Scandalous Adobe Terms Of Service, AI, and Getting Sued By The US GOVT?

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Last week RSS News brought you a story about Recall: Microsoft's catastrophic new Windows Copilot+ feature; this week it's Adobe who's in the hot-seat.

Creative Cloud Terms Of Service Changes

Starting with users' negative reaction to changes in the Adobe Creative Cloud terms of service that indicate they can monitor your designs and artwork for various violations. Something Microsoft also does with Microsoft Office subscriptions.

Adobe's Firely AI Scandal

This reignites concerns going back to 2023 where Adobe has been accused of theft and/or copyright infringement; by artists who found images that appear remarkably similar to their own work.
What's more, the images are found on Adobe Stock, and use the name of the artists in question as a search term.
The artists names appear to be used in the prompt for Adobe's Firefly AI. A prompt is the instructions handed to Adobe Firefly generative AI for creating the stock imagery.

Adobe's Firefly has to be trained against artwork from somewhere, and the artists allege that this proves Adobe is stealing from them.

Ansel Adam's Estate Calls Out Adobe:

Adding to the accusations is the estate of the late world-famous photographer Ansel Adams.

With Adobe's TOS reserving the right to manually or automatically monitor all content on the Creative Cloud service; the link between the two scandals is obvious.

Additionally, rejection to changes the terms of service results in not being able to use the platform, but that doesn't mean you won't continue to be charged.
And that brings us to the lawsuit by the US Government which charges Adobe for making it difficult to cancel their subscriptions, and unfair fees as a result of a successful cancellation.

Open Source Alternatives To Adobe

I finish the video off by suggesting the open-source tools that I use to do all my media work.

• Inkscape instead of Illustrator
• GIMP(the GNU Image Manipulation Program) instead of Photoshop
• Krita instead of Photoshop
• Darktable instead of Light Room

Adobe's tools have obvious advantages over their open-source alternatives, and the AI enhancements are a major one.
However, there are projects that aim to make use of AI in open-source as well.

The death of privacy, censorship, and AI are rapidly re-shaping the creative/art fields, but the Adobe scandal seems to have moved many people to look for working alternatives.