[HN Gopher] Adobe deletes Bluesky posts after backlash
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Adobe deletes Bluesky posts after backlash
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 131 points
Date : 2025-04-11 14:01 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (petapixel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (petapixel.com)
| jeffwask wrote:
| You don't get to play cute, fun, friend to creators and have the
| most odious licensing terms in the history of software.
| ikanreed wrote:
| Actually if you'll read the fine print, you're obligated to be
| friends.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| And you cannot stop being friends until the end of the
| billing year, even if you are on a monthly plan.
| fracus wrote:
| I think this is a great one sentence encapsulation of the
| situation.
| mtndew4brkfst wrote:
| Autodesk is at least boxing in the same weight class, but I do
| think Adobe is worse.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| When companies take actions hostile to their user base obvious
| things happen.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| What a great idea, scaring companies probing bluesky. That surely
| won't backfire and will cement bluesky as a Xitter alternative.
| miohtama wrote:
| Bluesky audience is certain kind, more left leaning, finding
| corporations evil. Adobe's experiment shows that it is unlikely
| any big corp could go there any time until the audience is more
| diverse, less cancel culture.
| pm90 wrote:
| The reaction seems specific to Adobe which has (probably) not
| been a good steward of its role as a tool for creatives. I
| don't think other big corps would get that reaction.
| jsheard wrote:
| Exactly, compare and contrast how bsky users engage with an
| Adobe peer that creatives are on good terms with.
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/procreate.com/post/3llfkv3mqas2s
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| That post seems an awful lot like pandering to the crowd
| there.
|
| More adroit PR, perhaps.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| That's part of it, but it helps a _lot_ that Procreate's
| both extremely affordable and a single purchase. That's a
| great combo when your target audience are artists, a
| crowd that is generally pretty cash-strapped. Creative
| Cloud's cost is actually pretty steep over time.
|
| It also helps that when Procreate adds features, it's
| always stuff that's desired by a large chunk of their
| users and is broadly useful. Contrast this to e.g.
| Photoshop, where for many of us eliminating 98% of the
| new features added since CS2 would make no material
| difference in day to day usage.
|
| Adobe would be well served by building "heirloom"
| versions of their tools that are single-purchase,
| affordable, and have a fixed CS1/CS2-ish feature set with
| all development thereafter being put into optimization,
| stability, etc. That'd be plenty for even many commercial
| artists, let alone "prosumers" and more casual users.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| Not particularly. What they _do_ seem to have is a more
| artist-heavy community, and that community has been fucked
| over by Adobe over the last decade or so.
| samlinnfer wrote:
| The most artist heavy platform is twitter.
| chowells wrote:
| Not anymore. Twitter has worked very hard to drive
| artists away. And succeeded!
| phillipcarter wrote:
| My dude have you not been on twitter ever?
| skybrian wrote:
| My guess is that most Bluesky users are doing their own thing
| and never noticed this until after it was over and appeared
| in the news. But it does seem like there is a large crowd of
| nasty people in Bluesky, and that seems like a bad sign.
| drooopy wrote:
| I don't know if I would refer to Adobe as being evil, but
| they're definitely one of the shittiest software companies in
| existence. And I'm 100% convinced that they would receive the
| same type of welcome if they made a xshitter account today.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Adobe is special. They have a pretty narrow specific audience
| who are kinda stuck with them, and who they've spent the last
| decade industriously pissing off.
|
| Bluesky _is_ less tolerant than Twitter of "hello, we're a
| brand, aren't we wonderful/funny", but I think this
| particular reaction is more about it being Adobe than
| anything else.
| 0xEF wrote:
| > more diverse, less cancel culture
|
| I love when people use this to mean "more white and
| conservative."
|
| Bluesky users lean toward hating corporate greed. Adobe is
| greedy as fuck. Simple as. They and companies like them can
| stay off.
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| Are you claiming cancel culture isn't real?
| gdulli wrote:
| "Cancel culture" is just a term we started using to cope
| with seeing people we're sympathetic to being judged for
| their words or actions.
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| Yes, good idea trawling up things people said when they
| were dumb and young, which they don't even think or agree
| with today, and trying to cancel their career over it.
|
| Not to benefit society, but to make one feel good about
| themselves about the victory they achieved in ruining
| someones life.
| danudey wrote:
| "Hey, this dude posted something wildly, rabidly racist
| in public on main a while ago. Maybe we should reconsider
| what kind of person we think they are instead of just
| taking their word that they're 'not like that anymore'
| and aren't just better at hiding their real opinions that
| they know are unacceptable to voice in modern society."
|
| The people trotting out the phrase "cancel culture" as a
| boogeyman also tend to run around being apologists for
| racism, sexism, assault, or criminal behavior. Regardless
| of if you're actually upset about legitimate instances of
| people overreacting, the fact that the term "cancel
| culture" is used to complain about pedophiles or sexual
| predators actually suffering consequences makes it
| difficult to take any complaints seriously.
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| Or maybe just ask them if they still think that? If they
| say no, suggest they take it down.
|
| Everyone wins and the world is a slightly nicer place.
|
| Rather than hounding people's employers etc. The world is
| already divided to extremes, best not to make it worse.
| criddell wrote:
| What changed my thinking on cancel culture was being
| asked if I believe in the possibility of redemption and
| giving people a second chance or am I more of a lock-em-
| up-and-throw-away-the-key kind of guy?
| simonw wrote:
| Define "cancel culture".
| pessimizer wrote:
| Bluesky is far whiter than Twitter. So diverse here would
| mean "less white."
| teraflop wrote:
| Maybe, just maybe, the platforms that we use to engage socially
| with other human beings don't also have to be organized around
| engaging commercially with brands.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Thank you. I would not accept a corporate brand sending me
| text messages. I don't want to "engage" with brands. The less
| of this garbage on the Internet, the better.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Then don't follow or engage with their content? You
| understand that's your option, right?
|
| I actually enjoy Bsky as a replacement for Twitter mostly to
| keep on top of news (tech and otherwise, the tech often
| coming from the source), along with a small selection of high
| profile figures. So I follow those sources and venues.
|
| It is absolutely _pathetic_ that a small mob attacked Adobe
| -- primarily a super aggressive anti-AI contingent that runs
| around like a sad torch mob on bsky -- and I hope Adobe
| return to the platform. It would be nice for people like me,
| who _chose_ to follow these brands, to see the news from
| Adobe, OpenAI, Microsoft, etc, and my choice shouldn 't be
| limited by those people.
| scheeseman486 wrote:
| If they can't take the heat from their customers, that's
| their problem.
|
| And you can always subscribe to Adobe's email list.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The platforms should be paid then.
|
| Its a fools errand to go on a "free" platform and complain
| about corporate presence. If you are not paying, then those
| corporate bodies are.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| It's already a Twitter alternative that's superior by virtue of
| being in its pre-enshittification era.
|
| It may never be a Twitter alternative in the sense of making
| anyone a billionaire, but I'm okay with that.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| So you think Adobe would get a resoundingly warm welcome on X?
|
| Pretty sure they trashed their own brand with their
| subscription model. They're finding that out now.
|
| I jumped to Affinity apps years ago when Adobe required a
| subscription -- never looked back.
| ruined wrote:
| yes!
| wesselbindt wrote:
| Won't someone please think of the corporations!
| nashashmi wrote:
| Corporations are people too.
| thih9 wrote:
| No, the moral is different: if you're a company notoriously
| hostile to creatives, don't ask in a post "What's fueling your
| creativity right now?" - and if you do then don't be surprised
| when you get honest answers.
| sitkack wrote:
| It isn't "an idea", it is a justified response.
|
| Crocodile tears for the poor company that got drunk on
| enshittifying its own brand and now has to sleep in it. Adobe's
| takeover is like it freebased Private Equity and now complains
| that it has no friends. The TOS change to have AI train on all
| your art is really what broke people.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| I'd say this is less to do specifically with BlueSky and more
| to do with posting tone-deaf marketing spiel.
| mayneack wrote:
| I personally am more likely to use a social media site without
| brands.
| fracus wrote:
| Maybe the Bluesky selects the community they want and that is
| why people are enjoying it.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| This was fascinating to see unfold. What if there was a social
| network that had taste and rejected things that suck?
|
| Is it a failure of Bluesky to never become the global town
| square, if it means being a place where a brand can't find it a
| safe space to promote itself?
|
| Can a social network thread the needle of having enough traffic
| to be worthwhile but not so much as to attract the Eternal
| September?
| dimal wrote:
| The problem is the microblogging format. No microblogging site
| can be a good town square. It's not designed for discussion.
| It's designed to allow people to shout into the void, hoping
| that someone hears them, so that they feel for a moment that
| their lives have meaning.
| cryptopian wrote:
| Maybe a better question is whether we even _need_ a global town
| square. I 've had Twitter and Bluesky and the difference
| between them and a real town square is that you're always
| performing publically to an audience you can't possibly know.
| I've found far more rewarding relationships posting on niche
| forums and even subreddits because you get a sense of the
| people who use and administrate them, and you're safe in the
| knowledge you can't easily find virality.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| I agree, it's just that the town square will exist regardless
| because of the billions of people and the propensity of most
| of them to gravitate to the most mainstream option. It feels
| ideal that that's quarantined on Twitter so the more niche
| spaces stay high quality.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Charging a subscription fee is crazy for a product that is very
| expensive. I do not know why they are still around.
| donatj wrote:
| Muscle memory. I could probably get by with something cheaper
| but I have been using photoshop for thirty years at this point,
| I know hot keys and workflows at a spiritual level at this
| point.
| ge96 wrote:
| I have this popup in Win 10 that will not go away, out of
| nowhere "DING" "Would you like to use Adobe PDF?" It's built
| into Windows like wth
| adzm wrote:
| I pay $20 a month for the educational discount and my kids get
| access to every Adobe product. It is an amazing deal.
|
| When you are an adult not in school you probably don't need
| "all apps" and it is relatively inexpensive to get just the
| product you use.
|
| Anyway, they are still around because they still have some of
| the best set of features, and are industry standards, though
| this may change in the future and in some areas is already in
| progress (and I welcome that! They need competition to push
| them)
| matwood wrote:
| When I took a lot more pictures, LR was hard to beat. I use
| Photomator now, but if I ever get back to taking tons of pics
| again I know I'll resub to LR.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I'd much rather just pay the single time purchase prices they
| used to ask for. The subscription is only a "good deal" for
| the first 2-3 years, after which you end up paying more than
| you would have with the one-time.
|
| The single time purchase also has the added benefit of
| letting me use that version however long I like. Personally I
| don't need much of anything that's been added since CS2, and
| as such a user I'd normally only be buying new versions of
| Photoshop when the one I own stops running on modern
| operating systems. It also means you're not bombarded with UI
| shifting around for no good reason, some feature getting
| pushed in your face for the sake of some PM's metrics, etc.
|
| The only reason I even have a CC sub right now is because a
| credit card benefit essentially pays for it. If/when that
| benefit disappears so does my sub.
| BeetleB wrote:
| People don't want to use Gimp, which is the next most powerful
| photo editing software :-)
| megaman821 wrote:
| As a lurker on both Bluesky and Twitter, I find Bluesky is a much
| more hostile place. Twitter is much more absurd but there is not
| as much anger.
| sundaeofshock wrote:
| I have a much different experience on Twitter. It has a much
| higher tolerance for racism, misogyny, gay/transphobia, and
| wild conspiracies. It got much worse after the election and I
| finally bailed on it after the inauguration. I have not missed
| it.
| megaman821 wrote:
| Bluesky has all that but just in the anti direction. I was
| hoping for a more absolute of not disparaging anyone based on
| their race, gender, or sexual preference.
| Funes- wrote:
| It figures. One's knee-deep in censorship and the other one is
| more or less free-for-all, so you get high levels of hostility
| and an extreme range of ideas respectively from the get go.
| rcleveng wrote:
| I just looked at twitter and it seems the sentiment is similar
| across both platforms. I think this was more of an adobe think
| than a bluesky thing.
| 63 wrote:
| I find that the extremes of hostility are worse on bluesky, but
| the average skeet is much less hostile. And there's just
| straight up fewer skeets to be angry about.
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| Being familiar only with the street slang for "skeet" and not
| Bluesky's relatively recent adoption of "skeet" to mean
| "Bluesky post", my parser really had to do some work to try
| to understand this sentence.
| chongli wrote:
| That's deliberate. BlueSky did not want the term "skeet"
| being adopted but it happened anyway.
| Molitor5901 wrote:
| I'm pretty left leaning and I don't like Bluesky. For me, it's
| too hostile and too much of an angry echo chamber. X is
| scattered wildly but I with muting I have been able to shape to
| get a more reasonable feed.
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| Likewise here, the amount of just pure made up
| crap/misinformation on X has definitely increased (perhaps
| because accounts get paid for views/engagement now) or the
| algorithm seems to push it more, but it's not an echo
| chamber.
|
| I have at least 100 words on my X muted word list and it's
| just about usable.
| nailer wrote:
| Same here. I'd agree with many of the political positions on
| Bluesky but it looks like the left equivalent of what Truth
| Social is on the right - Bluesky recently started publishing
| home addresses of DOGE employees, with the intent seeming to
| be to target them with violence.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| Conservatives have been posting home addresses of judges
| and doxxing activist much longer than that. I'm not
| condoning it but lets not pretend both sides aren't a
| shitstorm.
| _bin_ wrote:
| As is the case with most ideological echo chambers, they
| devolve into struggle sessions. You find the same thing
| happening in the niche right-wing movement sections of
| twitter, it's just "this person is secretly indian/jewish"
| instead of "this person is secretly a racist/xyzphobe".
|
| Twitter has the advantage of a broader range so you can
| escape that while bluesky is almost exclusively used based on
| strong ideological motivation. It's raison d'etre at this
| point is basically and highly political so this was bound to
| happen.
| jghn wrote:
| I don't understand why people struggle with either site.
| Follow only people you want to see. Both sites allow you to
| only see posts from those accounts. Problem solved.
| spiderice wrote:
| Unless you want to follow Adobe, who were just driven out
| by a mob of angry people
| jghn wrote:
| There are a lot of people I'd love to see content from on
| all of the platforms who aren't where I want them to be,
| for a variety of reasons. That's not really a great
| argument.
| maw wrote:
| And what about the people who sometimes post interesting
| things and sometimes post distilled insanity? They're
| incentivized to do so.
| jghn wrote:
| Do you want to follow them or not? Up to you. No one is
| incentivized to do anything other than post what they
| want and follow who they want.
| 98codes wrote:
| Then you decide if the positives outweigh the negatives
| and unfollow them or not.
|
| This particular situation is why the only thing I miss
| from Twitter at this point is the ability to mute an
| account's reposts rather than the full account.
| lyjackal wrote:
| It's more the content creators who bear the brunt of toxic
| rage. Who you follow doesn't solve that problem
| lukev wrote:
| This is a weird argument because Bluesky doesn't have a
| "feed"... by default you see only the people you follow
| unless you subscribe to specific other feeds.
|
| So you followed a bunch of people you didn't like? That says
| more about you than the platform...
| piyuv wrote:
| If you're still using X, you're not left leaning.
| jsight wrote:
| Yeah, I'm surprised by how many here are responding with weird
| Adobe rants. They posted fairly innocuous stuff, were attacked,
| and ultimately chose to abandon the platform as a result.
|
| This sounds like a bigger indictment of the platform than
| anything to do with Adobe.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| Maybe the people on the platform don't want it to get filled
| by bland corporate accounts like twitter did
| newsclues wrote:
| Not surprisingly because the community was populated by people
| who are angry that twitter changed.
|
| It's a community of unhealthy social media addicts
| doright wrote:
| So after the honeymoon with Bluesky ends, what will be the next
| friendlier social media platform? And after that one? Will this
| just keep repeating?
| jeffparsons wrote:
| If a new a Twitter/Bluesky replacement is to promote civil
| discourse, it will need to _restrict_ reach as a core
| feature. Which... seems antithetical to a social media
| platform. But as long as "enragement = engagement" holds
| true, each new social media platform will eventually devolve
| into the same kind of cesspool as its predecessors.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| I didn't get much negativity on Twitter, and after moving the
| Bluesky the same is true.
|
| The experience of a person following fantasy football stuff,
| and another person following politics, will be totally
| different, regardless of website.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Bluesky currently has the kuro5hin "A Group Is It's Own Worst
| Enemy" effect going on. People who think they claimed land
| first believe that they get to define the future of the service
| for everyone else.
|
| It's obnoxious, and if the service truly offers a real
| alternative to Twitter it needs to squash these brigading
| groups. I get that people don't want to see the posts of
| brands...so don't follow them. It's incredibly simple. I don't
| want furry content but I don't run around the platform
| complaining that some do.
| fracus wrote:
| In my experience, that is completely untrue. I think it is more
| of "you are the company you keep" situation. Bluesky is
| obviously more socially liberal and therefore, IMO objectively
| smarter, nicer users and community. On Bluesky you have more
| control over your experience which makes me wonder how genuine
| your post is.
| fossuser wrote:
| Bluesky is the worst of old Twitter concentrated into one
| place. It's some weird mixture of the hall monitors of Mastodon
| crossed with wannabe members of the weather underground. Like a
| leftwing Gab full of only Kara Swisher and Taylor Lorenz types.
| This sort of of faux outrage at adobe is par for the course -
| its awful over there.
|
| X is much more of an ideological mix.
| rvz wrote:
| I've seen worse. In terms of the most hostile, Mastodon takes
| the crown.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > "What's fueling your creativity right now?"
|
| Hilarious thin marketspeak. But sure, blame the social platform.
| gradientsrneat wrote:
| I've become so disenchanted with internet vitriol that it's
| surreal seeing these trolls attack a social media presence that's
| geniunely deserving. Still, I wouldn't invite any of these people
| to my house.
| bni wrote:
| Has anyone actually stopped using Photoshop?
|
| What are they migrating to?
| vachina wrote:
| Any number of AI apps out there can easily replace 95% of
| Photoshop's usecase.
| masswerk wrote:
| 1) Switched about 4 years ago
|
| 2) to Affinity Photo & Designer (perpetual license)
| coldcode wrote:
| I have Photoshop, but I use Affinity Photo for 99% of what I do
| (make digital art, AP is used for assembly and effects). I use
| Photoshop for a few special effects, but often it's not worth
| the effort.
| m-schuetz wrote:
| Krita and Photopea. I use image manipulation programs
| occasionally to work on paper figures and presentations. Years
| ago, I used photoshop because alternatives like Gimp have
| abyssimal UX that I can't get over, even for free.
|
| With Krita and Photopea, my need for photoshop, previously paid
| by my employer, is gone.
| vunderba wrote:
| I still own a copy of the last version of Photoshop before they
| went to subscription, CS6, but these days I find myself using
| either Pixelmator or Krita.
| RandomBacon wrote:
| Photopea
| sidcool wrote:
| Honestly, Adobe deserves it. Their early cancellation fees is
| atrocious.
| magicmicah85 wrote:
| I pay the extra cost to make sure I can cancel after my
| project's done. I only ever use Photoshop/Premiere and After
| Effects a few times a year, so it's easier for me.
| _kush wrote:
| A reminder that photopea.com is a great photoshop alternative and
| it's web-based
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| Photopea is great, and you can do a lot, but it is not near the
| functionality of Photoshop. However, most people do not need
| most of that.
| Suppafly wrote:
| The alternatives are getting better, but it always seems like
| there is one action that would be trivial in photoshop that
| always end up being impossible in the competitors, and it
| ends up being exactly the thing you need for your project.
| doright wrote:
| Examples? (I don't use Photoshop)
| adzm wrote:
| 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.
| Angostura wrote:
| Now _that_ would have been a really interesting thing for them
| to start a conversation about on Bluesky. They would have got
| some genuine engagement if they wanted it.
|
| Much better than the transparently vapid marketing-speak
| masswerk wrote:
| I think, part of the fiasco is about that engagement posters
| are not really welcomed on Bluesky. And, _" What's fueling
| your creativity right now?"_ is a pure engagement post,
| contributing nothing on its side of the conversation. Hence,
| it's more like another attempt to harvest Adobe's
| subscribers. -- For X/Twitter-bound marketing it's probably
| fine, at least, much what we had become used to, but it
| totally fails the Bluesky community. (Lesson leaned: not all
| social media are the same.)
| jsbisviewtiful wrote:
| > Adobe is the one major company trying to be ethical
|
| Adobe is cannibalizing their paid C-Suite artists by pumping
| out image generators to their enterprise customers. How is that
| ethical? They are double dipping and screwing over their
| longtime paying artists
| multimoon wrote:
| This is I think a narrow viewpoint that assumes the AI will
| ever get truly as good as a human artist. Will it get good
| enough for most people? Probably, but if not Adobe then four
| others will do the same thing, and as another commenter
| pointed out Adobe is the only one even attempting to make AI
| tools ethically. I think the hate is extremely misdirected.
|
| AI tech and tools aren't just going to go away, and people
| aren't going to just not make a tool you don't like, so
| sticking your head in the sand and pretending like it will
| stop if you scream loud enough is not going to help, you
| should instead be encouraging efforts like Adobe's to make
| these tools ethically.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| There is no such thing as "get as good as a human artist"
| unless it becomes an actual human that lived the human
| experience. Even bad art starts with something to express
| and a want to express it.
|
| Without that, it's only as good as a human artist in the
| way a picture of a work of art is.
|
| Actual AI art would first require an ai that wants to
| express something, and then it would have be trying to
| express something about the the life of an ai, which could
| really only be understood by another ai.
|
| The most we could get out of it is maybe by chance it might
| be appealing like a flower or a rock. That is, an actual
| flower not an artists depiction of a flower or even an
| actual flower that someone pointed out to you.
|
| An actual flower, that wasn't presented but you just found
| growing, might be pretty but it isn't a message and has no
| meaning or intent and isn't art. We like them as irrelevant
| bystanders observing something going on between plants and
| pollenators. Any meaning we percieve is actually only our
| own meanings we apply to something that was not created for
| that purpose.
|
| And I don't think you get to say the hate is misdirected.
| What an amazing statement. These are the paying users
| saying what they don't like directly. They are _the_ final
| authority on that.
| multimoon wrote:
| I'm not sure where we launched into the metaphysics of if
| an AI can produce an emotionally charged meaningful work,
| but that wasn't part of the debate here, I recall my
| stance being that the AI will never get as good as the
| human. Since photoshop is a tool like any other, "good
| enough" refers to making the barrier of entry to make a
| given work (in this case some image) so low that anyone
| could buy a photoshop license and type some words into a
| prompt and get a result that satisfies them instead of
| paying an artist to use photoshop - which is where the
| artists understandable objection comes from.
|
| I pay for photoshop along with the rest of the adobe
| suite myself, so you cannot write off my comment either
| while saying the rest of the paying users are "the final
| authority" when I am in fact a paying user.
|
| My point is simply that with or without everyone's
| consent and moral feel-goods these tools are going to
| exist and sticking your head in the sand pretending like
| that isn't true is silly. So you may as well pick the
| lesser evil and back the company who at least seems to
| give the slightest bit of a damn of the morals involved,
| I certainly will.
| UtopiaPunk wrote:
| I'm not the person who responded, but I believe it came
| from a place of "what is art" (and you had used the word
| "artist").
|
| My own position is that "art" can only be created by a
| human. AI can produce text, images, and sounds, and
| perhaps someday soon they can even create content that is
| practically indistinguishable from Picasso or Mozart, but
| they would still fail to be "art."
|
| So sure, an AI can create assets to pad out commercials
| for trucks or sugary cereal, and they will more than
| suffice. Commercials and other similar content can be
| made more cheaply. Maybe that's good?
|
| But I would never willingly spend my time or money
| engaging with AI "art." By that, I mean I would never
| attend a concert, watch a film, visit a museum, read a
| book, or even scroll through an Instagram profile if what
| I'm viewing is largely the output of AI. What would the
| point be?
|
| I'll admit that there is some middle ground, where a
| large project may have some smaller pieces touched by AI
| (say, art assets in the background of a movie scene, or
| certain pieces of code in a video game). I personally err
| on the side of avoiding that when it is known, but I
| currently don't have as strong of an opinion on that.
| spiderice wrote:
| > I mean I would never...if what I'm viewing is largely
| the output of AI. What would the point be?
|
| I agree with the sentiment, however..
|
| Good luck to all of us at holding to that philosophy as
| AI & Non-AI become indistinguishable. You can tell now. I
| don't think you'll be able to tell much longer. If for no
| other reason than the improvements in the last 3 years
| alone. You'll literally have to research the production
| process of a painting before you can decide if you should
| feel bad for liking it.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The point would be to have an interesting and novel
| experience in an experimental medium - which has been a
| major driver of art since its beginning.
|
| Also, realistically, most people want entertainment, not
| art (by your definition). They want to consume
| experiences that are very minor variations of on
| experiences they've already had, using familiar and
| unsurprising tropes/characters/imagery/twists/etc.
|
| The idea that only humans can make that kind of work has
| already been disproven. I know a number of authors who
| are doing very well mass-producing various kinds of
| trashy genre fiction. Their readers not only don't care,
| they love the books.
|
| I suspect future generations of AI will be _better_ at
| creating compelling original art because the AI will have
| a more complete model of our emotional triggers -
| including novelty and surprise triggers - than we do
| ourselves.
|
| So the work will be experienced as more emotional,
| soulful, insightful, deep, and so on than even the best
| human creators.
|
| This may or may not be a good thing, but it seems as
| inevitable as machine superiority in chess and basic
| arithmetic.
| numpad0 wrote:
| > AI tech and tools aren't just going to go away, and
| people aren't going to just not make a tool you don't like
|
| It could. Film photography effectively went away, dragging
| street snaps along it. If it continues to not make artistic
| sense, people will eventually move on.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| > Anyway I don't really think they deserve a lot of the hate
| they get
|
| The dark lesson here is that you avoid hate and bad PR by
| cutting artists out of the loop entirely and just shipping
| whatever slop the AI puts out. Maybe you lose 20% of the
| quality but you don't have to deal with the screaming and
| dogpiles.
| gdulli wrote:
| The problem isn't their specific practices, but more that
| they're in general one of the companies profiting from our
| slopcore future.
| nonchalantsui wrote:
| For their pricing and subscription practices alone, they
| deserve far more backlash than they get.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I would describe my business relationship with Adobe as:
|
| "hostage"
|
| They annually harass me with licensing checks and
| questionnaires because they really hate you if you run
| Photoshop inside a VM (my daily driver is Linux), although it
| is explicitly allowed. Luckily, I don't need the Adobe
| software that often. But they hold a lot of important old
| company documents hostage in their proprietary file formats.
| So I can't cancel the subscription, no matter how much I'd
| like to.
| Lammy wrote:
| I am so happy that my Win32 CS3 Master Collection still works
| fully-offline and will continue to do so for as long as I
| care to keep using it :)
| cosmotic wrote:
| There are a lot of good photoshop alternatives. Most are better
| at individual use cases than photoshop. For example, nearly all
| the alternatives are better at designing website comps because
| they are object-based instead of layer-based.
| genevra wrote:
| There are "some" Photoshop wannabes. I still haven't found
| any program on Linux that can give me anywhere close to the
| same ease of use and powerful tools that Photoshop has. The
| example you provided sounds like you want to use Illustrator
| for your use case anyway.
| f33d5173 wrote:
| 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.
| _bin_ wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Right, but "distaste" isn't grounds for trying to ban
| something._
|
| It isn't, but it doesn't stop people from trying and hoping
| for a miracle. That's pretty much all there is to the
| arguments of image models, _as well as LLMs_ , being
| trained in violation of copyright - it's distaste and
| greed[0], with a slice of basic legalese on top to confuse
| people into believing the law says what it doesn't (at
| least yet) on top.
|
| > _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'd say they have plenty of _moral / ethical_ justification
| for trying to ban/regulate/sue over it, they just don't
| have much of a _legal_ one at this point. But that 's why
| they _should_ be trying[1] - they have a legitimate
| argument that this is an unexpected, undeserved, _unfair_
| calamity for them, threatening to derail their lives, and
| lives of their dependents, across the entire sector - and
| therefore that _laws should be changed_ to shield them, or
| compensate them for the loss. After all, that 's what laws
| are for.
|
| (Let's not forget that the entire legal edifice around
| recognizing and protecting "intellectual property" is an
| entirely artificial construct that _goes against the nature
| of information and knowledge_ , forcing information to
| behave like physical goods, so it's not _unfair_ to the
| creators in an economy that 's built around trading
| physical goods. IP laws were built on moral arguments, so
| it's only fair to change them on moral grounds too.)
|
| --
|
| [0] - Greed is more visible in the LLM theatre of this
| conflict, because with textual content there's vastly more
| people who believe that they're entitled to compensation
| just because some comments they wrote on the Internet _may_
| have been part of the training dataset, and are appalled to
| see LLM providers get paid for the service while they are
| not. This Dog in the Manger mentality is distinct from that
| of people whose output was used in training a model that
| now directly competes with them for their job; the latter
| have legitimate ethical reasons to complain.
|
| [1] - Even though myself I am _for_ treating training
| datasets to generative AI as exempt from copyright. I think
| it 'll be better for society in general - but I recognize
| it's easy for me to say it, because I'm not the one being
| rugpulled out of a career path by GenAI, watching it going
| from 0 to being half of the way towards automating away
| visual arts, in just ~5 years.
| Riverheart wrote:
| "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."
|
| Care to elaborate?
|
| Also, saying artists only concern themselves with the
| legality of art used in AI because of distaste when there are
| legal cases where their art has been appropriated seems like
| a bold position to take.
|
| It's a practice founded on scooping everything up without
| care for origin or attribution and it's not like it's a
| transparent process. There are people that literally go out
| of their way to let artists know they're training on their
| art and taunt them about it online. Is it unusual they would
| assume bad faith from those purporting to train their AI
| legally when participation up till now has either been
| involuntary or opt out? Rolling out AI features when your
| customers are artists is tone deaf at best and trolling at
| worst.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| There is no "scooping up", the models aren't massive
| archives of copied art. People either don't understand how
| these models work or they purposely misrepresent it (or
| purposely refuse to understand it).
|
| Showing the model an picture doesn't create a copy of that
| picture in it's "brain". It moves a bunch of vectors around
| that captures an "essence" of what the image is. The next
| image shown from a totally different artist with a totally
| different style may well move around many of those same
| vectors again. But suffice to say, there is no copy of the
| picture anywhere inside of it.
|
| This also why these models hallucinate so much, they are
| not drawing from a bank of copies, they are working off of
| a fuzzy memory.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _People either don 't understand how these models work
| or they purposely misrepresent it (or purposely refuse to
| understand it)._
|
| Not only that, they also assume or pretend that this is
| obviously violating copyright, when in fact this is a)
| not clear, and b) pending determination by courts and
| legislators around the world.
|
| FWIW, I agree with your perspective on training, but I
| also accept that artists have legitimate _moral_ grounds
| to complain and try to fight it - so I don 't really like
| to argue about this with them; my pet peeve is on the LLM
| side of things, where the loudest arguments come from
| people who are envious and feel entitled, even though
| they have no personal stake in this.
| Riverheart wrote:
| "Not only that, they also assume or pretend that this is
| obviously violating copyright, when in fact this is a)
| not clear, and b) pending determination by courts and
| legislators around the world."
|
| Uh huh, so much worse than the people that assume or
| pretend that it's obviously not infringing and legal.
| Fortunately I don't need to wait for a lawyer to form an
| opinion and neither do those in favor of AI as you
| might've noticed.
|
| You see any of them backing down and waiting for answer
| from a higher authority?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _You see any of them backing down and waiting for
| answer from a higher authority?_
|
| Should they? That's generally not how things work in most
| places. Normally, if something isn't clearly illegal,
| especially when it's something too new and different for
| laws to clearly cover, you're free to go ahead and try
| it; you're not expected to first seek a go-ahead from a
| court.
| Riverheart wrote:
| So you, who just chided people for having strong opinions
| about AI infringement without a court ruling, is now
| telling me, that basing an entire industry on a legal
| grey area is a social norm that you have no strong
| feelings about. I didn't want to assume your position but
| I have a pretty good idea to know we won't find
| consensus.
| Root_Denied wrote:
| >Not only that, they also assume or pretend that this is
| obviously violating copyright, when in fact this is a)
| not clear, and b) pending determination by courts and
| legislators around the world.
|
| Legislation always takes time to catch up with tech,
| that's not new.
|
| The question I'm see being put forth from those with
| legal and IP backgrounds is about inputs vs. outputs, as
| in "if you didn't have access to _X_ (which has some form
| of legal IP protection) as an input, would you be able to
| get the output of a working model? " The comparison here
| is with manufacturing where you have assembly of parts
| made by others into some final product and you would be
| buying those inputs to create your product output.
|
| The cost of purchasing the required inputs is not being
| done for AI, which pretty solidly puts AI trained on
| copyrighted materials in hot water. The fact that it's an
| imperfect analogy and doesn't really capture the way
| software development works is irrelevant if the courts
| end up agreeing with something they can understand as a
| comparison.
|
| All that being said I don't think the legality is under
| consideration for any companies building a model - the
| profit margins are too high to care for now, and catching
| them at it is potentially difficult.
|
| There's also a tendency for AI advocates to try and say
| that AI/LLM's are "special" in some way, and to compare
| their development process to someone "learning" the style
| of art (or whatever input) that they then internalize and
| develop into their own style. Personally I think that
| argument gives a lot of assumed agency to these models
| that they don't actually have, and weakens the overall
| legal case.
| Riverheart wrote:
| The collection of the training data is the "scooping up"
| I mentioned. I assume you acknowledge the training data
| doesn't spontaneously burst out of the aether?
|
| As for the model, it's still creating deterministic,
| derivative works based off its inputs and the only thing
| that makes it random is the seed so it being a database
| of vectors is irrelevant.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Training data at scale unavoidably taints models with
| vast amounts of references to the same widespread ideas
| that appear repeatedly in said data, so because the model
| has "seen" probably millions of photos of Indiana Jones,
| if you ask for an image of an archeologist who wears a
| hat and uses a whip, it's weighted averages are going to
| lead it to create something extremely similar to Indiana
| Jones because it has seen Indiana Jones so much.
| Disintegrating IP into trillions of pieces and then
| responding to an instruction to create it with something
| so close to the IP as to barely be distinguishable is
| still infringement.
|
| The flip-side to that is the truly "original" images
| where no overt references are present all look kinda
| similar. If you run vague enough prompts to get something
| new that won't land you in hot water, you end up with a
| sort of stock-photo adjacent looking image where the
| lighting doesn't make sense and is completely
| unmotivated, the framing is strange, and everything has
| this over-smoothed, over-tuned "magazine copy editor
| doesn't understand the concept of restraint" look.
| tpmoney wrote:
| > if you ask for an image of an archeologist who wears a
| hat and uses a whip, it's weighted averages are going to
| lead it to create something extremely similar to Indiana
| Jones because it has seen Indiana Jones so much.
|
| If you ask a human artist for an image of "an
| archeologist who wears a hat and uses a whip" you're also
| going to get something extremely similar to Indiana Jones
| unless you explicitly ask for something else. Let's
| imagine we go to deviantart and ask some folks to draw us
| some drawing from these prompts:
|
| A blond haired fighter from a fantasy world that wears a
| green tunic and green pointy cap and used a sword and
| shield.
|
| A foreboding space villain with all black armor, a cape
| and full face breathing apparatus that uses a laser
| sword.
|
| A pudgy plumber in blue overalls and a red cap of Italian
| descent
|
| I don't know about you but I would expect with nothing
| more than that, most of the time you're going to get
| something very close to Link, Darth Vader and Mario. Link
| might be the one with the best chance to get something
| different just because the number of publicly known
| images of "fantasy world heroes" is much more diverse
| than the set of "black armored space samurai" and
| "Italian plumbers"
|
| > Disintegrating IP into trillions of pieces and then
| responding to an instruction to create it with something
| so close to the IP as to barely be distinguishable is
| still infringement.
|
| But it's the person that causes the creation of the
| infringing material that is responsible for the
| infringement, not the machine or device itself. A xerox
| machine is a machine that disintegrates IP into trillions
| of pieces and then responds to instructions to duplicate
| that IP almost exactly (or to the best of its abilities).
| And when that functionality was challenged, the courts
| rightfully found that a xerox machine in and of itself,
| regardless of its capability to be used for infringement
| is not in and of itself infringing.
| spoaceman7777 wrote:
| > Adobe isn't trying to be ethical, they are trying to be
| more legally compliant
|
| Is the implication of this statement that using AI for image
| editing and creation is inherently unethical?
|
| Is that really how people feel?
| mtndew4brkfst wrote:
| For creation, yes, because of the provenance of the
| training data that got us here. It was acquired unethically
| in the overwhelming majority of cases. Using models derived
| from that training is laundering and anonymizing the
| existing creativity of other humans and then still staking
| the claim "I made this", like the stick figure comic. It's
| ghoulish.
| no_wizard wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Quite an assertion. Why exactly would this be true?
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| I'm curious why you think it would be worse for everybody?
| This argument seems to depend on the assumption that if
| something makes AI less viable then the situation for human
| beings is worse overall. I don't think many actual people
| would accept that premise.
| UtopiaPunk wrote:
| You are assuming that there is an ethical way to use AI. There
| are several ethical concerns around using AI, and Adobe is
| perhaps concerned with one of these (charitably, respecting
| artists, or a little more cynically, respecting copyright).
|
| Many would argue, myself included, that the most ethical
| approach towards AI is to not use it. Procreate is a popular
| digital art program that is loudly taking that position:
| https://procreate.com/ai
| rmwaite wrote:
| Procreate is also owned by Apple, who is definitely not
| taking that position. Not saying both can't be true, but if a
| strong anti-AI stance is what you seek--I would be worried.
| input_sh wrote:
| Procreate is not owned by Apple, you're probably thinking
| of Pixelmator.
| _bin_ wrote:
| It's a corporation which knows that more of its users are
| artsy types who care about this than Adobe, which trends a
| little more professional. I have no idea what position the
| leadership personally holds but this is very much like DEI in
| that corporations embrace and discard it opportunistically.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I will forever miss Fireworks. I dont do much with graphics but
| Fireworks was the best thing I ever used. Now I do zero with
| graphics.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Even if they're "trying", it's moot if the result isn't clearly
| more ethical, and with the proliferation of stolen imagery on
| their stock image service (which they use to train their
| models), the ethics of their models are very much not clear.
|
| If I saw news of a huge purge of stolen content on their stock
| image service with continued periodic purges afterwards (and
| subsequent retraining of their models to exclude said content),
| I might take the claim more seriously.
| lawlessone wrote:
| They're making money off it.
|
| At least Meta gives their models to the public.
| m463 wrote:
| I remember pixelmator being a breath of fresh air.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I still use it, and might upgrade to their latest version.
|
| It's fine as a way of making shitposts, but I don't know if
| it's a professional-grade graphics editor - but I'm not a
| professional myself, so what do I know.
| numpad0 wrote:
| What it implies is, it's not really about ethics per se, just
| like it's not really about 6th digits per se. People hate AI
| images, cut and dry.
|
| Law is agreeable hate, in a way. Things that gets enough hate
| will get regulated out, sooner or later.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _People hate AI images, cut and dry._
|
| People hate _bad_ AI images, because they hate _bad images_ ,
| period. They don't hate _good_ AI images, and when they see
| _great_ AI images, they don 't even realize they are made by
| AI.
|
| It's true, there's a deluge of bad art now, and it's almost
| entirely AI art. But it's not because AI models exist or how
| they're trained - it's because _marketers[0] don 't give a
| fuck about how people feel_. AI art is cheap and takes little
| effort to get - it's so cheap and low-effort, that on the
| lower end of quality scale, there is no human competition. It
| makes no economic sense to commission human labor to make art
| _this_ bad. But with AI, you can get it for free - and
| marketing loves this, because, again, they don 't care about
| people or the commons[1], they just see an ability to get
| ahead by trading away quality for greater volume at lower
| costs.
|
| In short: don't blame bad AI art on AI, blame it on people
| who spam us with it.
|
| --
|
| [0] - I don't mean here just marketing agencies and people
| with marketing-related job titles, but also generally people
| engaging in excessive promotion of their services, content,
| or themselves.
|
| [1] - Such as population-level aesthetic sensibilities, or
| sanity.
| adzm wrote:
| > People hate AI images, cut and dry.
|
| I don't know for sure about the common usage, but personally
| my use of AI in Photoshop are things like replacing a
| telephone pole with a tree, or extending a photo outside of
| frame, which is much different than just generating entire
| images. It is unfortunate that this usage of generative AI is
| lumped in with everything else.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| While I agree about Adobe behaving more ethically, I suspect
| they simply talked to their customers, and decided they didn't
| have much choice. CELSYS, who makes Clip Studio, suffered a
| backlash and pulled their initial AI features:
| https://www.clipstudio.net/en/news/202212/02_01/
| mubou wrote:
| Probably didn't help that Clip Studio is predominantly used
| by Japanese artists, and virtually all models capable of
| producing anime-style images were trained on a dataset of
| their own, stolen pixiv art.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Talking to customers is a good thing.
|
| Let's normalize it.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| End of the day, the hate is: "The software is great, but these
| jerks expect me to pay for it!"
|
| Their sales went crazy because everyone was relentlessly
| pirating their software.
| crest wrote:
| > Adobe is the one major company trying to be ethical with its
| AI training data and no one seems to even care.
|
| It's sad that it's funny that you think Adobe is motivated by
| ethical consideration.
| ngcazz wrote:
| Or that generative AI is ethical at all
| Bluescreenbuddy wrote:
| This Adobe. They don't care about ethic. And frankly fuck them.
| quitit wrote:
| I'm not pointing fingers in any specific direction, but there
| is a lot of importance in AI leadership, and with that you're
| going to see a lot of bot activity and astroturfing to hinder
| the advancement of competitors. We also see companies such as
| OpenAI publicly calling out Elon Musk for what appears to be
| competition-motivated harassment.
|
| So while I think we're all pretty aware of both sides of the
| image gen discussion and may have differing opinions about that
| - I think we can all agree that the genie can't be put back in
| the bottle. This will naturally lead for those that do take
| advantage of the technology to outpace those which do not.
|
| Also I applaud Adobe's approach to building their models
| "ethically", yes they are inferior to many competitors, but
| they work well enough to save significant time and money. They
| have been very good at honing in what AI is genuinely useful
| for instead of bolting on a chatbot onto every app like clock
| radios in the 1980s.
| matt_heimer wrote:
| The best? I tried the Photoshop AI features to clean up a old
| photo for the first time this week and it crashed every time.
| After a bunch of searching I found a post identifying problem -
| it always crashes if there are two or more faces in the photo.
| Guess someone forgot to test on the more than one person edge
| case.
| ZeroTalent wrote:
| I know 5 AI image-gen apps that are better than photoshop and
| cost around $10-20/month. For example, ideogram. Photoshop
| doesn't even come close.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Uh, not sure where you've been but Adobe is slavering over
| using the content its locked-in users create to train its
| products. It only (seemingly) backed off this approach last
| year when the cost in terms of subscription revenue got too
| high. But you're naive if you think they aren't desperately
| planning how to get back to that original plan of owning an
| ever-growing slice of every bit of human creativity that
| touches their software.
| simonw wrote:
| Yeah, they posted this:
|
| > Hey, we're Adobe! We're here to connect with the artists,
| designers, and storytellers who bring ideas to life. What's
| fueling your creativity right now?
|
| > Drop a reply, tag a creator, or share your latest work--we'd
| love to see what inspires you!
|
| That's such a bland, corporate message. It feels totally
| inauthentic. Do Adobe (a corporation) really "love to see what
| inspires you" or do they just want engagement for their new
| account?
|
| I'm not surprised in the slightest that it triggered a pile-on.
| magicmicah85 wrote:
| They want engagement for their new account, it's what anyone
| who posts on social media wants.
| simonw wrote:
| Right, but you need to be a whole lot less obvious about it.
| Adobe's message here is a case study in what NOT to do.
| masswerk wrote:
| Yes, but it's not what social media users want. How about
| posting tips, small micro courses, behind the scene stories
| about what motivated some choices in the app, anything useful
| or endearing? Not just harvesting likes and account names?
| magicmicah85 wrote:
| I'm talking about when anyone post on social media. It's
| all about engagement. People don't post on social media in
| the hopes that no one sees or replies to them. So I find it
| silly that people are upset at Adobe for having the most
| generic "hey we joined, show us what you're working on"
| versus the useless engagement posts that are templates of
| "most people can't figure out what the answer is" when the
| image is "two plus two equals ?".
|
| To your point of useful info, I'm sure Adobe would get
| there. They just joined the site and got bullied off. I
| doubt they're going to care about the site now, but it'd be
| funny if they tried a second post and just trudged through
| it.
| simonw wrote:
| Social media has been a thing for 20+ years now. It's
| absolutely possible to achieve both: to "get engagement"
| _and_ to post things that are genuinely interesting and
| useful and that people find valuable while you are doing
| it.
|
| Adobe were really clumsy here, and that's why they got
| burned.
| masswerk wrote:
| Yes, I have no problem believing that this is what Adobe
| wants and/or a certain category of posters. But, what's
| the motivation for answering? (Notably, this was about
| "what's fuelling your creativity, right now?" and not
| "show us what you're working on", about
| circumstantialities instead of substance.) Will Adobe
| notice? Probably not, they just want stats to go up. This
| is not a conversation. It's more like IRL going up to a
| person and saying, "Talk!", and immediately turning the
| back on them to engage the next one.
|
| From my own experience, when moving to Bluesky, the
| absence of engagement posters felt like a breath of fresh
| air. Meanwhile, with the broader influx from X/Twitter,
| there are some posts which are more in this style (e.g.,
| "what was your favorite xy" nostalgia posts, or slightly
| more adopted to the platform, "this was my favorite xy
| (image), what was yours?"), but I usually see these going
| unanswered. It's just not the style of the platform,
| which is probably more about letting people know and/or
| about actual conversations, or just doing your thing. So,
| this gambit is more likely to be received as "oh no" and
| "corporate communications, of course", maybe as "yet
| another lack of commitment." So don't expect
| congratulations on this, rather, it may even unlock the
| wrath of some... The post may have done much better
| without this call for engagement. Just say "hi", if this
| is what it's about. (Actually, this is kind of a custom,
| new accounts just saying hi.)
|
| Most importantly, if you're doing public relations or
| marketing, it's still your job to meet your audiences,
| not theirs to adopt to you. And for the lack of
| understanding of these basics, this gambit may have come
| across as passive aggressive.
| mubou wrote:
| Well said. And agreed about posting tips, that would have
| been so much better. I follow people who post short
| Blender tutorials -- it's useful and interesting and they
| get my engagement without begging for it. Those thinly-
| veiled marketing engagement posts are just _desperate_.
| No better than the people posting trash AI YouTube shorts
| to rake in money (often the same tactics too).
| Apreche wrote:
| I'm always the first one to criticize companies for exploitative
| and evil business practices. Adobe is far from innocent. However,
| I will argue their subscription model itself is actually better
| than the previous model.
|
| The reality is that Adobe has a large team of engineers to create
| and maintain several high end professional digital art creation
| tools. They also frequently add new and excellent features to
| those tools. That costs money. This money has to come from
| somewhere.
|
| With the old model Creative Suite 6 Master Collection cost over
| $2600. They updated that software every two years. The maximum
| Creative Cloud subscription today costs $1440 for two years. They
| even have a cheap Photography plan for $20 a month with Photoshop
| and Lightroom. That's $480 for two years. Photoshop 6 cost $700+
| alone all by itself with no Lightroom.
|
| Why would Adobe allow for much lower prices, even considering
| inflation? Because they get reliable cash flow. Money keeps
| coming in regularly. That's much easier for keeping people
| employed and paid than a huge cash infusion every other year and
| a trickle until your next release. It's just not feasible to sell
| software that way anymore.
|
| Of course the argument is that with the old model you didn't need
| to update. You could just pay for CS5 or 6 and use it forever
| without ever paying again. That's true. And I guess that's viable
| if you are want software that is never updated, never gets new
| features, and never gets bugfixes and support. I would argue that
| a user that can get by without updating their tools, and has no
| use for new features, is not a professional. They can get by with
| free or cheap competitors, and they should.
|
| Professional digital artists do need and want those updates. They
| are the kind of people that were buying every version of Creative
| Suite in the old model. For those users, paying a subscription is
| a huge improvement. It keeps the updates and bugfixes coming
| regularly instead of rarely. It funds development of new and
| powerful features. It keeps Adobe solvent, so the software
| doesn't die. It lowers the overall price paid by the user
| significantly.
|
| Plenty of things we can criticize with Adobe. Bugs they haven't
| fixed. Crashy software sometimes. Products they come out with and
| then give up on. Doing dark patterns and fees to prevent people
| from unsubscribing. But the subscription model itself is a net
| positive compared to the old way.
| vachina wrote:
| > than a huge cash infusion every other year and a trickle
| until your next release
|
| It's a very good incentive to keep the entire company on their
| toes. Adobe will have to keep making new features for people to
| justify paying for a new version, instead of rehashing the same
| software, and then rent-seek with a subscription.
| Apreche wrote:
| That's a good point, but it hasn't borne out in reality.
| Creative Cloud is frequently adding new features, some of
| which are quite incredible. Project Turntable that they
| demonstrated last year honestly blew me away.
|
| Also, several of their products face stiff competition. They
| have to keep pushing Premiere to fend off Davinci and Final
| Cut.
| Marsymars wrote:
| How is that incentive notably different or better for
| consumers than the incentive provided by being required to
| remain better than competitors to retain subscription
| revenue?
| vunderba wrote:
| There are plenty of successful subscription based models that
| allow you to fallback on a perpetual license for the last
| annual version that you paid for, e.g. the Jetbrains model.
|
| As a "professional" I have zero interest in renting the tools
| of my trade.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| The first comment seems to be interesting:
|
| > I don't like subscriptions but that's not the biggest problem.
| The biggest issue is Adobe's software has been getting worse as
| the years have passed. It's slow, incredibly buggy, their new
| features are often an embarrassment, and Adobe seems to do
| nothing other than increasing prices. And therein lies the issue
| with subscriptions - the user keeps paying higher prices and the
| company has zero motivation to fix bugs
|
| I wonder how hard it is to create the core functionalities of
| Adobe Photoshop. Maybe many people have different definitions of
| what are the core functionalities, thus turning making a
| replacement software very tough.
| thejohnconway wrote:
| There's plenty of replacements which are fine. Many are better
| to use for many tasks. The problem is lock-in in professional
| contexts. Having a problem with some feature in a PSD? "I don't
| wanna pay for Photoshop" isn't usually an acceptable excuse.
|
| If open source projects and other companies had gathered around
| an open file format, maybe there would be some leverage, but
| they all use their own formats.
| mattskr wrote:
| Controversial take: I'm happy they went monthly paid
| subscription. You think a budding graphic designer of one year
| could afford the $1,500+ up front cost? The seven seas were the
| only option.
|
| HOWEVER, 60 a month is too high for a product quality that is
| tanking. I was okay with it the first few years, but PS and
| Illustrator's performance noticeably have gone straight to shit
| for absolutely no benefit except for a little stupid gimmicks
| that offer zero productivity boosts. Indesign, they've mostly
| left alone, which I'm happy about because it's like Oreos. Stop
| fucking with the recipe, you made the perfect cookie. There are
| no more kingdoms to conquer. Simply find performance boosts,
| that's it. The reliability of my files and getting work done is
| more important than anything else. Truly. That's what Adobe USED
| to stand for. Pure raw UI intuitive productivity and getting shit
| done. Now, it's a fucking clown show that cares about their
| social media and evangelism.
|
| I hear on the video side they've super dropped the ball, but I'm
| not much for motion graphics outside of Blender.
|
| Stop with the bullshit "telemetry" garbage that bogs down my
| computer and AI scrapping of our data. Old files that used to run
| fine on my older computers run like shit on my new one. I know
| damn well there's bullshit going on in the background. That's 80%
| of the issue. The other 20% of problems are running of the mill
| stuff.
|
| I am perfectly happy paying for functional, productive software.
| 60 bucks a month for that is fine as a freelance graphic designer
| and marketer. However creative cloud is quickly becoming
| dysfunctional and unproductive. That's the problem.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >You think a budding graphic designer of one year could afford
| the $1,500+ up front cost?
|
| Yes? It's pretty normal to take out a loan or use a credit card
| to purchase tools to setup your career for years to come. That
| budding graphic designer probably spent $2000+ on a new Mac.
| Honestly though subscriptions only make sense for business
| customers, they really fuck over the home users that would like
| to buy the software once and use it for several years. Hobby
| photographers and such are either priced out of the market, or
| stuck with old computers running older versions from before the
| subscription push.
| mattskr wrote:
| Lol, I started my career during the housing market crash.
| Even though I had decent credit, especially for my age, my
| credit cards were reduced due to "market volatility" to $20
| above what my balance was.
|
| Taking out a loan to start a career? I guess I was born to
| the wrong parents lol.
|
| Not everyone starts out on great footing in their careers. To
| this day, I still don't buy "new" computer parts to upgrade
| my computer. It's a waste of money to me because I grew up
| only being to afford used or, best case, clearance.
|
| Also, no Mac. Macs are for rich people with zero taste and
| sense and too much money to burn. Regardless of what anyone
| says, Macs dollar for dollar compared to a Windows machine,
| Adobe doesn't perform better on a Mac. I've tested it against
| computers where ever I would work, my older laptop versus
| their newer macs. Side by side, it's like 90% functions
| faster on Windows. Plus there's this weird ass memory issue
| where every PS file has an extra ~500mb of bloat on a Mac. No
| clue why.
|
| But yes, subscriptions do make sense for business customers
| which, a lot of graphic designers do freelance on the side.
| Again, exactly why Adobe SHOULD be a subscription. Adobe
| isn't a hobbyist toolset and they need to stop treating it as
| such. When home users "discovered" Adobe and they started
| placating to them, that's when it went south. If they bumped
| up the price to $100 bucks a month and obliterated the "I'm
| just a quirky creative home user who likes to dabble"
| pandering, GOOD. I'd keep my subscription. Instead, I'm
| actively building up my experience in alternative tools so I
| can get away from Adobe. Not every piece software should be
| "Karen" easy especially when it's designed for a professional
| market. I want my software to be brutally efficient and
| productive. Not "a vibe". My "vibe" is getting away from the
| computer. Software should help me annihilate my workload as
| quickly as possible so I can go live a real life more.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > If they bumped up the price to $100 bucks a month and
| obliterated the "I'm just a quirky creative home user who
| likes to dabble" pandering, GOOD. I'd keep my subscription.
| Instead, I'm actively building up my experience in
| alternative tools so I can get away from Adobe.
|
| You're telling them they'll lose you, but if they did what
| you recommend, they'd have lost both you and the "quirky
| creative home user who likes to dabble."
|
| The amateur market creates the professional market 10 years
| from now. They should make sure quirky home users are using
| their product, even if they have to pay them to use it. If
| the quirky instead choose any other tool that is capable
| enough for professional work, they'll grow into the tool
| and never leave it. The more that do that, the more the
| tool will improve to conform to their expectations.
|
| If the quirky start buying Affinity instead of learning
| Photoshop, Photoshop will be gone. In a hypothetical
| universe where the choices that were available when you
| first became professional were either an (even more, by
| your suggestion) expensive Adobe subscription and buying
| Affinity, you may never have used Photoshop at all.
| -__---____-ZXyw wrote:
| > Macs are for rich people with zero taste and sense and
| too much money to burn.
|
| Yes!
| nashashmi wrote:
| Companies should stay off social media ... Unless they are social
| companies. Companies that try to advertise on social media to
| their consumer base do harm to the social aspect. This is why
| twitter and Facebook and instagram went from healthy social
| interactions to just marketing fluffs giving the media companies
| heavier valuation
| broodbucket wrote:
| Notoriously user-hostile companies should, at least.
| bastard_op wrote:
| I remember pirating photoshop in the late 90's for the every now
| and then I need to edit a photo (usually something dumb or
| screwing around). I was never going to pay anything let alone the
| real cost to use it for random crap I needed it for, so when they
| began CS with subscriptions and such, I simply moved to The Gimp.
| For 25 years Gimp has been "good enough" for me, and now it's
| truly good enough for professionals too as I have family that do
| graphic design and now use it where prior they were Photoshop
| snobs.
|
| Adobe ought to be glad anyone still cares about them.
|
| Sadly what I know them mostly for now is their vermin web
| services major eCommerce companies seem to love to use (sad for
| the consumers stuck using this garbage). I see "adobedtm.com"
| domain show up constantly in noscript plugins, and I know nothing
| good can come from them, but NOT allowing it usually breaks the
| websites. I really, REALLY try not to do business with companies
| using adobe in their web services for this reason.
| greatgib wrote:
| Somehow Adobe can say thank you, for free they get honest
| feedback about the crap they do without having to hire an
| expensive consulting firm or a survey company.
|
| Now they can know why their sells are platoning at least and
| people would churn as must as possible.
| broodbucket wrote:
| As per those leaks, Adobe employees are already very aware that
| everyone despises them.
| proee wrote:
| No love for Adobe. I have fond memories of their Updater
| downloading 1GB plus "updates", even though my trial EXPIRED.
| fortran77 wrote:
| BlueSky can be brutal! I wonder how it got a reputation of being
| the kinder, gentler alternative?
| skyyler wrote:
| BlueSky is a very kind place in my experience. I don't get
| people asking me to justify my existence like I do on Twitter.
|
| Seriously, people on Twitter demand I debate them about the
| validity of my life. That has yet to happen on BlueSky.
| broodbucket wrote:
| People interact with brands differently to how they interact
| with humans.
| moonlion_eth wrote:
| Alternative social media contains alternative personalities
| w4rh4wk5 wrote:
| Nicely done, people on Bluesky! _clap_
| thot_experiment wrote:
| Here's a really great video detailing just how much Adobe (and
| Autodesk etc) hate their users.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4mdMMu-3fc
| paxys wrote:
| Good. Keep this corporate PR nonsense away from Bluesky.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Hey were a big company here to take your feedback and engage with
| you.
|
| Ogh, nvm, lol this platform has real users that actually engage
| about their opinions?
|
| _dips out_
| indigo0086 wrote:
| Bluecry is it's name-o #NA
| neuroelectron wrote:
| > "Go back to the fascist-owned site where they enjoy supporting
| AI-generated art like your brand does," wrote Evlyn Moreau.
|
| She's not wrong. The conservative crowd on X would recognize
| Adobe's right to offer their services with a license they see fit
| and the necessity of adopting AI to compete. I don't use Bluehair
| but I don't think we'll see an OSS alternative coming from it any
| time soon.
|
| Personally, I don't really see their tools as a "creative suite,"
| more like media production, which is why they inhabit that
| current niche so well.
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