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Adobe deletes Bluesky posts after backlash

(petapixel.com)
554 points bookofjoe | 3 comments | 11 Apr 25 14:01 UTC | HN request time: 0.415s | source
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adzm ◴[11 Apr 25 15:22 UTC] No.43654878[source]▶
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.

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f33d5173 ◴[11 Apr 25 16:52 UTC] No.43655907[source]▶
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.
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_bin_ ◴[11 Apr 25 20:13 UTC] No.43658034[source]▶
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.

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1. skywhopper ◴[11 Apr 25 23:01 UTC] No.43659616[source]▶
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.

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2. bmacho ◴[12 Apr 25 05:31 UTC] No.43661607[source]▶
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.)
3. _bin_ ◴[12 Apr 25 18:32 UTC] No.43666848[source]▶
Disagree. Authority is given Congress to establish an IP regime for the purpose of "promot[ing] the progress of science and useful arts". You would have to justify how banning gen AI is a. feasible at all, particularly with open-weight models; and b. how it "promotes the progress of useful arts." You would lose in court because it's very difficult to argue that keeping art as a skilled craftsman's trade is worse for its progress than lowering the barriers to individuals expressing what they see.

I think bad AI makes bad output and so a few people are worried it will replace good human art with bad AI art. Realistically, the stuff it's replacing now is bad human art: stock photos and clipart stuff that weren't really creative expression to start with. As it improves, we'll be increasingly able to go do a targeted inpaint to create images that more closely match our creative vision. There's a path here that lowers the barriers for someone getting his ideas into a visual form and that's an unambiguous good, unless you're one of the "craftsmen" who invested time to learn the old way.

It's almost exactly the same as AI development. As an experienced dev who knows the ins and outs really well I look at AI code and say, "wow, that's garbage." But people are using it to make unimportant webshit frontends, not do "serious work". Once it can do "serious work" that will decrease the number of jobs in the field but be good for software development as a whole.