Adobe deletes Bluesky posts after backlash

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.