What do Adobe's new rules about privacy mean for creatives?
Last week Adobe announced a significant update to the terms of use for its flagship product–Adobe Creative Cloud. Effective next month, users will be prompted to accept an update allowing Adobe to “…access your content through both automated and manual methods, such as for content review.”
Users will not be permitted to opt-out.
Adobe outlines the terms:
“Solely for the purposes of operating or improving the Services and Software, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free sublicensable, license, to use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, and translate the Content. For example, we may sublicense our right to the Content to our service providers or to other users to allow the Services and Software to operate with others, such as enabling you to share photos.”
Translation: You agree for Adobe to see and potentially use your content or else forfeit the right to use the product you’re paying for.
Is Adobe using user content to build AI tools?
The cause for concern is not only the erosion of privacy in Adobe applications, but how they do not say whether user content will be used for other purposes; namely, AI tools. Part of Adobe’s flagship suite of products is Firefly and other integrated AI tools in applications like Photoshop. With the broadening of Adobe's Terms of Service, Adobe does not specify whether it will harness user content to train its own growing AI platform.
This change potentially allows Adobe to scan and use any part of any design a user has in Creative Cloud to see how it was made. It's also gathering and creating a library of work that actual designers and creatives are making and have made. All of it could go into making the AI product stronger. The way products like Firefly work is that it dissects already created pieces of artwork and reconfigures them into something 'new.' So, the bigger its library, the easier it can complete its task.
Naturally, reusing content from artists without their permission is legally dicey, and companies who have tried have faced lawsuits and backlash. However, with more sophisticated AI generation tools along with a constantly growing library of content created by a user base as large as Adobe’s, the task of identifying copyright infringement becomes impossibly difficult.
In Adobe’s defense, the terms of service for years have allowed for some degree of access to content: “Adobe accesses user content for several reasons, including the ability to deliver some of our most innovative cloud-based features, such as Photoshop Neural Filters and Remove Background in Adobe Express, as well as to take action against prohibited content. Adobe does not access, view or listen to content that is stored locally on any user's device."
It appears the new ToS isn't a massive shift, but more of a readjustment. In a lot of ways, Adobe has been smart not to reinvent their ToS, but to tailor it instead. Some in the creative community claim the terms haven't changed much in actual substance because Adobe has always included a sort of observation balloon over content being generated in Adobe applications. The recent shift has admittedly been a light touch. Others have argued though, that this is simply another step in the path towards losing the rights to one’s own work and subjecting it to Adobe’s terms while AI simultaneously becomes a critical component of Adobe's business model. This almost certainly won't be the last change Adobe will make to our rights as designers–it's just the first salvo and a concerning one at that.
If you have questions about Adobe’s announcement or digital authorship in an AI world, please reach out to ur-creative@umn.edu.