Adobe deletes Bluesky posts after backlash

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.

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.

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.

Further making a variant of a famous art piece under copyright might very well be a derivative. There are court cases here just some years for the AI boom were a format shift from photo to painting was deemed to be a derivative. The picture generated with "Painting of a archeologist with a whip" will almost certainly be deemed a derivative if it would go through the same court.

Also, I'm curious, when they start censoring exports from their software. They already do that for money scans.

I'm not worry about image generators. They'll never generate art by definition. AI tools are same as camera back then - a new tool that still require human skills and purpose to create specific tasks.

You cannot find any group, where "all" is true in such context. There's always an element of outlier.

That said, you're not really an artist if you direct someone else to paint. Imagine a scenario where you sit back, and ask someone to paint an oil painting for you. During the event, you sit in an easy chair, watch them with easel and brush, and provide direction "I want clouds", "I want a dark background". The person does so.

You're not the artist.

All this AI blather is the same. At best, you're a fashion designer. Arranging things in a pleasant way.

Photographers do manipulate cameras, and rework afterwise the images to develop.

Digital artists do manipulate digital tools.

Their output is a large function of their informed input, experience, taste, knowledge, practice and intention, using their own specific tools in their own way.

Same with developers: the result is a function of their input (architecture, code, etc.). Garbage in, garbage out.

With AI prompters, the output is part function of the (very small) prompt, part function of the (huuuuuuuge) training set, part randomness.

If you're the director of a movie, or of a photo shoot, you're the director. Not the photographer, not the set painter, not the carpenter, not the light, etc.

If you're the producer, you're not the artist (unless you _also_ act as an artist in the production).

Do you feel the difference?

Adobe AI tools are pretty shit though if you want to use them to do something creative. Shockingly bad really.

They are probably good if you want to add a few elements to an instagram photo but terrible for actual digital art.

But we decided to drop Adobe after some of their recent shenanigans and moved to a set of tools that didn't have this ability and, frankly, we didn't really miss it that much. Certainly not enough to ever give Adobe another cent.

"Nothing was stolen from the artists but instead used without their permission"

Yes and no. Sure, the artist didn't loose anything physical, but neither did music or movie producers when people downloaded and shared MP3s and videos. They still won in court based on the profits they determined the "theft" cost them, and the settlements were absurdly high. How is this different? An artist's work is essentially their resume. AI companies use their work without permission to create programs specifically intended to generate similar work in seconds, this substantially impacts an artist's ability to profit from their work. You seem to be suggesting that artists have no right to control the profits their work can generate - an argument I can't imagine you would extend to corporations.

"The thing being used is an idea"

This is profoundly absurd. AI companies aren't taking ideas directly from artist's heads... yet. They're not training their models on ideas. They're training them on the actual images artists create with skills honed over decades of work.

"not anything the artist loses access to when someone else has it"

Again, see point #1. The courts have long established that what's lost in IP theft is the potential for future profits, not something directly physical. By your reasoning here, there should be no such things as patents. I should be able to take anyone or any corporation's "ideas" and use them to produce my own products to sell. And this is a perfect analogy - why would any corporation invest millions or billions of dollars developing a product if anyone could just take the "ideas" they came up with and immediately undercut the corporation with clones or variants of their products? Exactly similar, why would an artist invest years or decades of time honing the skills needed to create imagery if massive corporations can just take that work, feed it into their programs and generate similar work in seconds for pennies?

"What is there to complain about"

The loss of income potential, which is precisely what courts have agreed with when corporations are on the receiving end of IP theft.

"Why should others listen to the complaints"

Because what's happening is objectively wrong. You are exactly the kind of person the corporatocracy wants - someone who just say "Ehhh, I wasn't personally impacted, so I don't care". And not only don't you care, you actively argue in favor of the corporations. Is it any wonder society is what it is today?

With photographers, the output is part function of the (very small) orientation of the camera and pressing the button, part function of the (huuuuuuuge) technical marvel that are modern cameras, part randomness.

Let's be realistic here. Without the manufactured cameras, 99.9% of photographers wouldn't be photographers, only the 10 people who'd want it enough to build their own cameras, and they wouldn't have much appeal beyond a curiosity because their cameras would suck.

You still get images in a particular style by specifying the name of the style instead of the name of the artist. Do you really think this is no different than being able to produce only music when you want an image?

The US doesn't really have moral rights and it's not clear they're even constitutional in the US, since the copyright clause explicitly requires "promote the progress" and "limited times" and many aspects of "moral rights" would be violations of the First Amendment. Whether they exist in some other country doesn't really help you when it's US companies doing it in the US.

> Further making a variant of a famous art piece under copyright might very well be a derivative.

Well of course it is. That's what derivative works are. You can also produce derivative works with Photoshop or MS Paint, but that doesn't mean the purpose of MS Paint is to produce derivative works or that it's Microsoft rather than the user purposely creating a derivative work who should be responsible for that.

The ones using the name of the artist/studio (e.g. Ghiblification) also seem more common than they are because they're the ones that garner negative attention. Then the media attention a) causes people perceive it as being more common than it is and b) causes people do it more for a short period of time, making it temporarily more common even though the long-term economic relevance is still negligible.

From what I've seen from artists, they hate Adobe for both reasons, and the AI thing is often more of a dogmatic, uncompromising hate (and is not based on any of the various rationalizations used to persuade others to act in accord with it) and less of the kind of hate that is nevertheless willing to accept products for utility.

Reducing this to "orientation of the camera" is such a dismissive take on the eye and focus of the person that decides to take a picture, where/when he/she is; this is really revealing you do not practice it.

And... before cameras were even electronic, back in the early 2000, there were already thousands and more of extremely gifted photographers.

Yes, cameras are marvellous tools. But they are _static_. They don't dynamically, randomly change the input.

Generative AI are not _static_. They require training sets to be anywhere near useful.

Cameras _do not_ feed on all the previous photographies taken by others.

What's more important: the person behind the camera or the camera? Show me the photos taken without the camera and then look at all the great photos taken by amateurs.

> They require training sets to be anywhere near useful.

And the camera needs assembly and R&D. But when either arrives at your door, it's "ready to go".

> Cameras _do not_ feed on all the previous photographies taken by others.

Cameras do feed on all the research of previous cameras though. The photos don't matter to the Camera. The Camera manufacturers are geniuses, the photographers are users.

It's really not far off from AI, especially when the cameras do so much, and then there's the software-tools afterwards etc etc.

Yeah, yeah, everybody wants to feel special and artsy and all that and looks down on the new people who aren't even real artists. But most people really shouldn't.

However good or not is the camera, it’s not the camera that dictates the inner qualities of a photograph, there is _something else_ that evades the technicalities of the tools and comes from the context and the choice of the photograph (and of accident, too, because it’s the nature of photography: capturing an accident of light).

The same camera in the hands of two persons will give two totally different sets of pictures, if only because, their sight, their looking at the world is different; and because one knows how to use the tools, and the other, not in the same way, or not at all.

It’s not a matter of « feeling artsy » or special, it’s a matter of « doing art ».

Everyone is an artist, if they want to: it’s a matter of practicing and intent, not a matter of outputting.

Art is in the process (of making, and of receiving), not in the output (which is the artefact of art and which has its own set of controversial and confusing economics and markets).

Generative AI on the contrary of tools that stay in their specific place, steals the insight from previous artists (from the training set) and strips the prompter from their own insights and personality and imprint (because it is not employed, but only through a limited text prompt at an interface).

Generative AI enthousiasts may be so. They have every right to be. But not by ignoring and denying the fundamental steal that injecting training sets without approval is, and the fundamental difference there is between _doing art_ and asking a computer to produce art.

Ignoring those two is a red flag of people having no idea what art, and practice is.

Oh, the irony...

Personally I'm inclined to liken ML tools to backhoes. I don't want the law to force ditches to be dug by hand. I'm not a fan of busywork.

The person you replied to derailed the conversation by misconstruing an analogy.

> what's happening is objectively wrong.

Doesn't seem like a defensible claim to me. Clearly plenty of people don't feel that way, myself included.

Aside, you appear to be banned. Just in case you aren't aware.

My counter-argument is "no". Ideally I'd elaborate on that. So ummm ... no, that's not the way things are. Is it?

They can also make a legal argument that the training set will fully reproduce copyrighted work. Which is just an actual crime as well as being completely amoral.

> because then it exists and they have to compete with it

The entire point of copyright law is: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

Individual artists should not have to "compete" against a billion dollar corporation which freely engages in copyright violations that these same artists have to abide by.

> They still won in court based on the profits they determined the "theft" cost them, and the settlements were absurdly high.

Such court determinations are wrong. At least hopefully you can see how perhaps there is not so much wrong with the reasoning, even if you ultimately disagree.

> They're training them on the actual images artists create with skills honed over decades of work.

This is very similar to a human studying different artists and practicing; it’s pretty inarguable that art generated by such humans is not the product of copyright infringement, unless the image copies an artist’s style. Studio Ghibli-style AI images come to mind, to be fair, which should be a liability to whoever is running the AI because they’re distributing the image after producing it.

If one doesn’t think that it’s wrong for, e.g., Meta to torrent everything they can, as I do not, then it is not inconsistent to think their ML training and LLM deployment is simply something that happened and changed market conditions.

Curious why you say this. They seem to have made the copyright infringement analogous to theft and I addressed that directly in the comment.

The discussion is about whether or not ignoring something that is of little consequence to you diminishes a later case you might bring when something substantially similar causes you noticeable problems. The question at hand had nothing to do with damages due to piracy (direct, perceived, hypothetical, legal fiction, or otherwise).

It's confusing because the basis for the legal claim is damages due to piracy and the size of that claim probably hasn't shifted all that much. But the motivating interest is not the damages. It is the impact of the thing on their employment. That impact was not present before so no one was inclined to pursue a protracted uphill battle.

That comparison would be fair if the generative AI you use is trained exclusively on your own (rightfully acquired) data and work.

Existing generative AIs are feeding on the work of millions of people who did not consent.

That’s a violation of their work and of their rights.

And that should also alert those that expect to use/benefit of their own production out of these generators: why would it be 1/ protectable, 2/ protected at all.

It is no coincidence that these generators makers’ philosophy aligns with an autocrat political project, and some inhuman « masculinity » promoters. It’s all about power and nothing about playing by the rules of a society.

I am not even speaking of « do the users feel what it is ». Here it is:

If some people are so enthusiastic and ruthless defenders of AI generators that were trained/fed from the work of millions on unconsenting artists…

1/ what do they expect will happen to their own generated production?

2/ what do they expect will happen to their own consent, in that particular matter, or in others matters (as this will have been an additional precedent, a de facto)?

Again, said it elsewhere, there is a power play behind this, that is very related to the brolicharchy pushing for some kind of twisted, « red pilled » (lol) masculinity, and that is related to rape as a culture, not only in sexual matter but in all of them.

That's ignoring the fact that an AI image generator trained without infringing on existing works would have way worse quality, because of the reduced amount and quality of the training set.

> Existing generative AIs are feeding on the work of millions of people who did not consent.

There are LLMs that are trained on non-copyright work, but apparently that's irrelevant according to the comment I replied to.

The other objections, in the economic range (replacing/displacing artists work for financial gain, from the producers point of view) are totally valid too, but don't rely on the same argument.

And my point above is not really an objection, it's a reminder: of what are AI generators, and what they are not (and that AI generators promoters pretend they are, without any piece of evidence or real argument).

Of what their output is (a rough, industrial barely specified and mastered product), and what it is not (art).

Which is equally illegal.

> disregarding copyright law because that is circular reasoning

This is not circular, copyright is non-negotiable.

A machine, software, hardware, whatever, as much as a corporation, _is not a human person_.

And this is why I've stopped arguing with people from this crowd. Beyond the classic gatekeeping of what art is, I'm sick of the constant moving of the goalposts. Even if a company provides proof, I'm sure you'd find another issue with them

Underlying all of it is a fundamental misunderstanding of how AI tools are used for art, and a subtle implication that it's really the amount of effort that defines what "art" really is.

Because every piece of generative AI looks identical, right? I mean, if the prompt had an impact, and two people using some ML-model would create different results based on what they choose to input, it sounds suspiciously like your "the same camera in two different hands", doesn't it?

> the fundamental difference there is between _doing art_ and asking a computer to produce art.

You mean doing art by asking a computer do produce a dump of sensor-data by pressing a button?

You appear to be completely blind to the similarities and just retreat towards "I draw the lines around art, and this is inside, and that's outside of it" without being able to explain how the AI-tool is fundamentally different from the camera-tool, but obviously one negates all possibility to create art, while the other totally is art, because that's what people say!

Needless to say that the people making those distinctions can't even tell apart a photo from an AI-generated picture.

And what crowd? I am stating my viewpoint, from an education in humanities AND tech, and from 25 years of career in software tech, and 30 years of musician and painter practice.

Sorry but who is moving the goalpost here? Who is coming with their tech saying « hi, but we don’t care about how your laws make sense and we don’t care that we don’t know what art is because we never studied about it, neither do we have any artistic practice, we just want to have what you guys do by pressing a button. Oh and all of your stuff is free for us to forage thru, don’t care about what you say about your own work. »

Typical entitled behavior. Don’t act surprised that this is met with counter arguments and reality.

What would be gatekeeping is if someone prevented you to pick a pencil, paper, a guitar, a brush, to make something out of your own.

You’re the only one gatekeeping yourself here.

Looks like it’s the same pattern as with blockchains, and NFTs and Web3 stuff and the move fast/break things mantra: you cannot argue for and demonstrate for what your « solutions » actually solve, so you need brute force to break things and impose them.

Artistic expression is people in motion, alone or in groups.

You’re talking about the economics of performances and artefacts, which are _something else_ out of artistic expression.

EDIT to clarify/reinforce:

Elvis without Elvis isn’t Elvis. Discs, movies, books are captures of Elvis. Not the same thing.

Miyazaki without Miyazaki isn’t Miyazaki. It may look like it, but it is not it.

Artistic expression is someone’s expression, practice (yours, mine, theirs). It’s the definition of the originality of it (who it comes from, who it is actually made by).

A machine, a software may produce (raw) materials for artistic expression, whatever it is, but it is not artistic expression by itself.

Bowie using the Verbasizer is using a tool for artistic expression. The Verbasizer output isn’t art by itself. Bowie made Bowie stuff.

The casual dismissal of artists' fundamental rights to control their work and how they are used is a part of a larger cultural problem, where might would rule over law, power would rule over justice, lies over truth.

That may seem a charged argument, and it is, because it hits right and it is particularly uncomfortable to acknowledge.

The same tech leaders that push for this move over IP law are the tech leaders that fund(ed) the current dismantling of US democracy and that have chosen their political team because it aligns precisely (up to the man that got the presidential seat, the man that has (had?) quite problematic issues towards women) with their values.

This is too obvious to be an accident.

And this is also a stern warning. Because the ideology behind power does not stop at anything. It goes on until it eats itself.

I feel there's something interesting to discuss here but I'm still not convinced: a camera captures light from the physical reality. AI generators "capture" something from a model trained on existing artworks from other people (most likely not consenting). There's a superficial similarity in the push of the button, but that's it. Each does not operate the same way, on the same domain.

> You appear to be completely blind to the similarities [...] without being able to explain how the AI-tool is fundamentally different from the camera-tool, but obviously one negates all possibility to create art, while the other totally is art, because that's what people say!

There's a vocabulary issue here. Art is a practice, not a thing, not a product. You can create a picture, however you like it.

What makes a picture cool to look at is how it looks. And that is very subjective and contextual. No issue with that. What makes it _interesting_ and catchy is not so much what it _is_ but what it says, what it means, what it triggers, from the intent of the artist (if one gets to have the info about it), to its techniques[1] all the way to the inspiration it creates in the onlookers (which is also a function of a lot of things).

Anything machine-produced can be cool/beautiful/whatever.

Machines also reproduce/reprint original works. And while there are common qualities, it is not the same to look at a copy, at a reproduction of a thing, and to look at the original thing, that was made by the original artist. If you haven't experienced that, please try to (going to a museum for instance, or a gallery, anywhere).

[1] and there, using AI stuff as anything else as a _tool_ to practice/make art? of course. But to say that what this tool makes _is_ art or a work of art? Basic no for me.

> Needless to say that the people making those distinctions can't even tell apart a photo from an AI-generated picture.

1/ It does get better and better, but it still looks like AI-generated (as of April 2025).

2/ Human-wise/feeling-wise/intellectual-wise, anything that I know has been generated by AI will be a. interesting perhaps, for ideas, for randomness, b. but soulless. And that is connection, relief, soul (mine, and those of others) I am looking for in art (as a practice, an artefact or a performance); I'm pretty sure that's what connects us humans.

3/ Market-wise, I predict that any renowned artwork will lose of its value as soon as its origin being AI-made will be known; for the very reason 2/ above.

I always wonder why people make statements like this. Anyone that knows more than one artist knows that artists uses these tools for a variety of reasons and aren't nearly as scared as random internet concern trolls make them out to be.

Agreed, the ones I know in real life are excited by these tools and have been using them.

(/s)

2/ it has been discussed for like, decades, in academic and social contexts, how attitudes in some domain reflects and reinforces them in others.

3/ Your « actual » makes an assumption about my experience that you have no basis for.

Point remains that non-consensual use of artists’ work reflects the same fundamental disregard for autonomy that characterizes other consent violations.