the way towards automating away visual arts, in just ~5 years.
skissane 7 hours ago [-]
> they have a legitimate argument that this is an unexpected, undeserved, unfair calamity for them, threatening to derail their lives, and lives of their dependents, across the entire sector - and therefore that laws should be changed to shield them, or compensate them for the loss. After all, that's what laws are for.
Lots of people have had their lives disrupted by technological and economic changes before - entire careers which existed a century ago are now gone. Given society provided little or no compensation for prior such cases of disruption, what’s the argument for doing differently here?
petre 2 hours ago [-]
You're only going yo get "AI art" in the future because artists will have get a second job at McDonalds to survive. The same old themes all over again. It's like the only music is Richard Clayderman tunes.
TeMPOraL 7 hours ago [-]
Moral growth and learning from history?
skissane 7 hours ago [-]
There’s a big risk that you end up creating a scheme to compensate for technological disruption in one industry and then fail to do so in another, based on the political clout / mindshare / media attention each has - and then there are many people in even worse personal situations (through no fault of their own) who would also miss out.
Wouldn’t a better alternative be to work on improving social safety nets for everybody, as opposed to providing a bespoke one for a single industry?
CamperBob2 6 hours ago [-]
Given society provided little or no compensation for prior such cases of disruption
That's going to be hard for you to justify in the long run, I think. Virtually everybody who ever lost a job to technology ended up better off for it.
disconcision 4 hours ago [-]
> Virtually everybody who ever lost a job to technology ended up better off for it.
this feels like a much stronger claim than is typically made about the benefits of technological progress
CamperBob2 2 hours ago [-]
Certainly no stronger than the claim I was responding to. They are essentially pining for the return of careers that haven't existed for a century.
cratermoon 4 hours ago [-]
> Right, but "distaste" isn't grounds for trying to ban something
I disagree. There are many laws on the books codifying social distastes. They keep your local vice squad busy.
skywhopper 7 hours ago [-]
In the context of encouraging art, it totally is! Copyright and patents are 100% artificial and invented legal concepts that are based solely on the distaste for others profiting off a creator’s ideas. The reason for them is to encourage creativity by allowing creators to profit off new ideas.
So there’s no reason why “distaste” about AI abuse of human artists’ work shouldn’t be a valid reason to regulate or ban it. If society values the creation of new art and inventions, then it will create artificial barriers to encourage their creation.
bmacho 45 minutes ago [-]
Yup, banning AI for the sake of artist would be exactly the same as the current copyright laws. (Also they are attacking AI not purely for fear of their jobs, but bc it is illegal already.)
zmmmmm 2 hours ago [-]
The ship has sailed, but I can understand artists feeling that no matter how any AI is trained prospectively, it was only made possible because the methods to do so were learned through unethical means - we now know the exact model architectures, efficient training methods and types of training data needed so that companies like Adobe can recreate it with a fraction of the cost.
We obviously can never unscramble that egg, which is sad because it probably means there will never be a way to make such people feel OK about AI.
no_wizard 8 hours ago [-]
> A legal reality where you can only train AI on content you've licensed would be the worst for everybody bar massive companies, legacy artists included.
Quite an assertion. Why exactly would this be true?
drilbo 5 hours ago [-]
who else has would ever have a significantly large store of licensed material?
spoaceman7777 8 hours ago [-]
> Adobe isn't trying to be ethical, they are trying to be more legally compliant
Is the implication of this statement that using AI for image editing and creation is inherently unethical?
Is that really how people feel?
mtndew4brkfst 8 hours ago [-]
For creation, yes, because of the provenance of the training data that got us here. It was acquired unethically in the overwhelming majority of cases. Using models derived from that training is laundering and anonymizing the existing creativity of other humans and then still staking the claim "I made this", like the stick figure comic. It's ghoulish.
CaptainFever 1 hours ago [-]
The whole point is that Adobe's AI doesn't do this, yet is still hated. It reveals that some people simply hate the whole concept of generative AI, regardless of how it was made. You're never going to please them.
skissane 7 hours ago [-]
There exist image generation models that were trained on purely licensed content, e.g. Getty’s. I don’t know about Adobe’s specifically-but if not, it seems like a problem Adobe could easily fix-either buy/license a stock image library for AI training (maybe they already have one), and use that to train their own model-or else license someone else’s model e.g. Getty’s
spookie 6 hours ago [-]
Well they do license the art they use, but in... let's say... "interesting" ways through their ToS.
bolognafairy 6 hours ago [-]
They are training using licensed images! That’s the thing! There’s some sort of ridiculous brainworm infecting certain online groups that has them believing that stealing content is inherent in using generative AI.
I watch this all quite closely, and It’s chronically online, anime / fursona profile picture, artists.
Exact same thing happened when that ‘open’ trust and safety platform was announced a few months ago, which used “AI” in its marketing material. This exact same group of people—not even remotely the target audience for this B2B T&S product—absolutely lost it on Bluesky. “We don’t want AI everywhere!” “You’re taking the humanity out of everything!” “This is so unethical!” When you tell them that machine learning has been used in content moderation for decades, they won’t have a bar of it. Nor when you explain that T&S AI isn’t generative and almost certainly isn’t using “stolen” data. I had countless people legitimately say that having humans have to sift through gore and CSAM is a Good Thing because it gives them jobs, which AI is taking away.
It’s all the same sort of online presence. Anime profile picture, Ko-fi in bio, “minors dni”, talking about not getting “commissions” anymore. It genuinely feels like a psy-op / false flag operation or something.
subjectsigma 6 hours ago [-]
> I had countless people legitimately say that having humans have to sift through gore and CSAM is a Good Thing because it gives them jobs, which AI is taking away.
Link even a single example of someone explicitly saying this and I would be astounded
tbrownaw 6 hours ago [-]
> Adobe isn't trying to be ethical, they are trying to be more legally compliant,
Ethics (as opposed to morals) is about codified rules.
The law is a set of codified rules.
So are these really that different (beyond how the law is a hodge-podge and usually a minimum requirement rather than an ideal to reach for)?
Riverheart 10 hours ago [-]
“A legal reality where you can only train AI on content you've licensed would be the worst for everybody bar massive companies, legacy artists included.”
Care to elaborate?
Also, saying artists only concern themselves with the legality of art used in AI because of distaste when there are legal cases where their art has been appropriated seems like a bold position to take.
It’s a practice founded on scooping everything up without care for origin or attribution and it’s not like it’s a transparent process. There are people that literally go out of their way to let artists know they’re training on their art and taunt them about it online. Is it unusual they would assume bad faith from those purporting to train their AI legally when participation up till now has either been involuntary or opt out? Rolling out AI features when your customers are artists is tone deaf at best and trolling at worst.
Workaccount2 9 hours ago [-]
There is no "scooping up", the models aren't massive archives of copied art. People either don't understand how these models work or they purposely misrepresent it (or purposely refuse to understand it).
Showing the model an picture doesn't create a copy of that picture in it's "brain". It moves a bunch of vectors around that captures an "essence" of what the image is. The next image shown from a totally different artist with a totally different style may well move around many of those same vectors again. But suffice to say, there is no copy of the picture anywhere inside of it.
This also why these models hallucinate so much, they are not drawing from a bank of copies, they are working off of a fuzzy memory.
TeMPOraL 9 hours ago [-]
> People either don't understand how these models work or they purposely misrepresent it (or purposely refuse to understand it).
Not only that, they also assume or pretend that this is obviously violating copyright, when in fact this is a) not clear, and b) pending determination by courts and legislators around the world.
FWIW, I agree with your perspective on training, but I also accept that artists have legitimate moral grounds to complain and try to fight it - so I don't really like to argue about this with them; my pet peeve is on the LLM side of things, where the loudest arguments come from people who are envious and feel entitled, even though they have no personal stake in this.
Root_Denied 8 hours ago [-]
>Not only that, they also assume or pretend that this is obviously violating copyright, when in fact this is a) not clear, and b) pending determination by courts and legislators around the world.
Legislation always takes time to catch up with tech, that's not new.
The question I'm see being put forth from those with legal and IP backgrounds is about inputs vs. outputs, as in "if you didn't have access to X (which has some form of legal IP protection) as an input, would you be able to get the output of a working model?" The comparison here is with manufacturing where you have assembly of parts made by others into some final product and you would be buying those inputs to create your product output.
The cost of purchasing the required inputs is not being done for AI, which pretty solidly puts AI trained on copyrighted materials in hot water. The fact that it's an imperfect analogy and doesn't really capture the way software development works is irrelevant if the courts end up agreeing with something they can understand as a comparison.
All that being said I don't think the legality is under consideration for any companies building a model - the profit margins are too high to care for now, and catching them at it is potentially difficult.
There's also a tendency for AI advocates to try and say that AI/LLM's are "special" in some way, and to compare their development process to someone "learning" the style of art (or whatever input) that they then internalize and develop into their own style. Personally I think that argument gives a lot of assumed agency to these models that they don't actually have, and weakens the overall legal case.
jillyboel 6 hours ago [-]
It's unauthorized commercial use. Which part of that is confusing to you?
rcxdude 5 hours ago [-]
So is google books, and that got ruled as fair use. That it's being used commercially is not a slam dunk case against an argument for fair use.
Riverheart 9 hours ago [-]
“Not only that, they also assume or pretend that this is obviously violating copyright, when in fact this is a) not clear, and b) pending determination by courts and legislators around the world.”
Uh huh, so much worse than the people that assume or pretend that it’s obviously not infringing and legal. Fortunately I don’t need to wait for a lawyer to form an opinion and neither do those in favor of AI as you might’ve noticed.
You see any of them backing down and waiting for answer from a higher authority?
TeMPOraL 8 hours ago [-]
> You see any of them backing down and waiting for answer from a higher authority?
Should they? That's generally not how things work in most places. Normally, if something isn't clearly illegal, especially when it's something too new and different for laws to clearly cover, you're free to go ahead and try it; you're not expected to first seek a go-ahead from a court.
Riverheart 8 hours ago [-]
You just chided people for having strong opinions about AI infringement without a court ruling to back them up but now you’re saying that creating/promoting an entire industry based on a legal grey area is a social norm that you have no strong feelings about. I would have thought the same high bar to speak on copyright for those who believe it infringes would be applied equally to those saying it does not, especially when it financially benefits them. I don’t think we’ll find consensus.
ToucanLoucan 9 hours ago [-]
Training data at scale unavoidably taints models with vast amounts of references to the same widespread ideas that appear repeatedly in said data, so because the model has "seen" probably millions of photos of Indiana Jones, if you ask for an image of an archeologist who wears a hat and uses a whip, it's weighted averages are going to lead it to create something extremely similar to Indiana Jones because it has seen Indiana Jones so much. Disintegrating IP into trillions of pieces and then responding to an instruction to create it with something so close to the IP as to barely be distinguishable is still infringement.
The flip-side to that is the truly "original" images where no overt references are present all look kinda similar. If you run vague enough prompts to get something new that won't land you in hot water, you end up with a sort of stock-photo adjacent looking image where the lighting doesn't make sense and is completely unmotivated, the framing is strange, and everything has this over-smoothed, over-tuned "magazine copy editor doesn't understand the concept of restraint" look.
tpmoney 7 hours ago [-]
> if you ask for an image of an archeologist who wears a hat and uses a whip, it's weighted averages are going to lead it to create something extremely similar to Indiana Jones because it has seen Indiana Jones so much.
If you ask a human artist for an image of "an archeologist who wears a hat and uses a whip" you're also going to get something extremely similar to Indiana Jones unless you explicitly ask for something else. Let's imagine we go to deviantart and ask some folks to draw us some drawing from these prompts:
A blond haired fighter from a fantasy world that wears a green tunic and green pointy cap and used a sword and shield.
A foreboding space villain with all black armor, a cape and full face breathing apparatus that uses a laser sword.
A pudgy plumber in blue overalls and a red cap of Italian descent
I don't know about you but I would expect with nothing more than that, most of the time you're going to get something very close to Link, Darth Vader and Mario. Link might be the one with the best chance to get something different just because the number of publicly known images of "fantasy world heroes" is much more diverse than the set of "black armored space samurai" and "Italian plumbers"
> Disintegrating IP into trillions of pieces and then responding to an instruction to create it with something so close to the IP as to barely be distinguishable is still infringement.
But it's the person that causes the creation of the infringing material that is responsible for the infringement, not the machine or device itself. A xerox machine is a machine that disintegrates IP into trillions of pieces and then responds to instructions to duplicate that IP almost exactly (or to the best of its abilities). And when that functionality was challenged, the courts rightfully found that a xerox machine in and of itself, regardless of its capability to be used for infringement is not in and of itself infringing.
Riverheart 7 hours ago [-]
You know why we put up with copyrighted info in the human brain right? Because those are human beings, it’s unavoidable. This? Avoidable.
Also, the model isn’t a human brain. Nobody has invented a human brain.
And the model might not infringe if its inputs are licensed but that doesn’t seem to be the case for most and it’s not clearly transparent they don’t. If the inputs are bad, the intent of the user is meaningless. I can ask for a generic super hero and not mean to get superman but if I do I can’t blame that on myself, I had no role in it, heck even the model doesn’t know what it’s doing, it’s just a function. If I Xerox Superman my intent is clear.
tpmoney 6 hours ago [-]
> You know why we put up with copyrighted info in the human brain right? Because those are human beings, it’s unavoidable.
I would hope we put up with it because "copyright" is only useful to us insofar as it advances good things that we want in our society. I certainly don't want to live in a world where if we could forcibly remove copyrighted information from human brains as soon as the "license" expired that we would do so. That seems like a dystopian hell worse than even the worst possible predictions of AI's detractors.
> I can ask for a generic super hero and not mean to get superman but if I do I can’t blame that on myself, I had no role in it, heck even the model doesn’t know what it’s doing, it’s just a function.
And if you turn around and discard that output and ask for something else, then no harm has been caused. Just like when artists trace other artists work for practice, no harm is caused and while it might be copyright infringement in a "literal meaning of the words" it's also not something that as a society we consider meaningfully infringing. If on the other hand, said budding artist started selling copies of those traces, or making video games using assets scanned from those traces, then we do consider it infringement worth worrying about.
> If I Xerox Superman my intent is clear.
Is it? If you have a broken xerox machine and you think you have it fixed, grab the nearest papers you can find and as a result of testing the machine xerox Superman, what is your intent? I don't think it was to commit copyright infringement, even if again in the "literal meaning of the words" sense you absolutely did.
Riverheart 5 hours ago [-]
I’m saying that retaining information is a natural, accepted part of being human and operating in society. Don’t know why it needed to be turned into an Orwell sequel.
tpmoney 5 hours ago [-]
I had assumed when you said that a human retaining information was "unavoidable" and a machine retaining it was "avoidable" that the implication was we wouldn't tolerate humans retaining information if it was also "avoidable". Otherwise I'm unclear what the intent of distinguishing between "avoidable" and "unavoidable" was, and I'm unclear what it has to do with whether or not an AI model that was trained with "unlicensed" content is or isn't copyright infringing on its own.
Riverheart 1 hours ago [-]
I’m in the camp that believes that it’s neither necessary nor desirable to hold humans and software to the same standard of law. Society exists for our collective benefit and we make concessions with each other to ensure it functions smoothly and I don’t think those concessions should necessarily extend to automated processes even if they do in fact mimic humans for the myriad ways in which they differ from us.
I’m not saying it’s better because it’s naturally occurring, the objective reality is that we live in a world of IP laws where humans have no choice but to retain copyrighted information to function in society. I don’t care that text or images have been compressed into an AI model as long as it’s done legally but the fact that it is has very real consequences for society since, unlike a human, it doesn’t need to eat, sleep, pay taxes, nor will it ever die which is constantly ignored in this conversation of what’s best for society.
These tools are optional whether people like to hear it or not. I’m not even against them ideologically, I just don’t think they’re being integrated into society in anything resembling a well thought out way.
Riverheart 9 hours ago [-]
The collection of the training data is the “scooping up” I mentioned. I assume you acknowledge the training data doesn’t spontaneously burst out of the aether?
As for the model, it’s still creating deterministic, derivative works based off its inputs and the only thing that makes it random is the seed so it being a database of vectors is irrelevant.
rcxdude 5 hours ago [-]
deterministic is neither here nor there for copyright infringement. a hash of an image is not infringing, and a slightly noisy version of it is.
Riverheart 29 minutes ago [-]
Nobody is trying to copyright an image hash and determinism matters because it’s why the outputs are derivative rather than inspired.
dinkumthinkum 8 hours ago [-]
I'm curious why you think it would be worse for everybody? This argument seems to depend on the assumption that if something makes AI less viable then the situation for human beings is worse overall. I don't think many actual people would accept that premise.
crimony 4 hours ago [-]
It's worse only if AI turns out to be of high value.
In that case only large companies that can afford to license training data will be dominant.
nitwit005 9 hours ago [-]
While I agree about Adobe behaving more ethically, I suspect they simply talked to their customers, and decided they didn't have much choice. CELSYS, who makes Clip Studio, suffered a backlash and pulled their initial AI features: https://www.clipstudio.net/en/news/202212/02_01/
mubou 8 hours ago [-]
Probably didn't help that Clip Studio is predominantly used by Japanese artists, and virtually all models capable of producing anime-style images were trained on a dataset of their own, stolen pixiv art.
paulddraper 7 hours ago [-]
Talking to customers is a good thing.
Let's normalize it.
mesh 13 minutes ago [-]
For reference, here is Adobe's approach to generative ai:
For their pricing and subscription practices alone, they deserve far more backlash than they get.
fxtentacle 8 hours ago [-]
I would describe my business relationship with Adobe as:
"hostage"
They annually harass me with licensing checks and questionnaires because they really hate you if you run Photoshop inside a VM (my daily driver is Linux), although it is explicitly allowed. Luckily, I don't need the Adobe software that often. But they hold a lot of important old company documents hostage in their proprietary file formats. So I can't cancel the subscription, no matter how much I'd like to.
sureIy 3 hours ago [-]
> proprietary file formats
Gimp can't handle them?
mamonoleechi 13 minutes ago [-]
If not, Affinity Photo or Photopea will probably do the job.
Lammy 8 hours ago [-]
I am so happy that my Win32 CS3 Master Collection still works fully-offline and will continue to do so for as long as I care to keep using it :)
dylan604 4 hours ago [-]
Does it work on modern hardware running modern OS? Specifically, wondering if this was a Mac version. I could see WinX versions still running, but the Mac arch has changed significantly: 32bit -> 64bit, mactel -> AppleSI
cosmic_cheese 3 hours ago [-]
I haven’t tried so I can’t say for sure but my hunch is that you’d have better luck running old CS versions on modern Macs with WINE, which can run 32-bit x86 Windows binaries on ARM just fine (via Rosetta).
Performance is obviously going to take a hit though. Depending on the machines in question one would probably get better results from a current gen x86 box running that same Windows version of CS1/CS2/CS3 running through WINE (or of course Windows 11, but then you’re stuck with Windows 11).
Lammy 2 hours ago [-]
I have the offline CS3 Mac version too, but it's 32-bit Intel so you can't run it on anything after Catalina. The Win32 version works fine on Windows 10.
cosmic_cheese 10 hours ago [-]
Even if they’re “trying”, it’s moot if the result isn’t clearly more ethical, and with the proliferation of stolen imagery on their stock image service (which they use to train their models), the ethics of their models are very much not clear.
If I saw news of a huge purge of stolen content on their stock image service with continued periodic purges afterwards (and subsequent retraining of their models to exclude said content), I might take the claim more seriously.
sdrothrock 3 hours ago [-]
> Adobe is the one major company trying to be ethical with its AI training data
I was actually contacted by someone at Adobe for a chat about disability representation and sensitivity in Japan because they were doing research to gauge the atmosphere here and ensure that people with disabilities were represented, and how those representations would be appropriate for Japanese culture. It really blew my mind.
Spooky23 8 hours ago [-]
End of the day, the hate is: “The software is great, but these jerks expect me to pay for it!”
Their sales went crazy because everyone was relentlessly pirating their software.
giancarlostoro 10 hours ago [-]
I will forever miss Fireworks. I dont do much with graphics but Fireworks was the best thing I ever used. Now I do zero with graphics.
matt_heimer 7 hours ago [-]
The best? I tried the Photoshop AI features to clean up a old photo for the first time this week and it crashed every time. After a bunch of searching I found a post identifying problem - it always crashes if there are two or more faces in the photo. Guess someone forgot to test on the more than one person edge case.
ZeroTalent 7 hours ago [-]
I know 5 AI image-gen apps that are better than photoshop and cost around $10-20/month. For example, ideogram. Photoshop doesn't even come close.
Angostura 15 hours ago [-]
Now that would have been a really interesting thing for them to start a conversation about on Bluesky. They would have got some genuine engagement if they wanted it.
Much better than the transparently vapid marketing-speak
masswerk 15 hours ago [-]
I think, part of the fiasco is about that engagement posters are not really welcomed on Bluesky. And, "What’s fueling your creativity right now?” is a pure engagement post, contributing nothing on its side of the conversation. Hence, it's more like another attempt to harvest Adobe's subscribers. — For X/Twitter-bound marketing it's probably fine, at least, much what we had become used to, but it totally fails the Bluesky community. (Lesson leaned: not all social media are the same.)
jsbisviewtiful 14 hours ago [-]
> Adobe is the one major company trying to be ethical
Adobe is cannibalizing their paid C-Suite artists by pumping out image generators to their enterprise customers. How is that ethical? They are double dipping and screwing over their longtime paying artists
multimoon 14 hours ago [-]
This is I think a narrow viewpoint that assumes the AI will ever get truly as good as a human artist. Will it get good enough for most people? Probably, but if not Adobe then four others will do the same thing, and as another commenter pointed out Adobe is the only one even attempting to make AI tools ethically. I think the hate is extremely misdirected.
AI tech and tools aren’t just going to go away, and people aren’t going to just not make a tool you don’t like, so sticking your head in the sand and pretending like it will stop if you scream loud enough is not going to help, you should instead be encouraging efforts like Adobe’s to make these tools ethically.
Brian_K_White 13 hours ago [-]
There is no such thing as "get as good as a human artist" unless it becomes an actual human that lived the human experience. Even bad art starts with something to express and a want to express it.
Without that, it's only as good as a human artist in the way a picture of a work of art is.
Actual AI art would first require an ai that wants to express something, and then it would have be trying to express something about the the life of an ai, which could really only be understood by another ai.
The most we could get out of it is maybe by chance it might be appealing like a flower or a rock. That is, an actual flower not an artists depiction of a flower or even an actual flower that someone pointed out to you.
An actual flower, that wasn't presented but you just found growing, might be pretty but it isn't a message and has no meaning or intent and isn't art. We like them as irrelevant bystanders observing something going on between plants and pollenators. Any meaning we percieve is actually only our own meanings we apply to something that was not created for that purpose.
And I don't think you get to say the hate is misdirected. What an amazing statement. These are the paying users saying what they don't like directly. They are the final authority on that.
multimoon 13 hours ago [-]
I’m not sure where we launched into the metaphysics of if an AI can produce an emotionally charged meaningful work, but that wasn’t part of the debate here, I recall my stance being that the AI will never get as good as the human. Since photoshop is a tool like any other, “good enough” refers to making the barrier of entry to make a given work (in this case some image) so low that anyone could buy a photoshop license and type some words into a prompt and get a result that satisfies them instead of paying an artist to use photoshop - which is where the artists understandable objection comes from.
I pay for photoshop along with the rest of the adobe suite myself, so you cannot write off my comment either while saying the rest of the paying users are “the final authority” when I am in fact a paying user.
My point is simply that with or without everyone’s consent and moral feel-goods these tools are going to exist and sticking your head in the sand pretending like that isn’t true is silly. So you may as well pick the lesser evil and back the company who at least seems to give the slightest bit of a damn of the morals involved, I certainly will.
Brian_K_White 4 hours ago [-]
The fact that you are a paying user who does not hate some thing that other users do, does not change the fact that they do, and that they are the final authority on what they hate and why they hate it.
It has nothing to do with you. You are free not to have the same priorities as them, but that's all that difference indicates, is that your priorities are different.
The "what is art?" stuff is saying why I think that "get as good as a human artist" is a fundamentally invalid concept.
Not that humans are the mostest bestest blessed by god chosen whatever. Just that it's a fundamentally meaningless sequence of words.
UtopiaPunk 11 hours ago [-]
I'm not the person who responded, but I believe it came from a place of "what is art" (and you had used the word "artist").
My own position is that "art" can only be created by a human. AI can produce text, images, and sounds, and perhaps someday soon they can even create content that is practically indistinguishable from Picasso or Mozart, but they would still fail to be "art."
So sure, an AI can create assets to pad out commercials for trucks or sugary cereal, and they will more than suffice. Commercials and other similar content can be made more cheaply. Maybe that's good?
But I would never willingly spend my time or money engaging with AI "art." By that, I mean I would never attend a concert, watch a film, visit a museum, read a book, or even scroll through an Instagram profile if what I'm viewing is largely the output of AI. What would the point be?
I'll admit that there is some middle ground, where a large project may have some smaller pieces touched by AI (say, art assets in the background of a movie scene, or certain pieces of code in a video game). I personally err on the side of avoiding that when it is known, but I currently don't have as strong of an opinion on that.
TheOtherHobbes 9 hours ago [-]
The point would be to have an interesting and novel experience in an experimental medium - which has been a major driver of art since its beginning.
Also, realistically, most people want entertainment, not art (by your definition). They want to consume experiences that are very minor variations of on experiences they've already had, using familiar and unsurprising tropes/characters/imagery/twists/etc.
The idea that only humans can make that kind of work has already been disproven. I know a number of authors who are doing very well mass-producing various kinds of trashy genre fiction. Their readers not only don't care, they love the books.
I suspect future generations of AI will be better at creating compelling original art because the AI will have a more complete model of our emotional triggers - including novelty and surprise triggers - than we do ourselves.
So the work will be experienced as more emotional, soulful, insightful, deep, and so on than even the best human creators.
This may or may not be a good thing, but it seems as inevitable as machine superiority in chess and basic arithmetic.
spiderice 9 hours ago [-]
> I mean I would never...if what I'm viewing is largely the output of AI. What would the point be?
I agree with the sentiment, however..
Good luck to all of us at holding to that philosophy as AI & Non-AI become indistinguishable. You can tell now. I don't think you'll be able to tell much longer. If for no other reason than the improvements in the last 3 years alone. You'll literally have to research the production process of a painting before you can decide if you should feel bad for liking it.
numpad0 9 hours ago [-]
> AI tech and tools aren’t just going to go away, and people aren’t going to just not make a tool you don’t like
It could. Film photography effectively went away, dragging street snaps along it. If it continues to not make artistic sense, people will eventually move on.
Henchman21 3 hours ago [-]
SUPER ethical to try and put artists and entire industries out of business to be replaced with Adobe products.
numpad0 9 hours ago [-]
What it implies is, it's not really about ethics per se, just like it's not really about 6th digits per se. People hate AI images, cut and dry.
Law is agreeable hate, in a way. Things that gets enough hate will get regulated out, sooner or later.
TeMPOraL 9 hours ago [-]
> People hate AI images, cut and dry.
People hate bad AI images, because they hate bad images, period. They don't hate good AI images, and when they see great AI images, they don't even realize they are made by AI.
It's true, there's a deluge of bad art now, and it's almost entirely AI art. But it's not because AI models exist or how they're trained - it's because marketers[0] don't give a fuck about how people feel. AI art is cheap and takes little effort to get - it's so cheap and low-effort, that on the lower end of quality scale, there is no human competition. It makes no economic sense to commission human labor to make art this bad. But with AI, you can get it for free - and marketing loves this, because, again, they don't care about people or the commons[1], they just see an ability to get ahead by trading away quality for greater volume at lower costs.
In short: don't blame bad AI art on AI, blame it on people who spam us with it.
--
[0] - I don't mean here just marketing agencies and people with marketing-related job titles, but also generally people engaging in excessive promotion of their services, content, or themselves.
[1] - Such as population-level aesthetic sensibilities, or sanity.
becquerel 47 minutes ago [-]
If everyone hated AI images, nobody would be creating them.
adzm 7 hours ago [-]
> People hate AI images, cut and dry.
I don't know for sure about the common usage, but personally my use of AI in Photoshop are things like replacing a telephone pole with a tree, or extending a photo outside of frame, which is much different than just generating entire images. It is unfortunate that this usage of generative AI is lumped in with everything else.
8 hours ago [-]
m463 9 hours ago [-]
I remember pixelmator being a breath of fresh air.
pavel_lishin 9 hours ago [-]
I still use it, and might upgrade to their latest version.
It's fine as a way of making shitposts, but I don't know if it's a professional-grade graphics editor - but I'm not a professional myself, so what do I know.
geerlingguy 5 hours ago [-]
It's like 95% of the way there for me—there are a few little workflow niggles that keep me from fully switching over, like the inability to do a full export-close cycle without saving, without having to use my mouse (moving the hand to the trackpad/mouse is annoying when it's not necessary).
In Photoshop, likely because it's been used by pros for decades, little conveniences are all over the place, like the ability to press 'd' for 'Don't Save' in a save dialog box.
That said, the past few versions of Photoshop, which moved away from fully-native apps to some sort of web UI engine... they are getting worse and worse. On one of my Macs, every few weeks it gets stuck on the 'Hand' tool, no matter what (even surviving a preferences nuke + restart), until I reboot the entire computer.
11 hours ago [-]
cosmotic 13 hours ago [-]
There are a lot of good photoshop alternatives. Most are better at individual use cases than photoshop. For example, nearly all the alternatives are better at designing website comps because they are object-based instead of layer-based.
genevra 13 hours ago [-]
There are "some" Photoshop wannabes. I still haven't found any program on Linux that can give me anywhere close to the same ease of use and powerful tools that Photoshop has. The example you provided sounds like you want to use Illustrator for your use case anyway.
dgellow 18 minutes ago [-]
Have you tried Affinity?
geerlingguy 5 hours ago [-]
Pixelmator Pro is very close... but Mac only, still. Image editing on Linux is rough.
UtopiaPunk 11 hours ago [-]
You are assuming that there is an ethical way to use AI. There are several ethical concerns around using AI, and Adobe is perhaps concerned with one of these (charitably, respecting artists, or a little more cynically, respecting copyright).
Many would argue, myself included, that the most ethical approach towards AI is to not use it. Procreate is a popular digital art program that is loudly taking that position: https://procreate.com/ai
_bin_ 10 hours ago [-]
It's a corporation which knows that more of its users are artsy types who care about this than Adobe, which trends a little more professional. I have no idea what position the leadership personally holds but this is very much like DEI in that corporations embrace and discard it opportunistically.
rmwaite 11 hours ago [-]
Procreate is also owned by Apple, who is definitely not taking that position. Not saying both can't be true, but if a strong anti-AI stance is what you seek--I would be worried.
input_sh 10 hours ago [-]
Procreate is not owned by Apple, you're probably thinking of Pixelmator.
rmwaite 7 hours ago [-]
Oh snap, you’re right. My mistake!
quitit 8 hours ago [-]
I'm not pointing fingers in any specific direction, but there is a lot of importance in AI leadership, and with that you're going to see a lot of bot activity and astroturfing to hinder the advancement of competitors. We also see companies such as OpenAI publicly calling out Elon Musk for what appears to be competition-motivated harassment.
So while I think we're all pretty aware of both sides of the image gen discussion and may have differing opinions about that - I think we can all agree that the genie can't be put back in the bottle. This will naturally lead for those that do take advantage of the technology to outpace those which do not.
Also I applaud Adobe's approach to building their models "ethically", yes they are inferior to many competitors, but they work well enough to save significant time and money. They have been very good at honing in what AI is genuinely useful for instead of bolting on a chatbot onto every app like clock radios in the 1980s.
Bluescreenbuddy 8 hours ago [-]
This Adobe. They don’t care about ethic. And frankly fuck them.
lawlessone 10 hours ago [-]
They're making money off it.
At least Meta gives their models to the public.
devmor 3 hours ago [-]
If they are trying to be ethical, all it takes is one look at their stock photo service to see that they are failing horribly.
sneak 5 hours ago [-]
Subscriptionware is cancer. They deserve all the hate they get.
ilrwbwrkhv 7 hours ago [-]
Yes and this is what I was worried about in my essay on AI.
They have burned so much of goodwill that the community is not willing to engage even with positive things now.
This broadly is happening to tech as well.
gdulli 14 hours ago [-]
The problem isn't their specific practices, but more that they're in general one of the companies profiting from our slopcore future.
skywhopper 7 hours ago [-]
Uh, not sure where you’ve been but Adobe is slavering over using the content its locked-in users create to train its products. It only (seemingly) backed off this approach last year when the cost in terms of subscription revenue got too high. But you’re naive if you think they aren’t desperately planning how to get back to that original plan of owning an ever-growing slice of every bit of human creativity that touches their software.
bpodgursky 14 hours ago [-]
> Anyway I don't really think they deserve a lot of the hate they get
The dark lesson here is that you avoid hate and bad PR by cutting artists out of the loop entirely and just shipping whatever slop the AI puts out. Maybe you lose 20% of the quality but you don't have to deal with the screaming and dogpiles.
doctorpangloss 7 hours ago [-]
There’s no evidence that their generative tools are more ethical.
Even if you believe everything they say, they are lying by omission. For example, for their text to image technology, they never specify what their text language model is trained on - it’s almost certainly CLIP or T5, which is trained on plenty of not-expressly-licensed data. If they trained such a model from scratch - they don’t have enough image bureau data to make their own CLIP, even at 400m images, CLIP only performs well at the 4-7b image-caption pair scale - where’s the paper? It’s smoke and mirrors dude.
There’s a certain personality type that is getting co-opted on social media like Hacker News to “mook” for Adobe. Something on the intersection of a certain obsessive personality and Dunning Kruger.
simonw 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah, they posted this:
> Hey, we're Adobe! We're here to connect with the artists, designers, and storytellers who bring ideas to life. What's fueling your creativity right now?
> Drop a reply, tag a creator, or share your latest work—we'd love to see what inspires you!
That's such a bland, corporate message. It feels totally inauthentic. Do Adobe (a corporation) really "love to see what inspires you" or do they just want engagement for their new account?
I'm not surprised in the slightest that it triggered a pile-on.
EasyMark 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not surprised but disheartened that people have so little going on in their life they thing trying to boycott a bsky corporate account is a good use of their time.
drdaeman 4 hours ago [-]
I think it's rather the opposite - there's way too much going on in their life, specifically stuff that they have no control over, so they vent all that stress wherever they can.
jrflowers 3 hours ago [-]
I’m pretty sure the amount of time and energy it took you to write this post is more or less equal to the amount of time and energy energy it took somebody else to write a post making fun of the Adobe account
bigyabai 4 hours ago [-]
So what did you do this friday?
magicmicah85 15 hours ago [-]
They want engagement for their new account, it's what anyone who posts on social media wants.
caseyy 4 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, but "growth hacking" is an unnatural communication method. I think we got used to it, and now the Overton window is so shifted that it's normal. But it shouldn't be.
Imagine if you were talking to a friend group, and one of them was "engagement hacking", constantly shouting corporate-friendly questions at everyone to force as much attention in the group on them as possible. Then, they'd start carpet bombing the group with advertisements for how great they are.
You'd never interact with this person again. The difference between this friend group and social media is that social media is engineered so that this friend (and thousands of them) always have access to your ears (your feed) through promoted posts. They have your captive audience, you may not leave, unless you want to leave social media and pay the social cost.
masswerk 14 hours ago [-]
Yes, but it's not what social media users want. How about posting tips, small micro courses, behind the scene stories about what motivated some choices in the app, anything useful or endearing? Not just harvesting likes and account names?
magicmicah85 14 hours ago [-]
I’m talking about when anyone post on social media. It’s all about engagement. People don’t post on social media in the hopes that no one sees or replies to them. So I find it silly that people are upset at Adobe for having the most generic “hey we joined, show us what you’re working on” versus the useless engagement posts that are templates of “most people can’t figure out what the answer is” when the image is “two plus two equals ?”.
To your point of useful info, I’m sure Adobe would get there. They just joined the site and got bullied off. I doubt they’re going to care about the site now, but it’d be funny if they tried a second post and just trudged through it.
grayhatter 5 hours ago [-]
> It’s all about engagement.
The problem with this sentence is that words mean things... I don't use social media, so take this with some salt, but I do write things I hope people will find useful. I could just as easily share them to a social media and still wouldn't be looking for 'engagement'. It would still be in that same hope someone finds it useful. While I wouldn't object that someone could define or describe reading it as engagement. I wouldn't. Engagement is what you chase if you're looking to sell ads, because engaged people interact with ads too.
Saying everyone wants engagement as if that's the means and the ends is oblivious to the fact that people, humans, don't organically give a fuck about engagement. Attention, and therefore belonging, or appreciation. Yes, absolutely. You could also describe that goal as seeking engagement, but again because words mean things, attention, or belonging are both better words for the desire the human has.
Influencers arguably want engagement, but I'd also describe them as companies in addition to being people. Truth be told, I'm only convinced they're the former.
> So I find it silly that people are upset at Adobe for having the most generic “hey we joined, show us what you’re working on” versus the useless engagement posts that are templates of “most people can’t figure out what the answer is” when the image is “two plus two equals ?”.
I don't find it silly at all. A company who's earned it's reputation for taking from people, shows up and asks for more. Predictably, people said no! If Adobe wanted attention, and belonging, and came bearing gifts, like photos, artist resources, what have you. I suspect the vitriol wouldn't have been so bad. (They've earned their reputation) But at least they would be able to represent the idea they are seeking belonging. Paying in with the hope of getting something back. Instead they couldn't read the room, and demanded attention and engagement.
simonw 14 hours ago [-]
Social media has been a thing for 20+ years now. It's absolutely possible to achieve both: to "get engagement" and to post things that are genuinely interesting and useful and that people find valuable while you are doing it.
Adobe were really clumsy here, and that's why they got burned.
masswerk 9 hours ago [-]
Yes, I have no problem believing that this is what Adobe wants and/or a certain category of posters. But, what's the motivation for answering? (Notably, this was about "what's fuelling your creativity, right now?" and not "show us what you're working on", about circumstantialities instead of substance.) Will Adobe notice? Probably not, they just want stats to go up. This is not a conversation. It's more like IRL going up to a person and saying, "Talk!", and immediately turning the back on them to engage the next one.
From my own experience, when moving to Bluesky, the absence of engagement posters felt like a breath of fresh air. Meanwhile, with the broader influx from X/Twitter, there are some posts which are more in this style (e.g., "what was your favorite xy" nostalgia posts, or slightly more adopted to the platform, "this was my favorite xy (image), what was yours?"), but I usually see these going unanswered. It's just not the style of the platform, which is probably more about letting people know and/or about actual conversations, or just doing your thing. So, this gambit is more likely to be received as "oh no" and "corporate communications, of course", maybe as "yet another lack of commitment." So don't expect congratulations on this, rather, it may even unlock the wrath of some… The post may have done much better without this call for engagement. Just say "hi", if this is what it's about. (Actually, this is kind of a custom, new accounts just saying hi.)
Most importantly, if you're doing public relations or marketing, it's still your job to meet your audiences, not theirs to adopt to you. And for the lack of understanding of these basics, this gambit may have come across as passive aggressive.
7 hours ago [-]
36 minutes ago [-]
simonw 14 hours ago [-]
Right, but you need to be a whole lot less obvious about it. Adobe's message here is a case study in what NOT to do.
5 hours ago [-]
zarathustreal 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tstrimple 56 minutes ago [-]
It's likely both. In most large organizations I've worked with, there is a split between true believers and cynics. And often the true believers are so bought in they have trouble recognizing the cynics. There are likely earnest folks behind every bland social media post. Doesn't mean their product is worth anything either way.
WatchDog 5 hours ago [-]
It’s so bland I don’t understand why it elicited any response at all.
philipmnel 4 hours ago [-]
The general mood on Bluesky is very opposed to AI, especially AI art. Since Adobe now has AI integrated into their products, people on Bluesky hate them.
dlivingston 31 minutes ago [-]
There is an off-putting sort of attitude on BlueSky ("sneering mockery", I guess?). Same attitude was present on Twitter during the pre-Musk era and seems to have migrated over.
3 hours ago [-]
lysace 7 hours ago [-]
Meh. Adobe is a large corp. You'd want want them to masquerade as something they are not? Why would that be better?
I am so over pile-ons by people who see themselves as being SO important.
Also: it feels really weird to defend Adobe.
jimbob45 2 hours ago [-]
The left has spent the last decade proudly bullying everyone for wrongthink, including going after employment and family members. It should come as no surprise then that corporations wouldn’t participate above the bare minimum on a predominantly leftist forum.
hliyan 2 hours ago [-]
The phenomenon at work here is: if product being produced by a profit-seeking enterprise can be rented instead of being sold, said enterprise will eventually find a way to do it, then over time, rather than a single bill, it will attempt to rent out individual aspects of the now product-turned-service, followed by cost cutting that degrades the default service level while introducing additional service levels for which the consumer will have to pay additional fees, and finally making switching away to competitors progressively difficult for the consumer. This is a natural outcome of profit-maximization.
__loam 2 hours ago [-]
This is the primary reason why creatives despise Adobe despite some people here arguing that it's for the AI art generation. They hate that too but the biggest pain point by far is the toxic business relation you have to maintain to continue to use industry standard tooling.
megaman821 15 hours ago [-]
As a lurker on both Bluesky and Twitter, I find Bluesky is a much more hostile place. Twitter is much more absurd but there is not as much anger.
jsight 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I'm surprised by how many here are responding with weird Adobe rants. They posted fairly innocuous stuff, were attacked, and ultimately chose to abandon the platform as a result.
This sounds like a bigger indictment of the platform than anything to do with Adobe.
rchaud 6 hours ago [-]
Since when did a damn website have to be a "platform"? Did anyone ask to chat with Time Warner on the public AOL chatrooms of the 90s? Were Digg users interested in hearing from Blockbuster in the 2000s?
Adobe could try to offer virtual "office hours" with employees helping people learn to use the software, give something back to their users. Instead they immediately treated it like another marketing channel with a formulaic and lazy engagement bait question that I'm sure they thought would work the same way it does on Twitter and Instagram.
scarab92 6 hours ago [-]
Platforms which drive away normal users with unwarranted hate become increasingly concentrated with toxic people over time.
If bluesky don’t find a way to escape this spiral of driving away normal people and attracting toxic people it’s going to become a sort of left-wing 4chan.
Henchman21 3 hours ago [-]
How is the Adobe corporate account a "normal user"? Define "normal people"?
rchaud 5 hours ago [-]
Have a peek at the Facebook comments on Adobe's account. The sentiment is the same. We live in an economy where customers have no outlet to have their concerns heard, while companies set up shop on communal forums to blast their bullhorn. Why should communication be one way?
It's interesting that you see this as a moderation issue for Bluesky rather than an opportunity for a billion dollar brand to rethink the way they communicate online.
sandspar 4 hours ago [-]
Saying that BlueSky resembles Facebook comments isn't exactly a glowing review.
rchaud 4 hours ago [-]
I'm addressing the assertion that mean comments will scare off 'normal people'. It hasn't yet on Facebook, Reddit, Instagram etc. Brand pages get blasted everywhere, it comes with the territory.
sandspar 4 hours ago [-]
Facebook has size and inertia. Bluesky is small so needs high status early adopters. Such people have reputations to maintain so will avoid toxic drama like Bluesky. The sites are in different life stages.
TremendousJudge 8 hours ago [-]
Maybe the people on the platform don't want it to get filled by bland corporate accounts like twitter did
pembrook 7 hours ago [-]
Twitter/X doesn’t have a problem with corporate accounts. They murdered reach on brand accounts in the algorithm loooong ago (mid 2010s), you basically will never see company tweets in the feed even if you follow them.
I think it’s more the fact that bluesky’s core demographic are angry political obsessives (who are angry enough about politics to join a new social network over said politics). I can’t think of a worse way to create a community of people than filtering by “I’m angry about political stuff.”
Turns out the old social norm of “don’t talk politics with neighbors” was an example of a good Chestertons fence.
bakugo 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, they want it to be an echo chamber for one-sided political rants instead. Which is what it is now.
Molitor5901 14 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty left leaning and I don't like Bluesky. For me, it's too hostile and too much of an angry echo chamber. X is scattered wildly but I with muting I have been able to shape to get a more reasonable feed.
jghn 9 hours ago [-]
I don't understand why people struggle with either site. Follow only people you want to see. Both sites allow you to only see posts from those accounts. Problem solved.
lyjackal 7 hours ago [-]
It's more the content creators who bear the brunt of toxic rage. Who you follow doesn't solve that problem
jghn 7 hours ago [-]
> the content creators
This is IMO the problem. I don't use these sites to follow "content creators". For the most part I'm following normal people who happen to say things I find interesting.
jacobgkau 6 hours ago [-]
I don't think they were saying it's a problem for people following content creators. It's more a problem for content creators, because they usually want the greatest reach possible, so they want to be on platforms that people use, which requires them to put up with the emotional swingings of the platforms' userbases.
If you want to say you don't care about having content creators on your platform, that's at least a coherent take. But you still have to think about the business models of the platforms that keep them around-- short of collecting payments from every ordinary user, there needs to be buy-in from someone wanting reach, whether that's corporate accounts, individual content creators, or someone else. And do you actually know all of those "normal people who happen to say things you find interesting" in real life, or did you find some of them online, i.e. they're basically influencers/content creators with you as an audience member?
jghn 5 hours ago [-]
That is indeed what I'm saying. I treat social media more like I treated Usenet back in the day. To me that's a superior model than the influencer model.
spiderice 9 hours ago [-]
Unless you want to follow Adobe, who were just driven out by a mob of angry people
rchaud 6 hours ago [-]
Our deepest condolences. Losing a marketing bullhorn is always difficult.
spiderice 1 hours ago [-]
Ok I guess I'll simplify the point for you: You can't follow the "people you want to see" if the platform is so hostile that the people you want to see are driven from it.
My comment wasn't just about Adobe
jghn 9 hours ago [-]
There are a lot of people I'd love to see content from on all of the platforms who aren't where I want them to be, for a variety of reasons. That's not really a great argument.
jacobgkau 6 hours ago [-]
The argument is that this is now part of that list of reasons. Why acknowledge a problem but disregard one of the causes?
maw 9 hours ago [-]
And what about the people who sometimes post interesting things and sometimes post distilled insanity? They're incentivized to do so.
98codes 9 hours ago [-]
Then you decide if the positives outweigh the negatives and unfollow them or not.
This particular situation is why the only thing I miss from Twitter at this point is the ability to mute an account's reposts rather than the full account.
jghn 9 hours ago [-]
Do you want to follow them or not? Up to you. No one is incentivized to do anything other than post what they want and follow who they want.
8 hours ago [-]
lukev 8 hours ago [-]
This is a weird argument because Bluesky doesn't have a "feed"... by default you see only the people you follow unless you subscribe to specific other feeds.
So you followed a bunch of people you didn't like? That says more about you than the platform...
_bin_ 10 hours ago [-]
As is the case with most ideological echo chambers, they devolve into struggle sessions. You find the same thing happening in the niche right-wing movement sections of twitter, it's just "this person is secretly indian/jewish" instead of "this person is secretly a racist/xyzphobe".
Twitter has the advantage of a broader range so you can escape that while bluesky is almost exclusively used based on strong ideological motivation. It's raison d'etre at this point is basically and highly political so this was bound to happen.
karn97 6 hours ago [-]
I got an extension to hide every blue check user, twitter is wonderful nkw
ChocolateGod 14 hours ago [-]
Likewise here, the amount of just pure made up crap/misinformation on X has definitely increased (perhaps because accounts get paid for views/engagement now) or the algorithm seems to push it more, but it's not an echo chamber.
I have at least 100 words on my X muted word list and it's just about usable.
nailer 10 hours ago [-]
Same here. I'd agree with many of the political positions on Bluesky but it looks like the left equivalent of what Truth Social is on the right - Bluesky recently started publishing home addresses of DOGE employees, with the intent seeming to be to target them with violence.
9283409232 9 hours ago [-]
Conservatives have been posting home addresses of judges and doxxing activist much longer than that. I'm not condoning it but lets not pretend both sides aren't a shitstorm.
piyuv 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
63 15 hours ago [-]
I find that the extremes of hostility are worse on bluesky, but the average skeet is much less hostile. And there's just straight up fewer skeets to be angry about.
lastofthemojito 9 hours ago [-]
Being familiar only with the street slang for "skeet" and not Bluesky's relatively recent adoption of "skeet" to mean "Bluesky post", my parser really had to do some work to try to understand this sentence.
chongli 8 hours ago [-]
That’s deliberate. BlueSky did not want the term “skeet” being adopted but it happened anyway.
Tabular-Iceberg 1 hours ago [-]
It was really inevitable, since the left are terminal potty mouths.
nitwit005 9 hours ago [-]
I didn't get much negativity on Twitter, and after moving the Bluesky the same is true.
The experience of a person following fantasy football stuff, and another person following politics, will be totally different, regardless of website.
cosmic_cheese 3 hours ago [-]
I don’t use either lately because I’ve found that to be better for mental health overall, but to me it seemed that Bluesky was generally better about staying “on track” when it comes to showing relevant things, once trained. Xitter really, really likes to veer off course and so much as stopping scrolling for a second while an undesired post is on screen is enough for it to start showing more of the same type.
Bsky doesn’t have blue check replies which is a major point in its favor too. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a worthwhile blue check reply, it’s like if one purposefully dredged up the worst YouTube video comments they could find and pinned them at the top.
rcleveng 15 hours ago [-]
I just looked at twitter and it seems the sentiment is similar across both platforms. I think this was more of an adobe think than a bluesky thing.
doright 10 hours ago [-]
So after the honeymoon with Bluesky ends, what will be the next friendlier social media platform? And after that one? Will this just keep repeating?
jeffparsons 8 hours ago [-]
If a new a Twitter/Bluesky replacement is to promote civil discourse, it will need to _restrict_ reach as a core feature. Which... seems antithetical to a social media platform. But as long as "enragement = engagement" holds true, each new social media platform will eventually devolve into the same kind of cesspool as its predecessors.
thatnerdyguy 3 hours ago [-]
But...restricted reach is exactly how Bluesky works. People you follow show up in your feed, and only them. You can look at other feeds that are not as restricted, but you are making that choice.
Alupis 6 hours ago [-]
People will just go back to Twitter/X, again, because despite all the falling-sky predictions it remains the single most important social media platform of our day. Governments around the world announce actual world-changing news on it - kind of all you need to know.
Funes- 15 hours ago [-]
It figures. One's knee-deep in censorship and the other one is more or less free-for-all, so you get high levels of hostility and an extreme range of ideas respectively from the get go.
7 hours ago [-]
esjeon 7 hours ago [-]
The Bluesky community is left-leaning and mainly consists of early adopters - basically, a group of active idealists. It's unsurprising that they are highly hostile toward a company with a history of exploitative behavior. Additionally, the current political situation significantly affects their emotional stability, negatively.
I mean, yeah, the place is a kind of minefield these days, but I don't blame people. It just happens.
throwme_123 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, the elephant in the room is Bluesky itself. In my experience, it's way more toxic than Twitter/X.
fossuser 8 hours ago [-]
Bluesky is the worst of old Twitter concentrated into one place. It's some weird mixture of the hall monitors of Mastodon crossed with wannabe members of the weather underground. Like a leftwing Gab full of only Kara Swisher and Taylor Lorenz types. This sort of of faux outrage at adobe is par for the course - its awful over there.
X is much more of an ideological mix.
thatnerdyguy 3 hours ago [-]
My X experience was far more partisan than Bluesky. Not being able to get away from seeing the latest thoughts of user numero uno was also a turn off.
llm_nerd 8 hours ago [-]
Bluesky currently has the kuro5hin "A Group Is It's Own Worst Enemy" effect going on. People who think they claimed land first believe that they get to define the future of the service for everyone else.
It's obnoxious, and if the service truly offers a real alternative to Twitter it needs to squash these brigading groups. I get that people don't want to see the posts of brands...so don't follow them. It's incredibly simple. I don't want furry content but I don't run around the platform complaining that some do.
devmor 3 hours ago [-]
The last time I logged into my twitter account (which I use maybe once or twice a year to post about tech or complain to a customer service account) the first thing I saw was a paid ad espousing white nationalism and The Great Replacement conspiracy theory.
I have a very hard time believing that Bluesky is more hostile than Twitter.
rvz 8 hours ago [-]
I've seen worse. In terms of the most hostile, Mastodon takes the crown.
whimsicalism 6 hours ago [-]
frankly in some ways the audience for bluesky is more similar to HN, but in like a bad way.
juped 7 hours ago [-]
It's kinda sad to see it become Truth Social But For The Other Team.
newsclues 10 hours ago [-]
Not surprisingly because the community was populated by people who are angry that twitter changed.
It’s a community of unhealthy social media addicts
sundaeofshock 15 hours ago [-]
I have a much different experience on Twitter. It has a much higher tolerance for racism, misogyny, gay/transphobia, and wild conspiracies. It got much worse after the election and I finally bailed on it after the inauguration. I have not missed it.
megaman821 15 hours ago [-]
Bluesky has all that but just in the anti direction. I was hoping for a more absolute of not disparaging anyone based on their race, gender, or sexual preference.
mjmsmith 7 hours ago [-]
What does "the anti direction" mean? It's mean to racists?
megaman821 6 hours ago [-]
That it gives no-one pause to make disparaging remarks against white males, and violent allusions towards the outgroup are tolerated. That is not the vibe I want to see. I would hope that, starting fresh, there would be more cultural backlash against racial and gendered stereotypes and violence.
thatnerdyguy 3 hours ago [-]
Then you block those people, and never see their stupid opinions again.
abhinavk 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah. The racists, the misogynists and the homophobes don't like that.
12 hours ago [-]
artursapek 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
badapple1 15 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
sundaeofshock 15 hours ago [-]
I’m bad at hints. Can you be explicit and tell us who the bad apples are?
badapple1 15 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
doctorpangloss 7 hours ago [-]
Bluesky’s users love drama.
fracus 8 hours ago [-]
In my experience, that is completely untrue. I think it is more of "you are the company you keep" situation. Bluesky is obviously more socially liberal and therefore, IMO objectively smarter, nicer users and community. On Bluesky you have more control over your experience which makes me wonder how genuine your post is.
haswell 7 hours ago [-]
As a photographer, I have a love/hate relationship with Adobe. I’m not a fan of many aspects of their business, but Lightroom is a (sometimes) excellent product.
On the one hand, I don’t have much sympathy for Adobe. On the other hand, this whole situation is why I am not on social media these days with the exception of HN and niche subreddits.
Even if much of the criticism they receive is warranted, the social media climate is just so incredibly toxic that I want no part of it.
Feels like there has to be a better way to be social on the Internet, but as time goes on I’m increasingly not sure if humans can handle it once a certain scale is reached.
scarab92 6 hours ago [-]
Online communities have an inherent death spiral dynamic, unless you actively moderate away toxic people.
These people drive away normal folks creating an ever more distilled community of unpleasant folks.
How many normal people are going to hang around places like reddit and bluesky that are seemingly now filled with hate and conspiracy theories.
jeffwask 15 hours ago [-]
You don't get to play cute, fun, friend to creators and have the most odious licensing terms in the history of software.
ikanreed 15 hours ago [-]
Actually if you'll read the fine print, you're obligated to be friends.
teruakohatu 8 hours ago [-]
And you cannot stop being friends until the end of the billing year, even if you are on a monthly plan.
ajxs 6 hours ago [-]
I discovered this for myself while trying to cancel my plan. I told them I'd contact my state's consumer affairs regulator, and they instantly buckled. They ended up saving us both the trouble, and waived my 'cancellation fee'. For what it's worth, the previous time I tried to cancel their support offered me a 50% discount, which I accepted. Once that discount expired I was out. Adobe aren't earning their keep. Their costs are exorbitant when compared to the quality of the software. I mostly used Premiere (on Windows), which seems to get slower with each release. Media Encoder crashes constantly, and Photoshop is as slow as molasses.
pndy 6 hours ago [-]
All big companies do that for few years now - either with used language or graphics (namely Corporate Memphis and its various uncanny variants) or with both.
It's enough to look at patch notes for mobile apps: these are exactly cutesy, fake friendly. 99% of the time you won't learn what was changed or fixed but instead you get these unrelated comments trying to show how cool company xyz is. It's unironic "hello fellow kids" meme approach.
mtndew4brkfst 8 hours ago [-]
Autodesk is at least boxing in the same weight class, but I do think Adobe is worse.
fracus 8 hours ago [-]
I think this is a great one sentence encapsulation of the situation.
shaky-carrousel 15 hours ago [-]
What a great idea, scaring companies probing bluesky. That surely won't backfire and will cement bluesky as a Xitter alternative.
teraflop 15 hours ago [-]
Maybe, just maybe, the platforms that we use to engage socially with other human beings don't also have to be organized around engaging commercially with brands.
ryandrake 13 hours ago [-]
Thank you. I would not accept a corporate brand sending me text messages. I don't want to "engage" with brands. The less of this garbage on the Internet, the better.
Workaccount2 9 hours ago [-]
The platforms should be paid then.
Its a fools errand to go on a "free" platform and complain about corporate presence. If you are not paying, then those corporate bodies are.
RugnirViking 6 hours ago [-]
this is just not true?
I have (and I imagine most people over 25 have) used plenty of forums, wikis, and other social medias that are free as in beer, hosted by some guy with a computer in his garage, with technology from decades ago
The better ones of them asked you to pay if you wanted to be able to post video/large images. In most of those spaces, corporate was nowhere to be seen. Sometimes they used banner ads, but often, nothing at all but a single person's internet bill was the entire cost of the site. Such places still exist, and are good.
The internet is getting worse by the day. It's been getting worse for so long, that people are starting to wax lyrical about how it can't possibly work any other way, this is just the natural state of things.
Of course, if you absolutely must mindlessly go to the dopamine trough and get your fix of algorithmic profit engagement, then yes, you will end up in places that relentlessly seek profit via one form of another. But if you filter even a little bit for quality, you'll end up somewhere else.
acyou 4 hours ago [-]
We took our souls and carelessly poured them out into the machine, and later the robots came and sucked it all out, along with everything that made us special, unique, human.
Was it worth it? Was it really free? Or would we have done it knowing we would all eventually pay a terrible price?
rglullis 5 hours ago [-]
> Such places still exist, and are good.
Oh, yes, that artisanal internet. So nice, too bad it serves only a minuscule fraction of the people of the internet.
Everyone else just goes to Reddit and Discord.
grayhatter 5 hours ago [-]
Some might call that a feature.
rchaud 4 hours ago [-]
Those places aren't worth their while, and blessed be they for that!
All a business cares about is maximum reach, so they will ignore the small sites in favour of the biggest aggregator for the lowest cost.
If somebody on a smaller site behaved in the disingenuous and spammy way brands do on social, they'd be banned. Bluesky is not doing that, so this should be an opportunity to genuinely engage with the audience instead of copy/pasting the cynical tactics they apply everywhere else.
14 hours ago [-]
pndy 6 hours ago [-]
Wish we could separate all that corporate entities on the internet in their own walled social network world. Where they could have all these weird marketing convos like, mcdonald being angry because pepsi "unhahaed" nestle post /s
llm_nerd 12 hours ago [-]
Then don't follow or engage with their content? You understand that's your option, right?
I actually enjoy Bsky as a replacement for Twitter mostly to keep on top of news (tech and otherwise, the tech often coming from the source), along with a small selection of high profile figures. So I follow those sources and venues.
It is absolutely pathetic that a small mob attacked Adobe -- primarily a super aggressive anti-AI contingent that runs around like a sad torch mob on bsky -- and I hope Adobe return to the platform. It would be nice for people like me, who chose to follow these brands, to see the news from Adobe, OpenAI, Microsoft, etc, and my choice shouldn't be limited by those people.
scheeseman486 8 hours ago [-]
If they can't take the heat from their customers, that's their problem.
And you can always subscribe to Adobe's email list.
Alupis 6 hours ago [-]
I think we can safely assume 99% of the outraged posters have never once owned a legal copy of, nor subscribed to Adobe products.
Outrage is a performance these days.
scheeseman486 4 hours ago [-]
Just about everyone I know who works in graphic design doesn't have a high opinion of Adobe. Though in a sense you're right, many don't own a legal copy of Adobe products.
But that's because they've chosen something else for their personal use and only make Adobe part of their workflow when required to by their workplace.
Alupis 3 hours ago [-]
Every single graphics professional I've worked with (many) have owned their own copy of Creative Suite (or subscribed). It's akin to their "IDE", and they really get to know it inside-and-out. It would be difficult to become skilled in the various Creative Suite products if one didn't spend a lot of time (their own and employers) in it.
The point I was raising here specifically was the people who are feigning outrage to Adobe's benign Bluesky post are unlikely to be Adobe customers, and unlikely even creative professionals at all.
Outrage and hate is a sport to these people.
rchaud 4 hours ago [-]
Contrarian takes without empirical evidence remain a rare occurrence however.
llm_nerd 7 hours ago [-]
This is such an amazingly toxic, selfish attitude that you have. Is this how you really live your life?
It wasn't "their customers" that brigaded. It is the clowns who have decided that Bluesky is their own. They are the ones that will keep it from hitting mainstream, and hopefully the service crushes their obnoxious activism.
scheeseman486 4 hours ago [-]
Who cares if someone is toxic towards Adobe? It's a corporate brand, people should be allowed to voice what the feel about a fucking brand.
Adobe could have sincerely communicated while blocking any abusive stuff or if they couldn't be arsed, turned off comments. They have PR people to handle this stuff, or at least they did until it was probably left up to some underpain intern who doesn't give a shit.
kaibee 2 hours ago [-]
> It wasn't "their customers" that brigaded.
This is a silly idea. Who else would care enough or know about it?
cmrdporcupine 5 hours ago [-]
If you don't own the platform, you don't get to control the reception.
Post on an open forum, get open forum results.
They could host a web page. That's a thing still. What's that? They want an audience? A megaphone into someone else's auditorium?
There's a cost to that.
JKCalhoun 15 hours ago [-]
So you think Adobe would get a resoundingly warm welcome on X?
Pretty sure they trashed their own brand with their subscription model. They're finding that out now.
I jumped to Affinity apps years ago when Adobe required a subscription — never looked back.
thih9 15 hours ago [-]
No, the moral is different: if you’re a company notoriously hostile to creatives, don’t ask in a post “What’s fueling your creativity right now?” - and if you do then don’t be surprised when you get honest answers.
mayneack 8 hours ago [-]
I personally am more likely to use a social media site without brands.
miohtama 15 hours ago [-]
Bluesky audience is certain kind, more left leaning, finding corporations evil. Adobe's experiment shows that it is unlikely any big corp could go there any time until the audience is more diverse, less cancel culture.
rsynnott 15 hours ago [-]
Adobe is special. They have a pretty narrow specific audience who are kinda stuck with them, and who they’ve spent the last decade industriously pissing off.
Bluesky _is_ less tolerant than Twitter of “hello, we’re a brand, aren’t we wonderful/funny”, but I think this particular reaction is more about it being Adobe than anything else.
pm90 15 hours ago [-]
The reaction seems specific to Adobe which has (probably) not been a good steward of its role as a tool for creatives. I don’t think other big corps would get that reaction.
jsheard 15 hours ago [-]
Exactly, compare and contrast how bsky users engage with an Adobe peer that creatives are on good terms with.
That post seems an awful lot like pandering to the crowd there.
More adroit PR, perhaps.
cosmic_cheese 10 hours ago [-]
That’s part of it, but it helps a lot that Procreate’s both extremely affordable and a single purchase. That’s a great combo when your target audience are artists, a crowd that is generally pretty cash-strapped. Creative Cloud’s cost is actually pretty steep over time.
It also helps that when Procreate adds features, it’s always stuff that’s desired by a large chunk of their users and is broadly useful. Contrast this to e.g. Photoshop, where for many of us eliminating 98% of the new features added since CS2 would make no material difference in day to day usage.
Adobe would be well served by building “heirloom” versions of their tools that are single-purchase, affordable, and have a fixed CS1/CS2-ish feature set with all development thereafter being put into optimization, stability, etc. That’d be plenty for even many commercial artists, let alone “prosumers” and more casual users.
0xEF 14 hours ago [-]
> more diverse, less cancel culture
I love when people use this to mean "more white and conservative."
Bluesky users lean toward hating corporate greed. Adobe is greedy as fuck. Simple as. They and companies like them can stay off.
ChocolateGod 14 hours ago [-]
Are you claiming cancel culture isn't real?
danudey 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
simonw 13 hours ago [-]
Define "cancel culture".
j_w 7 hours ago [-]
When the people I like get in trouble socially for doing things that they maybe shouldn't. /s
gdulli 14 hours ago [-]
"Cancel culture" is just a term we started using to cope with seeing people we're sympathetic to being judged for their words or actions.
bigstrat2003 4 hours ago [-]
That's not true at all. You should read The Canceling of the American Mind (though get it from the library, because it's not really good enough to own imo). The authors very clearly lay out the evidence that there has in fact been an increase in the sort of online lynch mobs we call "cancel culture". It comes from both the left and the right, and the increase has been noticeable if you look at the data.
People have always tried to use social pressure to strike at people they didn't like. But there really has been a marked increase in occurrences in the last ten or so years.
ChocolateGod 13 hours ago [-]
Yes, good idea trawling up things people said when they were dumb and young, which they don't even think or agree with today, and trying to cancel their career over it.
Not to benefit society, but to make one feel good about themselves about the victory they achieved in ruining someones life.
danudey 11 hours ago [-]
"Hey, this dude posted something wildly, rabidly racist in public on main a while ago. Maybe we should reconsider what kind of person we think they are instead of just taking their word that they're 'not like that anymore' and aren't just better at hiding their real opinions that they know are unacceptable to voice in modern society."
The people trotting out the phrase "cancel culture" as a boogeyman also tend to run around being apologists for racism, sexism, assault, or criminal behavior. Regardless of if you're actually upset about legitimate instances of people overreacting, the fact that the term "cancel culture" is used to complain about pedophiles or sexual predators actually suffering consequences makes it difficult to take any complaints seriously.
ChocolateGod 10 hours ago [-]
Or maybe just ask them if they still think that? If they say no, suggest they take it down.
Everyone wins and the world is a slightly nicer place.
Rather than hounding people's employers etc. The world is already divided to extremes, best not to make it worse.
criddell 8 hours ago [-]
What changed my thinking on cancel culture was being asked if I believe in the possibility of redemption and giving people a second chance or am I more of a lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key kind of guy?
anonfordays 2 hours ago [-]
"Red scare" is just a term we started using to cope with seeing people we're sympathetic to being judged for their words or actions.
3 hours ago [-]
pessimizer 10 hours ago [-]
Bluesky is far whiter than Twitter. So diverse here would mean "less white."
drooopy 15 hours ago [-]
I don't know if I would refer to Adobe as being evil, but they're definitely one of the shittiest software companies in existence. And I'm 100% convinced that they would receive the same type of welcome if they made a xshitter account today.
skybrian 15 hours ago [-]
My guess is that most Bluesky users are doing their own thing and never noticed this until after it was over and appeared in the news. But it does seem like there is a large crowd of nasty people in Bluesky, and that seems like a bad sign.
phillipcarter 15 hours ago [-]
My dude have you not been on twitter ever?
DrillShopper 15 hours ago [-]
Not particularly. What they do seem to have is a more artist-heavy community, and that community has been fucked over by Adobe over the last decade or so.
samlinnfer 15 hours ago [-]
The most artist heavy platform is twitter.
chowells 15 hours ago [-]
Not anymore. Twitter has worked very hard to drive artists away. And succeeded!
netsharc 15 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
fracus 8 hours ago [-]
Maybe the Bluesky selects the community they want and that is why people are enjoying it.
Retr0id 7 hours ago [-]
The presence of obnoxious brand accounts is very far down my list of desires from a social network.
wnevets 6 hours ago [-]
> What a great idea, scaring companies probing bluesky.
you make that sound like a bad thing
15 hours ago [-]
ruined 15 hours ago [-]
yes!
sitkack 15 hours ago [-]
It isn't "an idea", it is a justified response.
Crocodile tears for the poor company that got drunk on enshittifying its own brand and now has to sleep in it. Adobe's takeover is like it freebased Private Equity and now complains that it has no friends. The TOS change to have AI train on all your art is really what broke people.
wesselbindt 15 hours ago [-]
Won't someone please think of the corporations!
nashashmi 14 hours ago [-]
Corporations are people too.
ndsipa_pomu 12 hours ago [-]
I'd say this is less to do specifically with BlueSky and more to do with posting tone-deaf marketing spiel.
rchaud 4 hours ago [-]
The public yearns for formulaic engagement slop /s
add-sub-mul-div 15 hours ago [-]
It's already a Twitter alternative that's superior by virtue of being in its pre-enshittification era.
It may never be a Twitter alternative in the sense of making anyone a billionaire, but I'm okay with that.
JKCalhoun 15 hours ago [-]
> “What’s fueling your creativity right now?”
Hilarious thin marketspeak. But sure, blame the social platform.
gradientsrneat 15 hours ago [-]
I've become so disenchanted with internet vitriol that it's surreal seeing these trolls attack a social media presence that's geniunely deserving. Still, I wouldn't invite any of these people to my house.
d0gsg0w00f 6 hours ago [-]
> Still, I wouldn't invite any of these people to my house.
I think this is one of the most profound statements I've read all year. Perfectly sums up all the quiet backlash by middle America against the trolls that have pulled the party into extremes.
It's not that they're bad people, they just get over excited and nobody wants to deal with the headache right now.
I see it at work in the lunch room conversations where someone starts spewing passive aggressive hate and it really kills the vibe.
energy123 3 hours ago [-]
Negative people should be terminated after a few days of confirmation that they are negative. The dose makes the poison so you have to get them out quickly.
ddtaylor 8 hours ago [-]
Hey were a big company here to take your feedback and engage with you.
Ogh, nvm, lol this platform has real users that actually engage about their opinions?
dips out
bobjordan 7 hours ago [-]
I had to call it a day and cancel this year. Yearly sub approaching $700 per year just to open photoshop files a few times per year and maybe edit a pdf file? Fk it I’ll find another way.
misswaterfairy 4 hours ago [-]
Affinity Photo is excellent, indeed Designer (Illustrator alternative) and Publisher (InDesign alternative) are excellent as well.
Qoppa PDF Studio is a great alternative to Adobe Acrobat.
Both offer perpetual licences.
modzu 5 hours ago [-]
krita is the way
throwaway2037 2 hours ago [-]
> has left Adobe’s standing with many photographers in shambles
What does this mean? Do normie photographers have any realistic choice except Adobe products? Are their sales falling? I doubt it. This quote reads like sour grapes.
nashashmi 14 hours ago [-]
Companies should stay off social media … Unless they are social companies. Companies that try to advertise on social media to their consumer base do harm to the social aspect. This is why twitter and Facebook and instagram went from healthy social interactions to just marketing fluffs giving the media companies heavier valuation
broodbucket 7 hours ago [-]
Notoriously user-hostile companies should, at least.
bastard_op 12 hours ago [-]
I remember pirating photoshop in the late 90's for the every now and then I need to edit a photo (usually something dumb or screwing around). I was never going to pay anything let alone the real cost to use it for random crap I needed it for, so when they began CS with subscriptions and such, I simply moved to The Gimp. For 25 years Gimp has been "good enough" for me, and now it's truly good enough for professionals too as I have family that do graphic design and now use it where prior they were Photoshop snobs.
Adobe ought to be glad anyone still cares about them.
Sadly what I know them mostly for now is their vermin web services major eCommerce companies seem to love to use (sad for the consumers stuck using this garbage). I see "adobedtm.com" domain show up constantly in noscript plugins, and I know nothing good can come from them, but NOT allowing it usually breaks the websites. I really, REALLY try not to do business with companies using adobe in their web services for this reason.
proee 10 hours ago [-]
No love for Adobe. I have fond memories of their Updater downloading 1GB plus "updates", even though my trial EXPIRED.
jmclnx 15 hours ago [-]
Charging a subscription fee is crazy for a product that is very expensive. I do not know why they are still around.
adzm 15 hours ago [-]
I pay $20 a month for the educational discount and my kids get access to every Adobe product. It is an amazing deal.
When you are an adult not in school you probably don't need "all apps" and it is relatively inexpensive to get just the product you use.
Anyway, they are still around because they still have some of the best set of features, and are industry standards, though this may change in the future and in some areas is already in progress (and I welcome that! They need competition to push them)
rcxdude 5 hours ago [-]
>though this may change in the future and in some areas is already in progress (and I welcome that! They need competition to push them)
A big part of how they keep their relevance is people using those 'educational discounts' so that they are the tools that everyone learns to use in school, building up a moat against any alternative.
cosmic_cheese 9 hours ago [-]
I’d much rather just pay the single time purchase prices they used to ask for. The subscription is only a “good deal” for the first 2-3 years, after which you end up paying more than you would have with the one-time.
The single time purchase also has the added benefit of letting me use that version however long I like. Personally I don’t need much of anything that’s been added since CS2, and as such a user I’d normally only be buying new versions of Photoshop when the one I own stops running on modern operating systems. It also means you’re not bombarded with UI shifting around for no good reason, some feature getting pushed in your face for the sake of some PM’s metrics, etc.
The only reason I even have a CC sub right now is because a credit card benefit essentially pays for it. If/when that benefit disappears so does my sub.
matwood 10 hours ago [-]
When I took a lot more pictures, LR was hard to beat. I use Photomator now, but if I ever get back to taking tons of pics again I know I'll resub to LR.
sureIy 3 hours ago [-]
I hate it too (and never had to use it) but $20/month is peanuts for people who use it professionally, unless they're from third world countries (which likely pirate it anyway)
donatj 15 hours ago [-]
Muscle memory. I could probably get by with something cheaper but I have been using photoshop for thirty years at this point, I know hot keys and workflows at a spiritual level at this point.
ge96 15 hours ago [-]
I have this popup in Win 10 that will not go away, out of nowhere "DING" "Would you like to use Adobe PDF?" It's built into Windows like wth
rchaud 5 hours ago [-]
Enterprise-level budgets.
maxerickson 5 hours ago [-]
An annual subscription to the whole suite is less than a weeks pay for someone that would be using it in the US, so no need for the Enterprise-level.
rchaud 4 hours ago [-]
Enterprise can pay the rising susbcription costs without blinking, a solo business will think twice.
BeetleB 15 hours ago [-]
People don't want to use Gimp, which is the next most powerful photo editing software :-)
mamonoleechi 15 minutes ago [-]
Scaling Text in Gimp still rasterize the layer in 2025 :) besides that, Gimp 3 is pretty nice.
stego-tech 3 hours ago [-]
Man, this was fun to see in real time. A site whose earliest adopters were Twitter refugees who hated the crypto/AI/NFT boosters, created actual art, and ultimately left Twitter because of rampant fascism and bigotry, effectively cyberbullied the company and its Head of Social Media so badly the latter left the site entirely.
You have to be pretty bad at your job to misread the room so terribly. Just taking a casual look at Clearsky’s block rankings would show how many lists are specifically blocking and targeting brands, griftos, fascists, and bigots of various stripes, and likely dissuade you from approaching the community without some form of battle plan.
Treating BlueSky like a “new Twitter” is a dangerous mistake to make, something Adobe learned the hard way. To make matters worse, they also poisoned the community well to the point there’s a fresh witch hunt out for brands and companies to add to block lists, thus harming everyone else’s “engagement”.
isoprophlex 1 hours ago [-]
> “Adobe couldn’t explain why it let its once excellent relationship with photographers and media lapse, only that it is sorry that happened.”
Maybe shouldn't have listened to asshat MBAs and overpaid management consultants that infiltrate your boardroom with their "haha number go up" bullshit
greatgib 10 hours ago [-]
Somehow Adobe can say thank you, for free they get honest feedback about the crap they do without having to hire an expensive consulting firm or a survey company.
Now they can know why their sells are platoning at least and people would churn as must as possible.
broodbucket 7 hours ago [-]
As per those leaks, Adobe employees are already very aware that everyone despises them.
chrisldgk 7 hours ago [-]
Another great reason to drop the great „For Profit (Creative) Software“ video[1] for insight on why Adobe‘s and Autodesk‘s hostile business practices hurt creative professionals so much
Krita and Photopea. I use image manipulation programs occasionally to work on paper figures and presentations. Years ago, I used photoshop because alternatives like Gimp have abyssimal UX that I can't get over, even for free.
With Krita and Photopea, my need for photoshop, previously paid by my employer, is gone.
vunderba 10 hours ago [-]
I still own a copy of the last version of Photoshop before they went to subscription, CS6, but these days I find myself using either Pixelmator or Krita.
coldcode 15 hours ago [-]
I have Photoshop, but I use Affinity Photo for 99% of what I do (make digital art, AP is used for assembly and effects). I use Photoshop for a few special effects, but often it's not worth the effort.
munchler 7 hours ago [-]
I use a copy of Photoshop Elements 10 from about a decade ago. Still works great and prevents me from over-editing my photos with crappy "looks" that make them "pop".
ajxs 6 hours ago [-]
Affinity Photo. It has an inexpensive perpetual license, and supports all the use-cases I previously needed Photoshop for.
dharmab 5 hours ago [-]
Affinity for most editing and Krita for digital painting.
masswerk 15 hours ago [-]
1) Switched about 4 years ago
2) to Affinity Photo & Designer (perpetual license)
15 hours ago [-]
RandomBacon 9 hours ago [-]
Photopea
vachina 15 hours ago [-]
Any number of AI apps out there can easily replace 95% of Photoshop’s usecase.
dharmab 5 hours ago [-]
Which ones?
moonlion_eth 9 hours ago [-]
Alternative social media contains alternative personalities
sandspar 4 hours ago [-]
"Join our site if you're enraged" users act enraged.
paxys 8 hours ago [-]
Good. Keep this corporate PR nonsense away from Bluesky.
mattskr 15 hours ago [-]
Controversial take: I'm happy they went monthly paid subscription. You think a budding graphic designer of one year could afford the $1,500+ up front cost? The seven seas were the only option.
HOWEVER, 60 a month is too high for a product quality that is tanking. I was okay with it the first few years, but PS and Illustrator's performance noticeably have gone straight to shit for absolutely no benefit except for a little stupid gimmicks that offer zero productivity boosts. Indesign, they've mostly left alone, which I'm happy about because it's like Oreos. Stop fucking with the recipe, you made the perfect cookie. There are no more kingdoms to conquer. Simply find performance boosts, that's it. The reliability of my files and getting work done is more important than anything else. Truly. That's what Adobe USED to stand for. Pure raw UI intuitive productivity and getting shit done. Now, it's a fucking clown show that cares about their social media and evangelism.
I hear on the video side they've super dropped the ball, but I'm not much for motion graphics outside of Blender.
Stop with the bullshit "telemetry" garbage that bogs down my computer and AI scrapping of our data. Old files that used to run fine on my older computers run like shit on my new one. I know damn well there's bullshit going on in the background. That's 80% of the issue. The other 20% of problems are running of the mill stuff.
I am perfectly happy paying for functional, productive software. 60 bucks a month for that is fine as a freelance graphic designer and marketer. However creative cloud is quickly becoming dysfunctional and unproductive. That's the problem.
bigstrat2003 4 hours ago [-]
I don't really agree with the cost argument when the subscription is more expensive in the long run. Nobody needs to upgrade Photoshop every year, they're going to go 2-3 years (if not more) between upgrades. And when you do that, it's much cheaper to buy up front.
Renting software is just plain a raw deal for the users. It's more expensive, plus you don't get to keep it after you stop paying. The only one who wins is the vendor.
Suppafly 14 hours ago [-]
>You think a budding graphic designer of one year could afford the $1,500+ up front cost?
Yes? It's pretty normal to take out a loan or use a credit card to purchase tools to setup your career for years to come. That budding graphic designer probably spent $2000+ on a new Mac. Honestly though subscriptions only make sense for business customers, they really fuck over the home users that would like to buy the software once and use it for several years. Hobby photographers and such are either priced out of the market, or stuck with old computers running older versions from before the subscription push.
mattskr 13 hours ago [-]
Lol, I started my career during the housing market crash. Even though I had decent credit, especially for my age, my credit cards were reduced due to "market volatility" to $20 above what my balance was.
Taking out a loan to start a career? I guess I was born to the wrong parents lol.
Not everyone starts out on great footing in their careers. To this day, I still don't buy "new" computer parts to upgrade my computer. It's a waste of money to me because I grew up only being to afford used or, best case, clearance.
Also, no Mac. Macs are for rich people with zero taste and sense and too much money to burn. Regardless of what anyone says, Macs dollar for dollar compared to a Windows machine, Adobe doesn't perform better on a Mac. I've tested it against computers where ever I would work, my older laptop versus their newer macs. Side by side, it's like 90% functions faster on Windows. Plus there's this weird ass memory issue where every PS file has an extra ~500mb of bloat on a Mac. No clue why.
But yes, subscriptions do make sense for business customers which, a lot of graphic designers do freelance on the side. Again, exactly why Adobe SHOULD be a subscription. Adobe isn't a hobbyist toolset and they need to stop treating it as such. When home users "discovered" Adobe and they started placating to them, that's when it went south. If they bumped up the price to $100 bucks a month and obliterated the "I'm just a quirky creative home user who likes to dabble" pandering, GOOD. I'd keep my subscription. Instead, I'm actively building up my experience in alternative tools so I can get away from Adobe. Not every piece software should be "Karen" easy especially when it's designed for a professional market. I want my software to be brutally efficient and productive. Not "a vibe". My "vibe" is getting away from the computer. Software should help me annihilate my workload as quickly as possible so I can go live a real life more.
pessimizer 10 hours ago [-]
> If they bumped up the price to $100 bucks a month and obliterated the "I'm just a quirky creative home user who likes to dabble" pandering, GOOD. I'd keep my subscription. Instead, I'm actively building up my experience in alternative tools so I can get away from Adobe.
You're telling them they'll lose you, but if they did what you recommend, they'd have lost both you and the "quirky creative home user who likes to dabble."
The amateur market creates the professional market 10 years from now. They should make sure quirky home users are using their product, even if they have to pay them to use it. If the quirky instead choose any other tool that is capable enough for professional work, they'll grow into the tool and never leave it. The more that do that, the more the tool will improve to conform to their expectations.
If the quirky start buying Affinity instead of learning Photoshop, Photoshop will be gone. In a hypothetical universe where the choices that were available when you first became professional were either an (even more, by your suggestion) expensive Adobe subscription and buying Affinity, you may never have used Photoshop at all.
mattskr 7 hours ago [-]
Adobe is losing more market share to Canva than anyone else. The amount of companies who send me "canva files" makes me want to summon the great solar flare that'll emp us back to the stone age, tomorrow. Most in house graphic design dabblers, typically admins or secretaries who have a slight creative flair, don't have Adobe subs anymore. They used to and would have the jankiest files ever... but they were psds, ai, and ind files. Now, it's all canva cloud with extra layers of vomit and headache.
Hobbyists can and should use pro tools, of course. There should always be a good opening as many next gen professionals come from that route, and bring outside, lateral knowledge to grow that tool in novel ways.
When you focus on lobotomizing a pro tool, that's when you actively lose market share. Affinity or someone else, just needs one or two banger spotlights and then Adobe will start seeing real problems. Right now, the lose is minor, but it's a crack in the wall. Remember Skype? I sure as fuck don't. They played the same fucky fuck game. One situation is all it took.
-__---____-ZXyw 8 hours ago [-]
> Macs are for rich people with zero taste and sense and too much money to burn.
Yes!
ferguess_k 15 hours ago [-]
The first comment seems to be interesting:
> I don't like subscriptions but that's not the biggest problem. The biggest issue is Adobe's software has been getting worse as the years have passed. It's slow, incredibly buggy, their new features are often an embarrassment, and Adobe seems to do nothing other than increasing prices. And therein lies the issue with subscriptions - the user keeps paying higher prices and the company has zero motivation to fix bugs
I wonder how hard it is to create the core functionalities of Adobe Photoshop. Maybe many people have different definitions of what are the core functionalities, thus turning making a replacement software very tough.
thejohnconway 9 hours ago [-]
There’s plenty of replacements which are fine. Many are better to use for many tasks. The problem is lock-in in professional contexts. Having a problem with some feature in a PSD? “I don’t wanna pay for Photoshop” isn’t usually an acceptable excuse.
If open source projects and other companies had gathered around an open file format, maybe there would be some leverage, but they all use their own formats.
sandspar 4 hours ago [-]
Social media really brings out the best in people doesn't it? Dogpiling, self-congratulation, mimicry, dehumanization, scapegoating. It's so lucky for society that many people spend hours a day on there!
Apreche 15 hours ago [-]
I’m always the first one to criticize companies for exploitative and evil business practices. Adobe is far from innocent. However, I will argue their subscription model itself is actually better than the previous model.
The reality is that Adobe has a large team of engineers to create and maintain several high end professional digital art creation tools. They also frequently add new and excellent features to those tools. That costs money. This money has to come from somewhere.
With the old model Creative Suite 6 Master Collection cost over $2600. They updated that software every two years. The maximum Creative Cloud subscription today costs $1440 for two years. They even have a cheap Photography plan for $20 a month with Photoshop and Lightroom. That’s $480 for two years. Photoshop 6 cost $700+ alone all by itself with no Lightroom.
Why would Adobe allow for much lower prices, even considering inflation? Because they get reliable cash flow. Money keeps coming in regularly. That’s much easier for keeping people employed and paid than a huge cash infusion every other year and a trickle until your next release. It’s just not feasible to sell software that way anymore.
Of course the argument is that with the old model you didn’t need to update. You could just pay for CS5 or 6 and use it forever without ever paying again. That’s true. And I guess that’s viable if you are want software that is never updated, never gets new features, and never gets bugfixes and support. I would argue that a user that can get by without updating their tools, and has no use for new features, is not a professional. They can get by with free or cheap competitors, and they should.
Professional digital artists do need and want those updates. They are the kind of people that were buying every version of Creative Suite in the old model. For those users, paying a subscription is a huge improvement. It keeps the updates and bugfixes coming regularly instead of rarely. It funds development of new and powerful features. It keeps Adobe solvent, so the software doesn’t die. It lowers the overall price paid by the user significantly.
Plenty of things we can criticize with Adobe. Bugs they haven’t fixed. Crashy software sometimes. Products they come out with and then give up on. Doing dark patterns and fees to prevent people from unsubscribing. But the subscription model itself is a net positive compared to the old way.
vachina 15 hours ago [-]
> than a huge cash infusion every other year and a trickle until your next release
It’s a very good incentive to keep the entire company on their toes. Adobe will have to keep making new features for people to justify paying for a new version, instead of rehashing the same software, and then rent-seek with a subscription.
9x39 6 hours ago [-]
Some of the lower tier individual plans offer generous storage. There's value for having a copy with them vs doing everything yourself.
There's a bit of maintenance even if you just stand still. On the photo side, I notice them updating distortion correction for new lenses that come out, new camera body support, etc -- that's just a few examples of maintaining existing features, separate from the new features they rolled out. Whoever does that has bills to pay, and I think that's just a fact across the industry.
Someone has to get paid to build, maintain, and extend these things, and I don't know if that classifies as rent-seeking.
Apreche 14 hours ago [-]
That’s a good point, but it hasn’t borne out in reality. Creative Cloud is frequently adding new features, some of which are quite incredible. Project Turntable that they demonstrated last year honestly blew me away.
Also, several of their products face stiff competition. They have to keep pushing Premiere to fend off Davinci and Final Cut.
Marsymars 8 hours ago [-]
How is that incentive notably different or better for consumers than the incentive provided by being required to remain better than competitors to retain subscription revenue?
chrisldgk 7 hours ago [-]
Because switching to a competitors option is a much bigger task that just staying on whichever version you’re on currently, which you can’t do anymore since Adobe only offers subscriptions.
Switching to a different creative software solution is a much bigger task than just buying the new license and installing the program. You have to relearn basic tasks that are second nature in the other thing, change workflows due to different file formats or you might just not have the option to because the rest of the industry depends on the competitors software.
This is true for individual professionals as well as big companies, where switching to a different software package also means dropping efficiency for a while and hiring people to teach your employees your new software. This is a step that no company will ever take and Adobe has recognized that and taken away the only opt-out of paying them assloads forever, which was buying a perpetual license and staying on that version.
vunderba 10 hours ago [-]
There are plenty of successful subscription based models that allow you to fallback on a perpetual license for the last annual version that you paid for, e.g. the Jetbrains model.
As a "professional" I have zero interest in renting the tools of my trade.
9x39 6 hours ago [-]
You wouldn't ever rent kit like a body or lens or lights? You'd just always buy something outright?
While time goes on, any software toolchain needs maintenance, too. What's the ideal model for sustaining that?
Is renting a problem in principle or financially or something else?
11 hours ago [-]
w4rh4wk5 9 hours ago [-]
Nicely done, people on Bluesky! clap
josefritzishere 15 hours ago [-]
When companies take actions hostile to their user base obvious things happen.
nullhole 7 hours ago [-]
I mean, the stunt they pulled to effectively release CS2 as free-to-use abandonware was pretty good. Still use it to this day, still works fine.
throwaway743 39 minutes ago [-]
Pirate their shit.
Tabular-Iceberg 2 hours ago [-]
What did Adobe possibly think they could gain by posting on a communist web site?
They really didn’t think this one through.
7 hours ago [-]
add-sub-mul-div 15 hours ago [-]
This was fascinating to see unfold. What if there was a social network that had taste and rejected things that suck?
Is it a failure of Bluesky to never become the global town square, if it means being a place where a brand can't find it a safe space to promote itself?
Can a social network thread the needle of having enough traffic to be worthwhile but not so much as to attract the Eternal September?
cryptopian 14 hours ago [-]
Maybe a better question is whether we even need a global town square. I've had Twitter and Bluesky and the difference between them and a real town square is that you're always performing publically to an audience you can't possibly know. I've found far more rewarding relationships posting on niche forums and even subreddits because you get a sense of the people who use and administrate them, and you're safe in the knowledge you can't easily find virality.
add-sub-mul-div 14 hours ago [-]
I agree, it's just that the town square will exist regardless because of the billions of people and the propensity of most of them to gravitate to the most mainstream option. It feels ideal that that's quarantined on Twitter so the more niche spaces stay high quality.
fmxsh 1 hours ago [-]
The town square is the mainstream's niche.
dimal 15 hours ago [-]
The problem is the microblogging format. No microblogging site can be a good town square. It’s not designed for discussion. It’s designed to allow people to shout into the void, hoping that someone hears them, so that they feel for a moment that their lives have meaning.
Barrin92 7 hours ago [-]
>Is it a failure of Bluesky to never become the global town square,
No, because that's an oxymoron. There is no such thing because a precondition for a town square (which in reality is a community of people, not a place) is that there exists shared set of values, context and conduct between its members. The state of nature on a global platform, just like in a megacity is to be an anonymous, atomized individual who ideas or products can be sold to.
_kush 15 hours ago [-]
A reminder that photopea.com is a great photoshop alternative and it's web-based
ThinkBeat 14 hours ago [-]
Photopea is great, and you can do a lot,
but it is not near the functionality of Photoshop.
However, most people do not need most of that.
Suppafly 14 hours ago [-]
The alternatives are getting better, but it always seems like there is one action that would be trivial in photoshop that always end up being impossible in the competitors, and it ends up being exactly the thing you need for your project.
doright 10 hours ago [-]
Examples? (I don't use Photoshop)
sidcool 15 hours ago [-]
Honestly, Adobe deserves it. Their early cancellation fees is atrocious.
magicmicah85 15 hours ago [-]
I pay the extra cost to make sure I can cancel after my project's done. I only ever use Photoshop/Premiere and After Effects a few times a year, so it's easier for me.
waltercool 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
lucasRW 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
neuroelectron 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
seivan 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
fortran77 10 hours ago [-]
BlueSky can be brutal! I wonder how it got a reputation of being the kinder, gentler alternative?
broodbucket 7 hours ago [-]
People interact with brands differently to how they interact with humans.
rchaud 4 hours ago [-]
Indeed. Humans dont make you talk to a chatbot for help or have 'no-reply' in their email addresses.
4 hours ago [-]
abhinavk 6 hours ago [-]
It's kinder to people, especially kind people.
whimsicalism 6 hours ago [-]
absolutely not
sandspar 4 hours ago [-]
"Kind" people is a shibboleth. "I'm kind to kind people" = I'm looking for an excuse to not be nice to someone.
skyyler 9 hours ago [-]
BlueSky is a very kind place in my experience. I don't get people asking me to justify my existence like I do on Twitter.
Seriously, people on Twitter demand I debate them about the validity of my life. That has yet to happen on BlueSky.
indigo0086 7 hours ago [-]
Bluecry is it's name-o #NA
Rendered at 06:15:52 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I fell for it once. But I’m in India so I just cancelled my debit card and that was that. Good luck to them to chase me through legal means in India. It was still bit of a hassle though.
Now it’s much easier to deal with the subscription problems due to the new RBI norms.
I hate annual billed monthly but the wording isn't hidden.
I do not like Adobe in the slightest, but it's not because of their billing practices.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/06/...
Interestingly, just fyi, they do a reasonable-person test when trying these cases. That means they literally pull 100 people off the street and ask each one to go through the funnel and then give them a quiz with questions like "How much am I going to be billed?"
So if people are confused, it's basically on you, regardless of whether you think you were being clear about the terms.
† I.e. the type of deal where the individual is being asked to trade away something they cannot reasonably evaluate the net present value of (their own future optionality in a future they can't predict) — which will inevitably be presented by the company offering the deal, in a way that minimizes/obscures this loss of optionality. In other words, it's a deal that, in being able to make it, has the same inherent flaws as indentured servitude does — just with money instead of labor.
My natural instinct was to be ropable. But then I realised that I had actually been paying an annual insurance policy, monthly. I wasn't paying a monthly insurance policy.
Presumably when we signed up, there was a monthly option. Presumably it cost more. And so I can hardly be annoyed that they're essentially making up that difference now that I've chosen to terminate that contract early.
That being said, maybe we're talking past one-another here.
Where I come from (Canada), even if you prepay for a service that charges annually (no "annual charged monthly" language needed), as long as that service can be common-sense-construed as delivering value on a finer granularity (by the month, by the second, etc), then if you only use that service for some fraction of the plan length, and then cancel it — you are then legally obligated to a pro-rated refund of the remaining plan length. So if you cancel an annual-billed service after a month? You get 11/12ths of your payment back. If you subscribe to a monthly-billed service on January 1 and cancel on January 2? You get 30/31ths of your payment back. Etc.
Under such a legal doctrine, there is no difference in the total amount owed between "billed monthly" when subscribed for one month, vs "billed annually" when subscribed for one month and then cancelled, vs "annual, billed monthly" when subscribed for one month and then cancelled.
If you're curious about the set of countries where this doctrine applies, here's a page from the Microsoft Store support outlining the set of countries where they will give out pro-rated refunds for subscriptions: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/account-billing/countrie...
(And if it isn't sickening to you that in general, corporations will write logic into their billing systems to support this, and then only activate that logic for countries where they're legally obligated to do so, while — now with intentionality — continuing to squeeze everyone else for services they've knowingly already cut off... then I don't know what to tell you.)
---
And yes, if you're wondering, there are a few exceptions to this pro-rated refund doctrine.
One is real-estate leasing — because chancery courts are weird and make their own rules; but also because a lot of the "work" of being a landlord is up-front/annual. (Though, admittedly, we also have laws here that force real-estate annual leasing contracts to revert to month-to-month after a low set number of years — usually 1 or 2 — with the month-to-month lease rate carried over from the "annual, paid monthly" rate.)
The other is for commercial leasing of assets like vehicles, construction equipment, servers, etc. This is because corporations have much more predictable optionality, sure — but it's also because corporations don't "deserve" protections in the same way individuals do. (Same reason investment banks don't get the protections of savings banks.)
Anyway I don't really think they deserve a lot of the hate they get, but I do hope this encourages development of viable alternatives to their products. Photoshop is still pretty much peerless. Illustrator has a ton of competitors catching up. After Effects and Premiere for video editing are getting overtaken by Davinci Resolve -- though for motion graphics it is still hard to beat After Effects. Though I do love that Adobe simply uses JavaScript for its expression and scripting language.
It's because nobody actually wants that.
Artists don't like AI image generators because they have to compete with them, not because of how they were trained. How they were trained is just the the most plausible claim they can make against them if they want to sue OpenAI et al over it, or to make a moral argument that some kind of misappropriation is occurring.
From the perspective of an artist, a corporation training an AI image generator in a way that isn't susceptible to moral or legal assault is worse, because then it exists and they have to compete with it and there is no visible path for them to make it go away.
If I were an artist, and I made a painting and published it to a site which was then used to train an LLM, I would feel as though the AI company treated me disingenuously, regardless of competition or not. Intellectual property laws aside, I think there is a social contract being broken when a publicly shared work is then used without the artist's direct, explicit permission.
The rights artists have over their work are economic rights. The most important fair use factor is how the use affects the market for the original work. If Disney is lobbying for copyright term extensions and you want to make art showing Mickey Mouse in a cage with the CEO of Disney as the jailer, that's allowed even though you're not allowed to open a movie theater and show Fantasia without paying for it, and even though (even because!) Disney would not approve of you using Mickey to oppose their lobbying position. And once the copyright expires you can do as you like.
So the ethical argument against AI training is that the AI is going to compete with them and make it harder for them to make a living. But substantially the same thing happens if the AI is trained on some other artist's work instead. Whose work it was has minimal impact on the economic consequences for artists in general. And being one of the artists who got a pittance for the training data is little consolation either.
The real ethical question is whether it's okay to put artists out of business by providing AI-generated images at negligible cost. If the answer is no, it doesn't really matter which artists were in the training data. If the answer is yes, it doesn't really matter which artists were in the training data.
You could take that further and say that "substantially the same thing" happens if the AI is trained on music instead. It's just another kind of artwork, right? Somebody who was going to have an illustration by [illustrator with distinctive style] might choose to have music instead, so the music is in competition, so all that illustrator's art might as well be in the training data, and that doesn't matter because the artist would get competed with either way. Says you.
Why do we even have the orphan crushing machine?
I believe it is completely reasonable for an artist to want to share their work publicly on the Internet without fear of it being appropriated, and I wish there was a pragmatic way they could achieve this.
It's sad that it's funny that you think Adobe is motivated by ethical consideration.
That gives them too much credit. "Outlaws" are folk heroes. Robin Hood was an outlaw, Bonnie and Clyde were outlaws. Luigi is an outlaw.
Nobody's going to be telling fables about the exploits of Sam Altman.
I hate Adobe's subscription model as much as the next guy and that's a good reason to get annoyed at them. Adobe building AI features is not.
It isn't, but it doesn't stop people from trying and hoping for a miracle. That's pretty much all there is to the arguments of image models, as well as LLMs, being trained in violation of copyright - it's distaste and greed[0], with a slice of basic legalese on top to confuse people into believing the law says what it doesn't (at least yet) on top.
> If Adobe properly licenses all their training data artists don't have a right to say "well i think this is bad for creativity and puts my job at risk, ban it!!!" Or more precisely, they have a right to say that, but no moral justification for trying to ban/regulate/sue over it.
I'd say they have plenty of moral / ethical justification for trying to ban/regulate/sue over it, they just don't have much of a legal one at this point. But that's why they should be trying[1] - they have a legitimate argument that this is an unexpected, undeserved, unfair calamity for them, threatening to derail their lives, and lives of their dependents, across the entire sector - and therefore that laws should be changed to shield them, or compensate them for the loss. After all, that's what laws are for.
(Let's not forget that the entire legal edifice around recognizing and protecting "intellectual property" is an entirely artificial construct that goes against the nature of information and knowledge, forcing information to behave like physical goods, so it's not unfair to the creators in an economy that's built around trading physical goods. IP laws were built on moral arguments, so it's only fair to change them on moral grounds too.)
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[0] - Greed is more visible in the LLM theatre of this conflict, because with textual content there's vastly more people who believe that they're entitled to compensation just because some comments they wrote on the Internet may have been part of the training dataset, and are appalled to see LLM providers get paid for the service while they are not. This Dog in the Manger mentality is distinct from that of people whose output was used in training a model that now directly competes with them for their job; the latter have legitimate ethical reasons to complain.
[1] - Even though myself I am for treating training datasets to generative AI as exempt from copyright. I think it'll be better for society in general - but I recognize it's easy for me to say it, because I'm not the one being rugpulled out of a career path by GenAI, watching it going from 0 to being half of the way towards automating away visual arts, in just ~5 years.
Lots of people have had their lives disrupted by technological and economic changes before - entire careers which existed a century ago are now gone. Given society provided little or no compensation for prior such cases of disruption, what’s the argument for doing differently here?
Wouldn’t a better alternative be to work on improving social safety nets for everybody, as opposed to providing a bespoke one for a single industry?
That's going to be hard for you to justify in the long run, I think. Virtually everybody who ever lost a job to technology ended up better off for it.
this feels like a much stronger claim than is typically made about the benefits of technological progress
I disagree. There are many laws on the books codifying social distastes. They keep your local vice squad busy.
So there’s no reason why “distaste” about AI abuse of human artists’ work shouldn’t be a valid reason to regulate or ban it. If society values the creation of new art and inventions, then it will create artificial barriers to encourage their creation.
We obviously can never unscramble that egg, which is sad because it probably means there will never be a way to make such people feel OK about AI.
Quite an assertion. Why exactly would this be true?
Is the implication of this statement that using AI for image editing and creation is inherently unethical?
Is that really how people feel?
I watch this all quite closely, and It’s chronically online, anime / fursona profile picture, artists.
Exact same thing happened when that ‘open’ trust and safety platform was announced a few months ago, which used “AI” in its marketing material. This exact same group of people—not even remotely the target audience for this B2B T&S product—absolutely lost it on Bluesky. “We don’t want AI everywhere!” “You’re taking the humanity out of everything!” “This is so unethical!” When you tell them that machine learning has been used in content moderation for decades, they won’t have a bar of it. Nor when you explain that T&S AI isn’t generative and almost certainly isn’t using “stolen” data. I had countless people legitimately say that having humans have to sift through gore and CSAM is a Good Thing because it gives them jobs, which AI is taking away.
It’s all the same sort of online presence. Anime profile picture, Ko-fi in bio, “minors dni”, talking about not getting “commissions” anymore. It genuinely feels like a psy-op / false flag operation or something.
Link even a single example of someone explicitly saying this and I would be astounded
Ethics (as opposed to morals) is about codified rules.
The law is a set of codified rules.
So are these really that different (beyond how the law is a hodge-podge and usually a minimum requirement rather than an ideal to reach for)?
Care to elaborate?
Also, saying artists only concern themselves with the legality of art used in AI because of distaste when there are legal cases where their art has been appropriated seems like a bold position to take.
It’s a practice founded on scooping everything up without care for origin or attribution and it’s not like it’s a transparent process. There are people that literally go out of their way to let artists know they’re training on their art and taunt them about it online. Is it unusual they would assume bad faith from those purporting to train their AI legally when participation up till now has either been involuntary or opt out? Rolling out AI features when your customers are artists is tone deaf at best and trolling at worst.
Showing the model an picture doesn't create a copy of that picture in it's "brain". It moves a bunch of vectors around that captures an "essence" of what the image is. The next image shown from a totally different artist with a totally different style may well move around many of those same vectors again. But suffice to say, there is no copy of the picture anywhere inside of it.
This also why these models hallucinate so much, they are not drawing from a bank of copies, they are working off of a fuzzy memory.
Not only that, they also assume or pretend that this is obviously violating copyright, when in fact this is a) not clear, and b) pending determination by courts and legislators around the world.
FWIW, I agree with your perspective on training, but I also accept that artists have legitimate moral grounds to complain and try to fight it - so I don't really like to argue about this with them; my pet peeve is on the LLM side of things, where the loudest arguments come from people who are envious and feel entitled, even though they have no personal stake in this.
Legislation always takes time to catch up with tech, that's not new.
The question I'm see being put forth from those with legal and IP backgrounds is about inputs vs. outputs, as in "if you didn't have access to X (which has some form of legal IP protection) as an input, would you be able to get the output of a working model?" The comparison here is with manufacturing where you have assembly of parts made by others into some final product and you would be buying those inputs to create your product output.
The cost of purchasing the required inputs is not being done for AI, which pretty solidly puts AI trained on copyrighted materials in hot water. The fact that it's an imperfect analogy and doesn't really capture the way software development works is irrelevant if the courts end up agreeing with something they can understand as a comparison.
All that being said I don't think the legality is under consideration for any companies building a model - the profit margins are too high to care for now, and catching them at it is potentially difficult.
There's also a tendency for AI advocates to try and say that AI/LLM's are "special" in some way, and to compare their development process to someone "learning" the style of art (or whatever input) that they then internalize and develop into their own style. Personally I think that argument gives a lot of assumed agency to these models that they don't actually have, and weakens the overall legal case.
Uh huh, so much worse than the people that assume or pretend that it’s obviously not infringing and legal. Fortunately I don’t need to wait for a lawyer to form an opinion and neither do those in favor of AI as you might’ve noticed.
You see any of them backing down and waiting for answer from a higher authority?
Should they? That's generally not how things work in most places. Normally, if something isn't clearly illegal, especially when it's something too new and different for laws to clearly cover, you're free to go ahead and try it; you're not expected to first seek a go-ahead from a court.
The flip-side to that is the truly "original" images where no overt references are present all look kinda similar. If you run vague enough prompts to get something new that won't land you in hot water, you end up with a sort of stock-photo adjacent looking image where the lighting doesn't make sense and is completely unmotivated, the framing is strange, and everything has this over-smoothed, over-tuned "magazine copy editor doesn't understand the concept of restraint" look.
If you ask a human artist for an image of "an archeologist who wears a hat and uses a whip" you're also going to get something extremely similar to Indiana Jones unless you explicitly ask for something else. Let's imagine we go to deviantart and ask some folks to draw us some drawing from these prompts:
A blond haired fighter from a fantasy world that wears a green tunic and green pointy cap and used a sword and shield.
A foreboding space villain with all black armor, a cape and full face breathing apparatus that uses a laser sword.
A pudgy plumber in blue overalls and a red cap of Italian descent
I don't know about you but I would expect with nothing more than that, most of the time you're going to get something very close to Link, Darth Vader and Mario. Link might be the one with the best chance to get something different just because the number of publicly known images of "fantasy world heroes" is much more diverse than the set of "black armored space samurai" and "Italian plumbers"
> Disintegrating IP into trillions of pieces and then responding to an instruction to create it with something so close to the IP as to barely be distinguishable is still infringement.
But it's the person that causes the creation of the infringing material that is responsible for the infringement, not the machine or device itself. A xerox machine is a machine that disintegrates IP into trillions of pieces and then responds to instructions to duplicate that IP almost exactly (or to the best of its abilities). And when that functionality was challenged, the courts rightfully found that a xerox machine in and of itself, regardless of its capability to be used for infringement is not in and of itself infringing.
Also, the model isn’t a human brain. Nobody has invented a human brain.
And the model might not infringe if its inputs are licensed but that doesn’t seem to be the case for most and it’s not clearly transparent they don’t. If the inputs are bad, the intent of the user is meaningless. I can ask for a generic super hero and not mean to get superman but if I do I can’t blame that on myself, I had no role in it, heck even the model doesn’t know what it’s doing, it’s just a function. If I Xerox Superman my intent is clear.
I would hope we put up with it because "copyright" is only useful to us insofar as it advances good things that we want in our society. I certainly don't want to live in a world where if we could forcibly remove copyrighted information from human brains as soon as the "license" expired that we would do so. That seems like a dystopian hell worse than even the worst possible predictions of AI's detractors.
> I can ask for a generic super hero and not mean to get superman but if I do I can’t blame that on myself, I had no role in it, heck even the model doesn’t know what it’s doing, it’s just a function.
And if you turn around and discard that output and ask for something else, then no harm has been caused. Just like when artists trace other artists work for practice, no harm is caused and while it might be copyright infringement in a "literal meaning of the words" it's also not something that as a society we consider meaningfully infringing. If on the other hand, said budding artist started selling copies of those traces, or making video games using assets scanned from those traces, then we do consider it infringement worth worrying about.
> If I Xerox Superman my intent is clear.
Is it? If you have a broken xerox machine and you think you have it fixed, grab the nearest papers you can find and as a result of testing the machine xerox Superman, what is your intent? I don't think it was to commit copyright infringement, even if again in the "literal meaning of the words" sense you absolutely did.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-...
These tools are optional whether people like to hear it or not. I’m not even against them ideologically, I just don’t think they’re being integrated into society in anything resembling a well thought out way.
As for the model, it’s still creating deterministic, derivative works based off its inputs and the only thing that makes it random is the seed so it being a database of vectors is irrelevant.
In that case only large companies that can afford to license training data will be dominant.
Let's normalize it.
https://www.adobe.com/fireflyapproach/
(I work for Adobe)
"hostage"
They annually harass me with licensing checks and questionnaires because they really hate you if you run Photoshop inside a VM (my daily driver is Linux), although it is explicitly allowed. Luckily, I don't need the Adobe software that often. But they hold a lot of important old company documents hostage in their proprietary file formats. So I can't cancel the subscription, no matter how much I'd like to.
Gimp can't handle them?
Performance is obviously going to take a hit though. Depending on the machines in question one would probably get better results from a current gen x86 box running that same Windows version of CS1/CS2/CS3 running through WINE (or of course Windows 11, but then you’re stuck with Windows 11).
If I saw news of a huge purge of stolen content on their stock image service with continued periodic purges afterwards (and subsequent retraining of their models to exclude said content), I might take the claim more seriously.
I was actually contacted by someone at Adobe for a chat about disability representation and sensitivity in Japan because they were doing research to gauge the atmosphere here and ensure that people with disabilities were represented, and how those representations would be appropriate for Japanese culture. It really blew my mind.
Their sales went crazy because everyone was relentlessly pirating their software.
Much better than the transparently vapid marketing-speak
Adobe is cannibalizing their paid C-Suite artists by pumping out image generators to their enterprise customers. How is that ethical? They are double dipping and screwing over their longtime paying artists
AI tech and tools aren’t just going to go away, and people aren’t going to just not make a tool you don’t like, so sticking your head in the sand and pretending like it will stop if you scream loud enough is not going to help, you should instead be encouraging efforts like Adobe’s to make these tools ethically.
Without that, it's only as good as a human artist in the way a picture of a work of art is.
Actual AI art would first require an ai that wants to express something, and then it would have be trying to express something about the the life of an ai, which could really only be understood by another ai.
The most we could get out of it is maybe by chance it might be appealing like a flower or a rock. That is, an actual flower not an artists depiction of a flower or even an actual flower that someone pointed out to you.
An actual flower, that wasn't presented but you just found growing, might be pretty but it isn't a message and has no meaning or intent and isn't art. We like them as irrelevant bystanders observing something going on between plants and pollenators. Any meaning we percieve is actually only our own meanings we apply to something that was not created for that purpose.
And I don't think you get to say the hate is misdirected. What an amazing statement. These are the paying users saying what they don't like directly. They are the final authority on that.
I pay for photoshop along with the rest of the adobe suite myself, so you cannot write off my comment either while saying the rest of the paying users are “the final authority” when I am in fact a paying user.
My point is simply that with or without everyone’s consent and moral feel-goods these tools are going to exist and sticking your head in the sand pretending like that isn’t true is silly. So you may as well pick the lesser evil and back the company who at least seems to give the slightest bit of a damn of the morals involved, I certainly will.
It has nothing to do with you. You are free not to have the same priorities as them, but that's all that difference indicates, is that your priorities are different.
The "what is art?" stuff is saying why I think that "get as good as a human artist" is a fundamentally invalid concept.
Not that humans are the mostest bestest blessed by god chosen whatever. Just that it's a fundamentally meaningless sequence of words.
My own position is that "art" can only be created by a human. AI can produce text, images, and sounds, and perhaps someday soon they can even create content that is practically indistinguishable from Picasso or Mozart, but they would still fail to be "art."
So sure, an AI can create assets to pad out commercials for trucks or sugary cereal, and they will more than suffice. Commercials and other similar content can be made more cheaply. Maybe that's good?
But I would never willingly spend my time or money engaging with AI "art." By that, I mean I would never attend a concert, watch a film, visit a museum, read a book, or even scroll through an Instagram profile if what I'm viewing is largely the output of AI. What would the point be?
I'll admit that there is some middle ground, where a large project may have some smaller pieces touched by AI (say, art assets in the background of a movie scene, or certain pieces of code in a video game). I personally err on the side of avoiding that when it is known, but I currently don't have as strong of an opinion on that.
Also, realistically, most people want entertainment, not art (by your definition). They want to consume experiences that are very minor variations of on experiences they've already had, using familiar and unsurprising tropes/characters/imagery/twists/etc.
The idea that only humans can make that kind of work has already been disproven. I know a number of authors who are doing very well mass-producing various kinds of trashy genre fiction. Their readers not only don't care, they love the books.
I suspect future generations of AI will be better at creating compelling original art because the AI will have a more complete model of our emotional triggers - including novelty and surprise triggers - than we do ourselves.
So the work will be experienced as more emotional, soulful, insightful, deep, and so on than even the best human creators.
This may or may not be a good thing, but it seems as inevitable as machine superiority in chess and basic arithmetic.
I agree with the sentiment, however..
Good luck to all of us at holding to that philosophy as AI & Non-AI become indistinguishable. You can tell now. I don't think you'll be able to tell much longer. If for no other reason than the improvements in the last 3 years alone. You'll literally have to research the production process of a painting before you can decide if you should feel bad for liking it.
Law is agreeable hate, in a way. Things that gets enough hate will get regulated out, sooner or later.
People hate bad AI images, because they hate bad images, period. They don't hate good AI images, and when they see great AI images, they don't even realize they are made by AI.
It's true, there's a deluge of bad art now, and it's almost entirely AI art. But it's not because AI models exist or how they're trained - it's because marketers[0] don't give a fuck about how people feel. AI art is cheap and takes little effort to get - it's so cheap and low-effort, that on the lower end of quality scale, there is no human competition. It makes no economic sense to commission human labor to make art this bad. But with AI, you can get it for free - and marketing loves this, because, again, they don't care about people or the commons[1], they just see an ability to get ahead by trading away quality for greater volume at lower costs.
In short: don't blame bad AI art on AI, blame it on people who spam us with it.
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[0] - I don't mean here just marketing agencies and people with marketing-related job titles, but also generally people engaging in excessive promotion of their services, content, or themselves.
[1] - Such as population-level aesthetic sensibilities, or sanity.
I don't know for sure about the common usage, but personally my use of AI in Photoshop are things like replacing a telephone pole with a tree, or extending a photo outside of frame, which is much different than just generating entire images. It is unfortunate that this usage of generative AI is lumped in with everything else.
It's fine as a way of making shitposts, but I don't know if it's a professional-grade graphics editor - but I'm not a professional myself, so what do I know.
In Photoshop, likely because it's been used by pros for decades, little conveniences are all over the place, like the ability to press 'd' for 'Don't Save' in a save dialog box.
That said, the past few versions of Photoshop, which moved away from fully-native apps to some sort of web UI engine... they are getting worse and worse. On one of my Macs, every few weeks it gets stuck on the 'Hand' tool, no matter what (even surviving a preferences nuke + restart), until I reboot the entire computer.
Many would argue, myself included, that the most ethical approach towards AI is to not use it. Procreate is a popular digital art program that is loudly taking that position: https://procreate.com/ai
So while I think we're all pretty aware of both sides of the image gen discussion and may have differing opinions about that - I think we can all agree that the genie can't be put back in the bottle. This will naturally lead for those that do take advantage of the technology to outpace those which do not.
Also I applaud Adobe's approach to building their models "ethically", yes they are inferior to many competitors, but they work well enough to save significant time and money. They have been very good at honing in what AI is genuinely useful for instead of bolting on a chatbot onto every app like clock radios in the 1980s.
At least Meta gives their models to the public.
They have burned so much of goodwill that the community is not willing to engage even with positive things now.
This broadly is happening to tech as well.
The dark lesson here is that you avoid hate and bad PR by cutting artists out of the loop entirely and just shipping whatever slop the AI puts out. Maybe you lose 20% of the quality but you don't have to deal with the screaming and dogpiles.
Even if you believe everything they say, they are lying by omission. For example, for their text to image technology, they never specify what their text language model is trained on - it’s almost certainly CLIP or T5, which is trained on plenty of not-expressly-licensed data. If they trained such a model from scratch - they don’t have enough image bureau data to make their own CLIP, even at 400m images, CLIP only performs well at the 4-7b image-caption pair scale - where’s the paper? It’s smoke and mirrors dude.
There’s a certain personality type that is getting co-opted on social media like Hacker News to “mook” for Adobe. Something on the intersection of a certain obsessive personality and Dunning Kruger.
> Hey, we're Adobe! We're here to connect with the artists, designers, and storytellers who bring ideas to life. What's fueling your creativity right now?
> Drop a reply, tag a creator, or share your latest work—we'd love to see what inspires you!
That's such a bland, corporate message. It feels totally inauthentic. Do Adobe (a corporation) really "love to see what inspires you" or do they just want engagement for their new account?
I'm not surprised in the slightest that it triggered a pile-on.
Imagine if you were talking to a friend group, and one of them was "engagement hacking", constantly shouting corporate-friendly questions at everyone to force as much attention in the group on them as possible. Then, they'd start carpet bombing the group with advertisements for how great they are.
You'd never interact with this person again. The difference between this friend group and social media is that social media is engineered so that this friend (and thousands of them) always have access to your ears (your feed) through promoted posts. They have your captive audience, you may not leave, unless you want to leave social media and pay the social cost.
To your point of useful info, I’m sure Adobe would get there. They just joined the site and got bullied off. I doubt they’re going to care about the site now, but it’d be funny if they tried a second post and just trudged through it.
The problem with this sentence is that words mean things... I don't use social media, so take this with some salt, but I do write things I hope people will find useful. I could just as easily share them to a social media and still wouldn't be looking for 'engagement'. It would still be in that same hope someone finds it useful. While I wouldn't object that someone could define or describe reading it as engagement. I wouldn't. Engagement is what you chase if you're looking to sell ads, because engaged people interact with ads too.
Saying everyone wants engagement as if that's the means and the ends is oblivious to the fact that people, humans, don't organically give a fuck about engagement. Attention, and therefore belonging, or appreciation. Yes, absolutely. You could also describe that goal as seeking engagement, but again because words mean things, attention, or belonging are both better words for the desire the human has.
Influencers arguably want engagement, but I'd also describe them as companies in addition to being people. Truth be told, I'm only convinced they're the former.
> So I find it silly that people are upset at Adobe for having the most generic “hey we joined, show us what you’re working on” versus the useless engagement posts that are templates of “most people can’t figure out what the answer is” when the image is “two plus two equals ?”.
I don't find it silly at all. A company who's earned it's reputation for taking from people, shows up and asks for more. Predictably, people said no! If Adobe wanted attention, and belonging, and came bearing gifts, like photos, artist resources, what have you. I suspect the vitriol wouldn't have been so bad. (They've earned their reputation) But at least they would be able to represent the idea they are seeking belonging. Paying in with the hope of getting something back. Instead they couldn't read the room, and demanded attention and engagement.
Adobe were really clumsy here, and that's why they got burned.
From my own experience, when moving to Bluesky, the absence of engagement posters felt like a breath of fresh air. Meanwhile, with the broader influx from X/Twitter, there are some posts which are more in this style (e.g., "what was your favorite xy" nostalgia posts, or slightly more adopted to the platform, "this was my favorite xy (image), what was yours?"), but I usually see these going unanswered. It's just not the style of the platform, which is probably more about letting people know and/or about actual conversations, or just doing your thing. So, this gambit is more likely to be received as "oh no" and "corporate communications, of course", maybe as "yet another lack of commitment." So don't expect congratulations on this, rather, it may even unlock the wrath of some… The post may have done much better without this call for engagement. Just say "hi", if this is what it's about. (Actually, this is kind of a custom, new accounts just saying hi.)
Most importantly, if you're doing public relations or marketing, it's still your job to meet your audiences, not theirs to adopt to you. And for the lack of understanding of these basics, this gambit may have come across as passive aggressive.
I am so over pile-ons by people who see themselves as being SO important.
Also: it feels really weird to defend Adobe.
This sounds like a bigger indictment of the platform than anything to do with Adobe.
Adobe could try to offer virtual "office hours" with employees helping people learn to use the software, give something back to their users. Instead they immediately treated it like another marketing channel with a formulaic and lazy engagement bait question that I'm sure they thought would work the same way it does on Twitter and Instagram.
If bluesky don’t find a way to escape this spiral of driving away normal people and attracting toxic people it’s going to become a sort of left-wing 4chan.
It's interesting that you see this as a moderation issue for Bluesky rather than an opportunity for a billion dollar brand to rethink the way they communicate online.
I think it’s more the fact that bluesky’s core demographic are angry political obsessives (who are angry enough about politics to join a new social network over said politics). I can’t think of a worse way to create a community of people than filtering by “I’m angry about political stuff.”
Turns out the old social norm of “don’t talk politics with neighbors” was an example of a good Chestertons fence.
This is IMO the problem. I don't use these sites to follow "content creators". For the most part I'm following normal people who happen to say things I find interesting.
If you want to say you don't care about having content creators on your platform, that's at least a coherent take. But you still have to think about the business models of the platforms that keep them around-- short of collecting payments from every ordinary user, there needs to be buy-in from someone wanting reach, whether that's corporate accounts, individual content creators, or someone else. And do you actually know all of those "normal people who happen to say things you find interesting" in real life, or did you find some of them online, i.e. they're basically influencers/content creators with you as an audience member?
My comment wasn't just about Adobe
This particular situation is why the only thing I miss from Twitter at this point is the ability to mute an account's reposts rather than the full account.
So you followed a bunch of people you didn't like? That says more about you than the platform...
Twitter has the advantage of a broader range so you can escape that while bluesky is almost exclusively used based on strong ideological motivation. It's raison d'etre at this point is basically and highly political so this was bound to happen.
I have at least 100 words on my X muted word list and it's just about usable.
The experience of a person following fantasy football stuff, and another person following politics, will be totally different, regardless of website.
Bsky doesn’t have blue check replies which is a major point in its favor too. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a worthwhile blue check reply, it’s like if one purposefully dredged up the worst YouTube video comments they could find and pinned them at the top.
I mean, yeah, the place is a kind of minefield these days, but I don't blame people. It just happens.
X is much more of an ideological mix.
It's obnoxious, and if the service truly offers a real alternative to Twitter it needs to squash these brigading groups. I get that people don't want to see the posts of brands...so don't follow them. It's incredibly simple. I don't want furry content but I don't run around the platform complaining that some do.
I have a very hard time believing that Bluesky is more hostile than Twitter.
It’s a community of unhealthy social media addicts
On the one hand, I don’t have much sympathy for Adobe. On the other hand, this whole situation is why I am not on social media these days with the exception of HN and niche subreddits.
Even if much of the criticism they receive is warranted, the social media climate is just so incredibly toxic that I want no part of it.
Feels like there has to be a better way to be social on the Internet, but as time goes on I’m increasingly not sure if humans can handle it once a certain scale is reached.
These people drive away normal folks creating an ever more distilled community of unpleasant folks.
How many normal people are going to hang around places like reddit and bluesky that are seemingly now filled with hate and conspiracy theories.
Its a fools errand to go on a "free" platform and complain about corporate presence. If you are not paying, then those corporate bodies are.
I have (and I imagine most people over 25 have) used plenty of forums, wikis, and other social medias that are free as in beer, hosted by some guy with a computer in his garage, with technology from decades ago
The better ones of them asked you to pay if you wanted to be able to post video/large images. In most of those spaces, corporate was nowhere to be seen. Sometimes they used banner ads, but often, nothing at all but a single person's internet bill was the entire cost of the site. Such places still exist, and are good.
The internet is getting worse by the day. It's been getting worse for so long, that people are starting to wax lyrical about how it can't possibly work any other way, this is just the natural state of things.
Of course, if you absolutely must mindlessly go to the dopamine trough and get your fix of algorithmic profit engagement, then yes, you will end up in places that relentlessly seek profit via one form of another. But if you filter even a little bit for quality, you'll end up somewhere else.
Was it worth it? Was it really free? Or would we have done it knowing we would all eventually pay a terrible price?
Oh, yes, that artisanal internet. So nice, too bad it serves only a minuscule fraction of the people of the internet.
Everyone else just goes to Reddit and Discord.
All a business cares about is maximum reach, so they will ignore the small sites in favour of the biggest aggregator for the lowest cost.
If somebody on a smaller site behaved in the disingenuous and spammy way brands do on social, they'd be banned. Bluesky is not doing that, so this should be an opportunity to genuinely engage with the audience instead of copy/pasting the cynical tactics they apply everywhere else.
I actually enjoy Bsky as a replacement for Twitter mostly to keep on top of news (tech and otherwise, the tech often coming from the source), along with a small selection of high profile figures. So I follow those sources and venues.
It is absolutely pathetic that a small mob attacked Adobe -- primarily a super aggressive anti-AI contingent that runs around like a sad torch mob on bsky -- and I hope Adobe return to the platform. It would be nice for people like me, who chose to follow these brands, to see the news from Adobe, OpenAI, Microsoft, etc, and my choice shouldn't be limited by those people.
And you can always subscribe to Adobe's email list.
Outrage is a performance these days.
But that's because they've chosen something else for their personal use and only make Adobe part of their workflow when required to by their workplace.
The point I was raising here specifically was the people who are feigning outrage to Adobe's benign Bluesky post are unlikely to be Adobe customers, and unlikely even creative professionals at all.
Outrage and hate is a sport to these people.
It wasn't "their customers" that brigaded. It is the clowns who have decided that Bluesky is their own. They are the ones that will keep it from hitting mainstream, and hopefully the service crushes their obnoxious activism.
Adobe could have sincerely communicated while blocking any abusive stuff or if they couldn't be arsed, turned off comments. They have PR people to handle this stuff, or at least they did until it was probably left up to some underpain intern who doesn't give a shit.
This is a silly idea. Who else would care enough or know about it?
Post on an open forum, get open forum results.
They could host a web page. That's a thing still. What's that? They want an audience? A megaphone into someone else's auditorium?
There's a cost to that.
Pretty sure they trashed their own brand with their subscription model. They're finding that out now.
I jumped to Affinity apps years ago when Adobe required a subscription — never looked back.
Bluesky _is_ less tolerant than Twitter of “hello, we’re a brand, aren’t we wonderful/funny”, but I think this particular reaction is more about it being Adobe than anything else.
https://bsky.app/profile/procreate.com/post/3llfkv3mqas2s
More adroit PR, perhaps.
It also helps that when Procreate adds features, it’s always stuff that’s desired by a large chunk of their users and is broadly useful. Contrast this to e.g. Photoshop, where for many of us eliminating 98% of the new features added since CS2 would make no material difference in day to day usage.
Adobe would be well served by building “heirloom” versions of their tools that are single-purchase, affordable, and have a fixed CS1/CS2-ish feature set with all development thereafter being put into optimization, stability, etc. That’d be plenty for even many commercial artists, let alone “prosumers” and more casual users.
I love when people use this to mean "more white and conservative."
Bluesky users lean toward hating corporate greed. Adobe is greedy as fuck. Simple as. They and companies like them can stay off.
People have always tried to use social pressure to strike at people they didn't like. But there really has been a marked increase in occurrences in the last ten or so years.
Not to benefit society, but to make one feel good about themselves about the victory they achieved in ruining someones life.
The people trotting out the phrase "cancel culture" as a boogeyman also tend to run around being apologists for racism, sexism, assault, or criminal behavior. Regardless of if you're actually upset about legitimate instances of people overreacting, the fact that the term "cancel culture" is used to complain about pedophiles or sexual predators actually suffering consequences makes it difficult to take any complaints seriously.
Everyone wins and the world is a slightly nicer place.
Rather than hounding people's employers etc. The world is already divided to extremes, best not to make it worse.
you make that sound like a bad thing
Crocodile tears for the poor company that got drunk on enshittifying its own brand and now has to sleep in it. Adobe's takeover is like it freebased Private Equity and now complains that it has no friends. The TOS change to have AI train on all your art is really what broke people.
It may never be a Twitter alternative in the sense of making anyone a billionaire, but I'm okay with that.
Hilarious thin marketspeak. But sure, blame the social platform.
I think this is one of the most profound statements I've read all year. Perfectly sums up all the quiet backlash by middle America against the trolls that have pulled the party into extremes.
It's not that they're bad people, they just get over excited and nobody wants to deal with the headache right now.
I see it at work in the lunch room conversations where someone starts spewing passive aggressive hate and it really kills the vibe.
Ogh, nvm, lol this platform has real users that actually engage about their opinions?
dips out
Qoppa PDF Studio is a great alternative to Adobe Acrobat.
Both offer perpetual licences.
Adobe ought to be glad anyone still cares about them.
Sadly what I know them mostly for now is their vermin web services major eCommerce companies seem to love to use (sad for the consumers stuck using this garbage). I see "adobedtm.com" domain show up constantly in noscript plugins, and I know nothing good can come from them, but NOT allowing it usually breaks the websites. I really, REALLY try not to do business with companies using adobe in their web services for this reason.
When you are an adult not in school you probably don't need "all apps" and it is relatively inexpensive to get just the product you use.
Anyway, they are still around because they still have some of the best set of features, and are industry standards, though this may change in the future and in some areas is already in progress (and I welcome that! They need competition to push them)
A big part of how they keep their relevance is people using those 'educational discounts' so that they are the tools that everyone learns to use in school, building up a moat against any alternative.
The single time purchase also has the added benefit of letting me use that version however long I like. Personally I don’t need much of anything that’s been added since CS2, and as such a user I’d normally only be buying new versions of Photoshop when the one I own stops running on modern operating systems. It also means you’re not bombarded with UI shifting around for no good reason, some feature getting pushed in your face for the sake of some PM’s metrics, etc.
The only reason I even have a CC sub right now is because a credit card benefit essentially pays for it. If/when that benefit disappears so does my sub.
You have to be pretty bad at your job to misread the room so terribly. Just taking a casual look at Clearsky’s block rankings would show how many lists are specifically blocking and targeting brands, griftos, fascists, and bigots of various stripes, and likely dissuade you from approaching the community without some form of battle plan.
Treating BlueSky like a “new Twitter” is a dangerous mistake to make, something Adobe learned the hard way. To make matters worse, they also poisoned the community well to the point there’s a fresh witch hunt out for brands and companies to add to block lists, thus harming everyone else’s “engagement”.
Maybe shouldn't have listened to asshat MBAs and overpaid management consultants that infiltrate your boardroom with their "haha number go up" bullshit
Now they can know why their sells are platoning at least and people would churn as must as possible.
[1] https://youtu.be/I4mdMMu-3fc
What are they migrating to?
With Krita and Photopea, my need for photoshop, previously paid by my employer, is gone.
2) to Affinity Photo & Designer (perpetual license)
HOWEVER, 60 a month is too high for a product quality that is tanking. I was okay with it the first few years, but PS and Illustrator's performance noticeably have gone straight to shit for absolutely no benefit except for a little stupid gimmicks that offer zero productivity boosts. Indesign, they've mostly left alone, which I'm happy about because it's like Oreos. Stop fucking with the recipe, you made the perfect cookie. There are no more kingdoms to conquer. Simply find performance boosts, that's it. The reliability of my files and getting work done is more important than anything else. Truly. That's what Adobe USED to stand for. Pure raw UI intuitive productivity and getting shit done. Now, it's a fucking clown show that cares about their social media and evangelism.
I hear on the video side they've super dropped the ball, but I'm not much for motion graphics outside of Blender.
Stop with the bullshit "telemetry" garbage that bogs down my computer and AI scrapping of our data. Old files that used to run fine on my older computers run like shit on my new one. I know damn well there's bullshit going on in the background. That's 80% of the issue. The other 20% of problems are running of the mill stuff.
I am perfectly happy paying for functional, productive software. 60 bucks a month for that is fine as a freelance graphic designer and marketer. However creative cloud is quickly becoming dysfunctional and unproductive. That's the problem.
Renting software is just plain a raw deal for the users. It's more expensive, plus you don't get to keep it after you stop paying. The only one who wins is the vendor.
Yes? It's pretty normal to take out a loan or use a credit card to purchase tools to setup your career for years to come. That budding graphic designer probably spent $2000+ on a new Mac. Honestly though subscriptions only make sense for business customers, they really fuck over the home users that would like to buy the software once and use it for several years. Hobby photographers and such are either priced out of the market, or stuck with old computers running older versions from before the subscription push.
Taking out a loan to start a career? I guess I was born to the wrong parents lol.
Not everyone starts out on great footing in their careers. To this day, I still don't buy "new" computer parts to upgrade my computer. It's a waste of money to me because I grew up only being to afford used or, best case, clearance.
Also, no Mac. Macs are for rich people with zero taste and sense and too much money to burn. Regardless of what anyone says, Macs dollar for dollar compared to a Windows machine, Adobe doesn't perform better on a Mac. I've tested it against computers where ever I would work, my older laptop versus their newer macs. Side by side, it's like 90% functions faster on Windows. Plus there's this weird ass memory issue where every PS file has an extra ~500mb of bloat on a Mac. No clue why.
But yes, subscriptions do make sense for business customers which, a lot of graphic designers do freelance on the side. Again, exactly why Adobe SHOULD be a subscription. Adobe isn't a hobbyist toolset and they need to stop treating it as such. When home users "discovered" Adobe and they started placating to them, that's when it went south. If they bumped up the price to $100 bucks a month and obliterated the "I'm just a quirky creative home user who likes to dabble" pandering, GOOD. I'd keep my subscription. Instead, I'm actively building up my experience in alternative tools so I can get away from Adobe. Not every piece software should be "Karen" easy especially when it's designed for a professional market. I want my software to be brutally efficient and productive. Not "a vibe". My "vibe" is getting away from the computer. Software should help me annihilate my workload as quickly as possible so I can go live a real life more.
You're telling them they'll lose you, but if they did what you recommend, they'd have lost both you and the "quirky creative home user who likes to dabble."
The amateur market creates the professional market 10 years from now. They should make sure quirky home users are using their product, even if they have to pay them to use it. If the quirky instead choose any other tool that is capable enough for professional work, they'll grow into the tool and never leave it. The more that do that, the more the tool will improve to conform to their expectations.
If the quirky start buying Affinity instead of learning Photoshop, Photoshop will be gone. In a hypothetical universe where the choices that were available when you first became professional were either an (even more, by your suggestion) expensive Adobe subscription and buying Affinity, you may never have used Photoshop at all.
Hobbyists can and should use pro tools, of course. There should always be a good opening as many next gen professionals come from that route, and bring outside, lateral knowledge to grow that tool in novel ways.
When you focus on lobotomizing a pro tool, that's when you actively lose market share. Affinity or someone else, just needs one or two banger spotlights and then Adobe will start seeing real problems. Right now, the lose is minor, but it's a crack in the wall. Remember Skype? I sure as fuck don't. They played the same fucky fuck game. One situation is all it took.
Yes!
> I don't like subscriptions but that's not the biggest problem. The biggest issue is Adobe's software has been getting worse as the years have passed. It's slow, incredibly buggy, their new features are often an embarrassment, and Adobe seems to do nothing other than increasing prices. And therein lies the issue with subscriptions - the user keeps paying higher prices and the company has zero motivation to fix bugs
I wonder how hard it is to create the core functionalities of Adobe Photoshop. Maybe many people have different definitions of what are the core functionalities, thus turning making a replacement software very tough.
If open source projects and other companies had gathered around an open file format, maybe there would be some leverage, but they all use their own formats.
The reality is that Adobe has a large team of engineers to create and maintain several high end professional digital art creation tools. They also frequently add new and excellent features to those tools. That costs money. This money has to come from somewhere.
With the old model Creative Suite 6 Master Collection cost over $2600. They updated that software every two years. The maximum Creative Cloud subscription today costs $1440 for two years. They even have a cheap Photography plan for $20 a month with Photoshop and Lightroom. That’s $480 for two years. Photoshop 6 cost $700+ alone all by itself with no Lightroom.
Why would Adobe allow for much lower prices, even considering inflation? Because they get reliable cash flow. Money keeps coming in regularly. That’s much easier for keeping people employed and paid than a huge cash infusion every other year and a trickle until your next release. It’s just not feasible to sell software that way anymore.
Of course the argument is that with the old model you didn’t need to update. You could just pay for CS5 or 6 and use it forever without ever paying again. That’s true. And I guess that’s viable if you are want software that is never updated, never gets new features, and never gets bugfixes and support. I would argue that a user that can get by without updating their tools, and has no use for new features, is not a professional. They can get by with free or cheap competitors, and they should.
Professional digital artists do need and want those updates. They are the kind of people that were buying every version of Creative Suite in the old model. For those users, paying a subscription is a huge improvement. It keeps the updates and bugfixes coming regularly instead of rarely. It funds development of new and powerful features. It keeps Adobe solvent, so the software doesn’t die. It lowers the overall price paid by the user significantly.
Plenty of things we can criticize with Adobe. Bugs they haven’t fixed. Crashy software sometimes. Products they come out with and then give up on. Doing dark patterns and fees to prevent people from unsubscribing. But the subscription model itself is a net positive compared to the old way.
It’s a very good incentive to keep the entire company on their toes. Adobe will have to keep making new features for people to justify paying for a new version, instead of rehashing the same software, and then rent-seek with a subscription.
There's a bit of maintenance even if you just stand still. On the photo side, I notice them updating distortion correction for new lenses that come out, new camera body support, etc -- that's just a few examples of maintaining existing features, separate from the new features they rolled out. Whoever does that has bills to pay, and I think that's just a fact across the industry.
Someone has to get paid to build, maintain, and extend these things, and I don't know if that classifies as rent-seeking.
Also, several of their products face stiff competition. They have to keep pushing Premiere to fend off Davinci and Final Cut.
Switching to a different creative software solution is a much bigger task than just buying the new license and installing the program. You have to relearn basic tasks that are second nature in the other thing, change workflows due to different file formats or you might just not have the option to because the rest of the industry depends on the competitors software. This is true for individual professionals as well as big companies, where switching to a different software package also means dropping efficiency for a while and hiring people to teach your employees your new software. This is a step that no company will ever take and Adobe has recognized that and taken away the only opt-out of paying them assloads forever, which was buying a perpetual license and staying on that version.
As a "professional" I have zero interest in renting the tools of my trade.
While time goes on, any software toolchain needs maintenance, too. What's the ideal model for sustaining that?
Is renting a problem in principle or financially or something else?
They really didn’t think this one through.
Is it a failure of Bluesky to never become the global town square, if it means being a place where a brand can't find it a safe space to promote itself?
Can a social network thread the needle of having enough traffic to be worthwhile but not so much as to attract the Eternal September?
No, because that's an oxymoron. There is no such thing because a precondition for a town square (which in reality is a community of people, not a place) is that there exists shared set of values, context and conduct between its members. The state of nature on a global platform, just like in a megacity is to be an anonymous, atomized individual who ideas or products can be sold to.
Seriously, people on Twitter demand I debate them about the validity of my life. That has yet to happen on BlueSky.