Adobe deletes Bluesky posts after backlash

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.

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.

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...

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.

> 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).

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.

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.