[HN Gopher] Adobe deletes Bluesky posts after backlash
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Adobe deletes Bluesky posts after backlash
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 505 points
Date : 2025-04-11 14:01 UTC (1 days 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.
| ajxs wrote:
| I discovered this for myself while trying to cancel my
| plan. I told them I'd contact my state's consumer affairs
| regulator, and they instantly buckled. They ended up saving
| us both the trouble, and waived my 'cancellation fee'. For
| what it's worth, the previous time I tried to cancel their
| support offered me a 50% discount, which I accepted. Once
| that discount expired I was out. Adobe aren't earning their
| keep. Their costs are _exorbitant_ when compared to the
| quality of the software. I mostly used Premiere (on
| Windows), which seems to get slower with each release.
| Media Encoder crashes constantly, and Photoshop is as slow
| as molasses.
| 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.
| pndy wrote:
| All big companies do that for few years now - either with used
| language or graphics (namely Corporate Memphis and its various
| uncanny variants) or with both. It's enough to look at patch
| notes for mobile apps: these are exactly cutesy, fake friendly.
| 99% of the time you won't learn what was changed or fixed but
| instead you get these unrelated comments trying to show how
| cool company xyz is. It's unironic "hello fellow kids" meme
| approach.
| 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?
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| > someone says something dumb 5 years ago
|
| Fire them, debank them, humiliate them, destroy their
| life.
|
| > someone commits petty crime for the 13th time.
|
| Meh
|
| I just don't post anything publicly anymore because the
| EV is clearly negative now. Luckily the people I meet in
| the real world are not the thought police.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| That's not true at all. You should read _The Canceling of
| the American Mind_ (though get it from the library,
| because it 's not really good enough to own imo). The
| authors very clearly lay out the evidence that there has
| in fact been an increase in the sort of online lynch mobs
| we call "cancel culture". It comes from both the left and
| the right, and the increase has been noticeable if you
| look at the data.
|
| People have always tried to use social pressure to strike
| at people they didn't like. But there really has been a
| marked increase in occurrences in the last ten or so
| years.
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| Even Obama, considered by some to be an icon of the left,
| has called out cancel culture.
|
| We're starting to see the legal effects of people being
| fired for holding legal views.
| simonw wrote:
| Define "cancel culture".
| j_w wrote:
| When the people I like get in trouble socially for doing
| things that they maybe shouldn't. /s
| 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.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| This is such an _amazingly_ toxic, selfish attitude that
| you have. Is this how you really live your life?
|
| It wasn't "their customers" that brigaded. It is the
| clowns who have decided that Bluesky is their own. They
| are the ones that will keep it from hitting mainstream,
| and hopefully the service crushes their obnoxious
| activism.
| scheeseman486 wrote:
| Who cares if someone is toxic towards Adobe? It's a
| corporate brand, people should be allowed to voice what
| the feel about a fucking _brand_.
|
| Adobe could have sincerely communicated while blocking
| any abusive stuff or if they couldn't be arsed, turned
| off comments. They have PR people to handle this stuff,
| or at least they did until it was probably left up to
| some underpain intern who doesn't give a shit.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Toxicity and brigading is the problem. _Moral_ toxicity
| and brigading, where people think they are doing some
| good, is even worse.
|
| I'm not crying crocodile tears for Adobe. They shouldn't
| have deleted their post, and ultimately they just
| shrugged and decided that bsky didn't matter yet and just
| abandoned it for now.
|
| Which serves no one, but it's what you get when a small
| number of twats who think they're the bully squad ruin a
| platform.
| scheeseman486 wrote:
| Yeah. Against people.
|
| Corporations and brands aren't people.
| kaibee wrote:
| > It wasn't "their customers" that brigaded.
|
| This is a silly idea. Who else would care enough or know
| about it?
| Alupis wrote:
| I think we can safely assume 99% of the outraged posters
| have never once owned a legal copy of, nor subscribed to
| Adobe products.
|
| Outrage is a performance these days.
| rchaud wrote:
| Contrarian takes without empirical evidence remain a rare
| occurrence however.
| scheeseman486 wrote:
| Just about everyone I know who works in graphic design
| doesn't have a high opinion of Adobe. Though in a sense
| you're right, many don't own a legal copy of Adobe
| products.
|
| But that's because they've chosen something else for
| their personal use and only make Adobe part of their
| workflow when required to by their workplace.
| Alupis wrote:
| Every single graphics professional I've worked with
| (many) have owned their own copy of Creative Suite (or
| subscribed). It's akin to their "IDE", and they really
| get to know it inside-and-out. It would be difficult to
| become skilled in the various Creative Suite products if
| one didn't spend a lot of time (their own and employers)
| in it.
|
| The point I was raising here specifically was the people
| who are feigning outrage to Adobe's benign Bluesky post
| are unlikely to be Adobe customers, and unlikely even
| creative professionals at all.
|
| Outrage and hate is a sport to these people.
| scheeseman486 wrote:
| Or they do use their products and they don't like them or
| the company's policies. Why is this so hard for you to
| believe? Given a lack of hard evidence either way other
| than our own anecdotes, you're essentially falling into
| conspiracy theorizing, accusing people of being liars
| based on precisely fuck-all. Even going so far as to
| suggest it's organized, a "sport".
|
| It's delusional.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| If you don't own the platform, you don't get to control the
| reception.
|
| Post on an open forum, get open forum results.
|
| They could host a web page. That's a thing still. What's
| that? They want an audience? A megaphone into someone
| else's auditorium?
|
| There's a cost to that.
| 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.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| this is just not true?
|
| I have (and I imagine most people over 25 have) used plenty
| of forums, wikis, and other social medias that are free as
| in beer, hosted by some guy with a computer in his garage,
| with technology from decades ago
|
| The better ones of them asked you to pay if you wanted to
| be able to post video/large images. In most of those
| spaces, corporate was nowhere to be seen. Sometimes they
| used banner ads, but often, nothing at all but a single
| person's internet bill was the entire cost of the site.
| Such places still exist, and are good.
|
| The internet is getting worse by the day. It's been getting
| worse for so long, that people are starting to wax lyrical
| about how it can't possibly work any other way, this is
| just the natural state of things.
|
| Of course, if you absolutely must mindlessly go to the
| dopamine trough and get your fix of algorithmic profit
| engagement, then yes, you will end up in places that
| relentlessly seek profit via one form of another. But if
| you filter even a little bit for quality, you'll end up
| somewhere else.
| rglullis wrote:
| > Such places still exist, and are good.
|
| Oh, yes, that artisanal internet. So nice, too bad it
| serves only a minuscule fraction of the people of the
| internet.
|
| Everyone else just goes to Reddit and Discord.
| grayhatter wrote:
| Some might call that a feature.
| rglullis wrote:
| Some people also love the caste system.
| grayhatter wrote:
| comparing small communities or forums as primarily
| similar to the caste system is certainly a take...
|
| The world is not better when everyone is exactly the
| same, it's better when everyone has a place they feel
| welcome. For some people they enjoy reddit or discord,
| others don't. There's nothing wrong with someone
| preferring something made out of passion, rather than
| something made to make more money.
| rglullis wrote:
| >it's better when everyone has a (place?) they feel
| welcome
|
| Yes, the problem is that the overwhelming majority of
| people using sites like Reddit or Discord are not
| _choosing_ it. They are there because it has become their
| only alternative.
|
| And it has become their only alternative because all
| these hobbyist forums can only exist when they are
| serving some tiny, exclusive priviledge few. If they grow
| too much, they either will crumble or will find
| themselves becoming a "professional" service with people
| on payroll and revenue targets.
| grayhatter wrote:
| > can only exist when they are serving some tiny,
| exclusive priviledge few
|
| I'm not sure I agree with this, but it does fit the
| pattern. Auto forums are an example of this working. But
| I wouldn't call that a privileged few, would you?
| acyou wrote:
| We took our souls and carelessly poured them out into the
| machine, and later the robots came and sucked it all out,
| along with everything that made us special, unique,
| human.
|
| Was it worth it? Was it really free? Or would we have
| done it knowing we would all eventually pay a terrible
| price?
| rchaud wrote:
| Those places aren't worth their while, and blessed be
| they for that!
|
| All a business cares about is maximum reach, so they will
| ignore the small sites in favour of the biggest
| aggregator for the lowest cost.
|
| If somebody on a smaller site behaved in the disingenuous
| and spammy way brands do on social, they'd be banned.
| Bluesky is not doing that, so this should be an
| opportunity to genuinely engage with the audience instead
| of copy/pasting the cynical tactics they apply everywhere
| else.
| pndy wrote:
| Wish we could separate all that corporate entities on the
| internet in their own walled social network world. Where they
| could have all these weird marketing convos like, mcdonald
| being angry because pepsi "unhahaed" nestle post /s
| cma wrote:
| Bluesky itself is a commercial brand
| 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!
| 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.
| Retr0id wrote:
| The presence of obnoxious brand accounts is very far down my
| list of desires from a social network.
| wnevets wrote:
| > What a great idea, scaring companies probing bluesky.
|
| you make that sound like a bad thing
| rchaud wrote:
| The public yearns for formulaic engagement slop /s
| 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.
| fmxsh wrote:
| The town square is the mainstream's niche.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Is it a failure of Bluesky to never become the global town
| square,
|
| No, because that's an oxymoron. There is no such thing because
| a precondition for a town square (which in reality is a
| community of people, not a place) is that there exists shared
| set of values, context and conduct between its members. The
| state of nature on a global platform, just like in a megacity
| is to be an anonymous, atomized individual who ideas or
| products can be sold to.
| 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.
| rcxdude wrote:
| >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)
|
| A big part of how they keep their relevance is people using
| those 'educational discounts' so that they are the tools that
| everyone learns to use in school, building up a moat against
| any alternative.
| BeetleB wrote:
| People don't want to use Gimp, which is the next most powerful
| photo editing software :-)
| mamonoleechi wrote:
| Scaling Text in Gimp still rasterize the layer in 2025 :)
| besides that, Gimp 3 is pretty nice.
| rchaud wrote:
| Enterprise-level budgets.
| maxerickson wrote:
| An annual subscription to the whole suite is less than a
| weeks pay for someone that would be using it in the US, so no
| need for the Enterprise-level.
| rchaud wrote:
| Enterprise can pay the rising susbcription costs without
| blinking, a solo business will think twice.
| sureIy wrote:
| I hate it too (and never had to use it) but $20/month is
| peanuts for people who use it professionally, unless they're
| from third world countries (which likely pirate it anyway)
| schrijver wrote:
| The suite is $60 / month, which is not peanuts, especially
| since the vast majority of self-employed creatives aren't
| exactly raking in cash.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Sure, but unlike a purchased copy if you are unable to
| afford the subscription your locked out from your own work.
| 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.
| mjmsmith wrote:
| What does "the anti direction" mean? It's mean to racists?
| abhinavk wrote:
| Yeah. The racists, the misogynists and the homophobes
| don't like that.
| megaman821 wrote:
| That it gives no-one pause to make disparaging remarks
| against white males, and violent allusions towards the
| outgroup are tolerated. That is not the vibe I want to
| see. I would hope that, starting fresh, there would be
| more cultural backlash against racial and gendered
| stereotypes and violence.
| thatnerdyguy wrote:
| Then you block those people, and never see their stupid
| opinions again.
| 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.
| 65 wrote:
| Hello username neighbor
| 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.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| The argument is that this is now part of that list of
| reasons. Why acknowledge a problem but disregard one of
| the causes?
| rchaud wrote:
| Our deepest condolences. Losing a marketing bullhorn is
| always difficult.
| spiderice wrote:
| Ok I guess I'll simplify the point for you: You can't
| follow the "people you want to see" if the platform is so
| hostile that the people you want to see are driven from
| it.
|
| My comment wasn't just about Adobe
| sph wrote:
| Being intolerant of soulless rent-seeking corporations
| doesn't turn you into a cool person. It just shows you
| are intolerant.
|
| There must be a name for the phenomenon when a minority
| escapes persecution and hate, and upon reaching their
| promised land become intolerant and hateful of any
| outside group.
| chownie wrote:
| Nah, it makes gp cool as fuck actually.
| 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
| jghn wrote:
| > the content creators
|
| This is IMO the problem. I don't use these sites to
| follow "content creators". For the most part I'm
| following normal people who happen to say things I find
| interesting.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| I don't think they were saying it's a problem for people
| _following_ content creators. It 's more a problem _for_
| content creators, because they usually want the greatest
| reach possible, so they want to be on platforms that
| people use, which requires them to put up with the
| emotional swingings of the platforms ' userbases.
|
| If you want to say you don't care about having _content
| creators_ on your platform, that 's at least a coherent
| take. But you still have to think about the business
| models of the platforms that keep them around-- short of
| collecting payments from every ordinary user, there needs
| to be buy-in from _someone_ wanting reach, whether that
| 's corporate accounts, individual content creators, or
| someone else. And do you actually know all of those
| "normal people who happen to say things you find
| interesting" in real life, or did you find some of them
| online, i.e. they're basically influencers/content
| creators with you as an audience member?
| jghn wrote:
| That is indeed what I'm saying. I treat social media more
| like I treated Usenet back in the day. To me that's a
| superior model than the influencer model.
| 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...
| vitorgrs wrote:
| There is a Discovery feed by default for sure.
| gs17 wrote:
| There's a default feed, and it's awful. Part of why I gave
| up on the site, it never seemed to "get" me, their features
| for tuning it don't work, and the alternative feeds weren't
| what I wanted at all.
| karn97 wrote:
| I got an extension to hide every blue check user, twitter is
| wonderful nkw
| sph wrote:
| X is a cesspit. Bluesky is a cult and echo chamber. Both
| should be avoided if you care about your mental sanity.
|
| Social media was a catastrophic mistake.
| 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
| bakugo wrote:
| Yes, they want it to be an echo chamber for one-sided
| political rants instead. Which is what it is now.
| pembrook wrote:
| Twitter/X doesn't have a problem with corporate accounts.
| They murdered reach on brand accounts in the algorithm
| loooong ago (mid 2010s), you basically will never see
| company tweets in the feed even if you follow them.
|
| I think it's more the fact that bluesky's core demographic
| are angry political obsessives (who are angry enough about
| politics to join a new social network over said politics).
| I can't think of a worse way to create a community of
| people than filtering by "I'm angry about political stuff."
|
| Turns out the old social norm of "don't talk politics with
| neighbors" was an example of a good Chestertons fence.
| rchaud wrote:
| Since when did a damn website have to be a "platform"? Did
| anyone ask to chat with Time Warner on the public AOL
| chatrooms of the 90s? Were Digg users interested in hearing
| from Blockbuster in the 2000s?
|
| Adobe could try to offer virtual "office hours" with
| employees helping people learn to use the software, give
| something back to their users. Instead they immediately
| treated it like another marketing channel with a formulaic
| and lazy engagement bait question that I'm sure they thought
| would work the same way it does on Twitter and Instagram.
| scarab92 wrote:
| Platforms which drive away normal users with unwarranted
| hate become increasingly concentrated with toxic people
| over time.
|
| If bluesky don't find a way to escape this spiral of
| driving away normal people and attracting toxic people it's
| going to become a sort of left-wing 4chan.
| rchaud wrote:
| Have a peek at the Facebook comments on Adobe's account.
| The sentiment is the same. We live in an economy where
| customers have no outlet to have their concerns heard,
| while companies set up shop on communal forums to blast
| their bullhorn. Why should communication be one way?
|
| It's interesting that you see this as a moderation issue
| for Bluesky rather than an opportunity for a billion
| dollar brand to rethink the way they communicate online.
| sandspar wrote:
| Saying that BlueSky resembles Facebook comments isn't
| exactly a glowing review.
| rchaud wrote:
| I'm addressing the assertion that mean comments will
| scare off 'normal people'. It hasn't yet on Facebook,
| Reddit, Instagram etc. Brand pages get blasted
| everywhere, it comes with the territory.
| sandspar wrote:
| Facebook has size and inertia. Bluesky is small so needs
| high status early adopters. Such people have reputations
| to maintain so will avoid toxic drama like Bluesky. The
| sites are in different life stages.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| How is the Adobe corporate account a "normal user"?
| Define "normal people"?
| stafferxrr wrote:
| I don't think it possible with the the twitter/bluesky UI
| to not become dominated by grandstanding, attention
| starved, narcissists.
|
| The same way a photo sharing app is going to become
| dominated by attention starved, narcissists posting sexy
| photos.
|
| Normal users just don't have the same motivation to post.
|
| It is like complaining rotting meat is attracting flies.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Oh no! Imagine if all the corporate advertisers _left_
| our social media platform!
|
| That would be like Hacker News but without all the shills
| using it. Practically unrecognizable, all the "normal
| people" would be gone.
| 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.
| thatnerdyguy wrote:
| But...restricted reach is exactly how Bluesky works. People
| you follow show up in your feed, and only them. You can
| look at other feeds that are not as restricted, but you are
| making that choice.
| gs17 wrote:
| Bluesky has the "Discover" feed that is definitely not
| only people you follow (sometimes, when it feels like it,
| they'll be on top of it).
| Alupis wrote:
| People will just go back to Twitter/X, again, because despite
| all the falling-sky predictions it remains the single most
| important social media platform of our day. Governments
| around the world announce actual world-changing news on it -
| kind of all you need to know.
| smj-edison wrote:
| See A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy: https://web.archive.org/w
| eb/20080708220307/http://shirky.com...
| 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.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I don't use either lately because I've found that to be
| better for mental health overall, but to me it seemed that
| Bluesky was generally better about staying "on track" when it
| comes to showing relevant things, once trained. Xitter
| really, _really_ likes to veer off course and so much as
| stopping scrolling for a second while an undesired post is on
| screen is enough for it to start showing more of the same
| type.
|
| Bsky doesn't have blue check replies which is a major point
| in its favor too. I don't think I've ever seen a worthwhile
| blue check reply, it's like if one purposefully dredged up
| the worst YouTube video comments they could find and pinned
| them at the top.
| gs17 wrote:
| > but to me it seemed that Bluesky was generally better
| about staying "on track" when it comes to showing relevant
| things, once trained. Xitter really, really likes to veer
| off course and so much as stopping scrolling for a second
| while an undesired post is on screen is enough for it to
| start showing more of the same type.
|
| What is your "track"? Bluesky seemed to be behaving exactly
| like you described Twitter, and the only explanation I
| could come up with was that the process of clicking on a
| post to block/mute the account (which is what I was told to
| do to curate my feed) was considered enough engagement that
| my feed should be more and more of what I don't want any
| of.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| For me at least, Bsky acted that initially but it tapered
| off after a certain threshold of training. After that it
| was pretty solid.
|
| For Xitter it didn't matter how much I trained it,
| eventually it'd insert something I didn't want to see and
| even the slightest hint of engagement would push my feed
| that direction. This could happen even after multiple
| weeks of training.
| 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.
| thatnerdyguy wrote:
| My X experience was far more partisan than Bluesky. Not being
| able to get away from seeing the latest thoughts of user
| numero uno was also a turn off.
| huhkerrf wrote:
| I've heard it described as Digital Canada, which I think is
| just the perfect description.
| zifpanachr23 wrote:
| Lmao
| rvz wrote:
| I've seen worse. In terms of the most hostile, Mastodon takes
| the crown.
| juped wrote:
| It's kinda sad to see it become Truth Social But For The Other
| Team.
| esjeon wrote:
| The Bluesky community is left-leaning and mainly consists of
| early adopters - basically, a group of active idealists. It's
| unsurprising that they are highly hostile toward a company with
| a history of exploitative behavior. Additionally, the current
| political situation significantly affects their emotional
| stability, negatively.
|
| I mean, yeah, the place is a kind of minefield these days, but
| I don't blame people. It just happens.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Bluesky's users love drama.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| frankly in some ways the audience for bluesky is more similar
| to HN, but in like a bad way.
| throwme_123 wrote:
| Yes, the elephant in the room is Bluesky itself. In my
| experience, it's way more toxic than Twitter/X.
| devmor wrote:
| The last time I logged into my twitter account (which I use
| maybe once or twice a year to post about tech or complain to a
| customer service account) the first thing I saw was a paid ad
| espousing white nationalism and The Great Replacement
| conspiracy theory.
|
| I have a very hard time believing that Bluesky is more hostile
| than Twitter.
| cma wrote:
| Maybe it shouldn't have been surprising after Democrats removed
| abolishing the death penalty from their party platform, but all
| the Mangione stuff on bluesky was pretty sad to see.
| fullshark wrote:
| Well yeah Bluesky is predominantly left wing, and the left wing
| is angry right now.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| So far, Bluesky hasn't been inserting alt-right nutjobs into my
| feed like Twitter has.
|
| Bluesky seems to focus on curating your own feed, to the point
| where mass blocklists will block hundreds or thousands of
| accounts, and not every blocklist is reliable. The "block
| first, ask questions later" approach is very freeing and I've
| been practicing it on social media long before it gained
| traction on Bluesky.
|
| I expect the platform will be very painful for people who
| believe everyone should be subjected to their opinion (the
| people who will cry censorship because Reddit shadow-banned
| them). Good riddance, I'd say; they can be happy on Twitter
| with the rest of their kind.
|
| On average, my experience has been a lot better. I'm guessing
| that's mostly because I had to fight and subdue Twitter to
| exclusively show me content from the people I follow, combined
| with social media's general attraction to alt-right nutjobs
| (and of course, Twitter's owner being an alt-right nutjob
| doesn't help either).
| 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.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| > Still, I wouldn't invite any of these people to my house.
|
| I think this is one of the most profound statements I've read
| all year. Perfectly sums up all the quiet backlash by middle
| America against the trolls that have pulled the party into
| extremes.
|
| It's not that they're bad people, they just get over excited
| and nobody wants to deal with the headache right now.
|
| I see it at work in the lunch room conversations where someone
| starts spewing passive aggressive hate and it really kills the
| vibe.
| energy123 wrote:
| Negative people should be terminated after a few days of
| confirmation that they are negative. The dose makes the
| poison so you have to get them out quickly.
| 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.
| dharmab wrote:
| Which ones?
| vachina wrote:
| One that I use frequently is FaceApp. They seem to on
| device face touchups. For subject removal Google photos is
| very good at it, though it needs to upload your photo.
| karaterobot wrote:
| 95% of use cases is a stretch, even if you mean "a
| combination of many different AI apps with their own
| subscriptions, totaling more than the cost of a subscription
| to everything Adobe makes, not just Photoshop". Photoshop
| does a lot of stuff.
| 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
| munchler wrote:
| I use a copy of Photoshop Elements 10 from about a decade ago.
| Still works great and prevents me from over-editing my photos
| with crappy "looks" that make them "pop".
| ajxs wrote:
| Affinity Photo. It has an inexpensive perpetual license, and
| supports all the use-cases I previously needed Photoshop for.
| dharmab wrote:
| Affinity for most editing and Krita for digital painting.
| 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)
| mxuribe wrote:
| Was about to mention photopea as well...I should add that i'm
| by no means a person who uses this type of software on a
| regular basis....But whenever i need it i reach for either GIMP
| or photopea, and last few years, its been photopea far more
| often.
|
| Honestly, i wish Adobe would still offer the conventional
| license, but with an additional hosting option that consumer
| can *choose* to activate and pay more for, or not...so that,
| basically:
|
| * I pay a one-time license to use photoshop offline - and for
| however long i wish (understanding that after its end of life i
| may not eligible for security updates, but that's fair)
|
| * Now, for storing of files, i would need to of course store
| them locally on my machine.
|
| * But, if i *chose* to pay an ongoing subscription, that is
| when Adobe would host files for me....so i can still use their
| product offline, and they only charge me for use of online file
| storage...and i wouldn't mind if there were a premium on that
| charge, since i get that i would be paying for an ongoing
| storage service.
|
| That gives me choice, it gives them money (both for licensing
| and ongoing hosting subscription), and i would figure everyone
| would be content....
|
| ...but, i guess the current world does not work that way, eh?
| So, i guess i will continue to avoid their products, heading
| towards alternatives like photopea, Gimp, etc.
| 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.
| UtopiaPunk wrote:
| I don't want to come across as judgey, gate-keeping what
| is in good taste or what should make you "feel bad." The
| human element is just a very crucial part, at least for
| me. Art is a way of humans beings connectig with each
| other. That can be high-brow stuff, but that can also be,
| like, pulpy action movies or cheesy romance novels.
| Someone might be expressing deep beautiful ideas that
| change my life forever, or they might think that it was
| totally sick to have a car jump over a chasm and through
| a big loud explosion. In both cases, I'm engaging with
| another human being, at least at some level, at that
| means _something._
|
| But if I see something that I think is cool and
| interesting, and then I discover that it was mostly the
| result of a few AI prompts, then I just don't care about
| it anymore. I don't "feel bad" that I thought it
| interesting, rather, I just completely lose interest.
|
| I do fear that it will be increasingly difficult to tell
| what is generated by AI and what is created by humans.
| Just examining myself, I think that would mean I would
| retreat from mainstream pop-culture stuff, and it would
| be with sadness. It's a bleak future to imagine. It seems
| reminiscent of the "versificator" in George Orwell's
| 1984.
| 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.
| UtopiaPunk wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment that "most people want
| entertainment, not art," or at least they do a lot of the
| time. I have a pretty wide definition of what is art, in
| that almost anything created by a human could be
| appreciated as art (whether that's a novel, a building,
| the swinging of a baseball bat, or even a boring
| sidewalk). But a lot of people, a lot of the time engage
| with movies and books and the like as merely
| "entertainment." There's art there, but art is a two-way
| interaction between the creator(s) and the audience. Even
| in the pulpiest, most corporate creations. I'm not
| engaging with cat food commercials as art, but one
| genuinely could. I agree that AI can generate stuff that
| is entertaining.
|
| "The idea that only humans can make that kind of work has
| already been disproven." That I disagree with, and it
| ultimately is a matter of "what is art." I won't pretend
| to offer a full, complete definition of what is art, but
| at least one aspect of defining what is and is not art
| is, in my opinion, whether is was created by a human or
| not. There is at least some legal precedent that in order
| for a copyright to be granted, the work has to be created
| by a human being: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_se
| lfie_copyright_disput...
|
| "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."
|
| Again, by my definition at least, AI cannot create
| "original art." But I'll concede that it is conceivable
| that AI will generate entertainment that is more popular
| and arousing than the entertainment of today. That is a
| rather bleak future to imagine, though, isn't it? It
| seems reminiscent of the "versificator" of 1984.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| > 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?
|
| Why not? The output of AI is usually produced at the
| request of a human. So if the human will then alter the
| request such that the result suits whatever the human's
| goal is, why would there be no point?
|
| This, to me, sound like the debate of whether just
| pressing a button on a box to produce a photograph is
| actually art, compared to a painting. I wonder whether
| painters felt "threatened" when cameras became
| commonplace. AI seems just like a new, different way of
| producing images. Sure, it's based on prior forms of art,
| just like photography is heavily inspired by painting.
|
| And just because most images are weird or soulless or
| whatever doesn't disqualify the whole approach. Are most
| photographs works of art? I don't think so. Ditto for
| paintings.
|
| To your point about Instagram profiles, I actually do
| follow some dude who creates "AI art" and I find the
| images do have "soul" and I very much enjoy looking at
| them.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| The fact that you are a paying user who does not hate
| some thing that other users do, does not change the fact
| that they do, and that they are the final authority on
| what they hate and why they hate it.
|
| It has nothing to do with you. You are free not to have
| the same priorities as them, but that's all that
| difference indicates, is that your priorities are
| different.
|
| The "what is art?" stuff is saying why I think that "get
| as good as a human artist" is a fundamentally invalid
| concept.
|
| Not that humans are the mostest bestest blessed by god
| chosen whatever. Just that it's a fundamentally
| meaningless sequence of words.
| visarga 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.
|
| There is always an actual human who has actual human
| experience in the loop, the AI doesn't need to have it.
| AI doesn't intend to draw anything on its own, and can't
| enjoy the process, there has to be a human to make it
| work on either intent (input) or value (output) side.
| 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.
| sureIy wrote:
| > proprietary file formats
|
| Gimp can't handle them?
| mamonoleechi wrote:
| If not, Affinity Photo or Photopea will probably do the
| job.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| For InDesign magazines with embedded images, for example,
| I'm not aware of any compatible 3rd party software
| mandmandam wrote:
| Here are some options which might help [0] (Bias: I love
| Affinity Publisher and _despise_ Adobe).
|
| 0 - https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/225
| 143-wha...
| jwitthuhn wrote:
| It sort of can but all non-adobe software I know of, even
| commercial stuff like Affinity Photo, has spotty support
| for some PSD features.
|
| Basically any given PSD will certainly load correctly in
| photoshop, but you're rolling the dice if you want to
| load it into anything else. More so if you are using more
| modern features.
| xeonmc wrote:
| Have you seen the recently posted video "For Profit
| (Creative) Software"?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4mdMMu-3fc
| 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 :)
| dylan604 wrote:
| Does it work on modern hardware running modern OS?
| Specifically, wondering if this was a Mac version. I could
| see WinX versions still running, but the Mac arch has
| changed significantly: 32bit -> 64bit, mactel -> AppleSI
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I haven't tried so I can't say for sure but my hunch is
| that you'd have better luck running old CS versions on
| modern Macs with WINE, which can run 32-bit x86 Windows
| binaries on ARM just fine (via Rosetta).
|
| Performance is obviously going to take a hit though.
| Depending on the machines in question one would probably
| get better results from a current gen x86 box running
| that same Windows version of CS1/CS2/CS3 running through
| WINE (or of course Windows 11, but then you're stuck with
| Windows 11).
| Lammy wrote:
| I have the offline CS3 Mac version too, but it's 32-bit
| Intel so you can't run it on anything after Catalina. The
| Win32 version works fine on Windows 10.
| 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.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Pixelmator Pro is very close... but Mac only, still. Image
| editing on Linux is rough.
| dgellow wrote:
| Have you tried Affinity?
| 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.
| skissane wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Lots of people have had their lives disrupted by
| technological and economic changes before - entire
| careers which existed a century ago are now gone. Given
| society provided little or no compensation for prior such
| cases of disruption, what's the argument for doing
| differently here?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Moral growth and learning from history?
| skissane wrote:
| There's a big risk that you end up creating a scheme to
| compensate for technological disruption in one industry
| and then fail to do so in another, based on the political
| clout / mindshare / media attention each has - and then
| there are many people in even worse personal situations
| (through no fault of their own) who would also miss out.
|
| Wouldn't a better alternative be to work on improving
| social safety nets for everybody, as opposed to providing
| a bespoke one for a single industry?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _Given society provided little or no compensation for
| prior such cases of disruption_
|
| That's going to be hard for you to justify in the long
| run, I think. Virtually everybody who ever lost a job to
| technology ended up better off for it.
| disconcision wrote:
| > Virtually everybody who ever lost a job to technology
| ended up better off for it.
|
| this feels like a much stronger claim than is typically
| made about the benefits of technological progress
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Certainly no stronger than the claim I was responding to.
| They are essentially pining for the return of careers
| that haven't existed for a century.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Virtually everybody who ever lost a job to technology
| ended up better off for it._
|
| That's plain wrong, and quite obviously so. You're
| demonstrating here a very common misunderstanding of the
| arguments people affected by (or worried about)
| automation taking their jobs make. In a very concise
| form:
|
| - It's true that _society_ and _humanity_ so far always
| benefited from eliminating jobs through technology, _in
| the long term_.
|
| - It's _not_ true that society and humanity benefited in
| the immediate term, due to the economic and social
| disruption. And, most importantly:
|
| - It's _not_ true that _people who lost jobs to
| technology_ were better off for it - those people, those
| specific individuals, as well as their families and local
| communities, _were all screwed over by progress_ , having
| their lives permanently disrupted, and in many cases
| being thrown into poverty _for generations_.
|
| (Hint: yes, there may be new jobs to replace old ones,
| but those jobs are there for the _next generation of
| people_ , not for those who just lost theirs.)
|
| Understanding that distinction - society vs. individual
| victims - will help make sense of e.g. why Luddites
| destroyed the new mechanized looms and weaving frames. It
| was not about technology, it was about capital owners
| pulling the rug from under them, and leaving them and
| their children to starve.
| petre wrote:
| You're only going yo get "AI art" in the future because
| artists will have get a second job at McDonalds to
| survive. The same old themes all over again. It's like
| the only music is Richard Clayderman tunes.
| anileated wrote:
| > The entire legal edifice around recognizing and
| protecting intellectual property is an entirely
| artificial construct
|
| The presence of "natural" vs. "artificial" argument is a
| placeholder for nonexistent substantiation. There is
| never a case when it does anything else but add a
| disguise of objectivity to some wild opinion.
|
| Artificial as opposed to what? Do you consider what
| humans do is "unnatural" because humans are somehow not
| part of nature?
|
| If some humans (in case of big tech abusing copyright,
| vast majority, once the realization reaches the masses)
| want something and other humans don't, what exactly makes
| one natural and another unnatural other than your own
| belonging to one group or the other?
|
| > that goes against the nature of information and
| knowledge
|
| What is that nature of information and knowledge that you
| speak about?
|
| > 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
|
| Its point has been to encourage innovation, creativity,
| and open information sharing--exactly those things that
| gave us ML and LLMs. We would have none of these in that
| rosy land of IP communism where no idea or original work
| belongs to its author that you envision.
|
| Recognition of intellectual ownership of original work
| (coming in many shapes, including control over how it is
| distributed, ability to monetize it, and just being able
| to say you have done it) is the primary incentive for
| people to do truly original work. You know, the work that
| gave us GNU Linux et al., true innovation that tends to
| come when people are not giving their work to their
| employer in return for paycheck.
|
| > IP laws were built on moral arguments, so it's only
| fair to change them on moral grounds too.
|
| That is, perhaps, the exact point of people who argue
| that copyright law should be changed or at least
| clarified as new technology appears.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > I'm not the one being rugpulled out of a career path by
| GenAI,
|
| That's quite a bold assumption. Betting that logic and
| reasoning ability plateaus prior to "full stack
| developer" seems like a very risky gamble.
| skywhopper wrote:
| In the context of encouraging art, it totally is! Copyright
| and patents are 100% artificial and invented legal concepts
| that are based solely on the distaste for others profiting
| off a creator's ideas. The reason for them is to encourage
| creativity by allowing creators to profit off new ideas.
|
| So there's no reason why "distaste" about AI abuse of human
| artists' work shouldn't be a valid reason to regulate or
| ban it. If society values the creation of new art and
| inventions, then it will create artificial barriers to
| encourage their creation.
| bmacho wrote:
| Yup, banning AI for the sake of artist would be exactly
| the same as the current copyright laws. (Also they are
| attacking AI not purely for fear of their jobs, but bc it
| is illegal already.)
| _bin_ wrote:
| Disagree. Authority is given Congress to establish an IP
| regime for the purpose of "promot[ing] the progress of
| science and useful arts". You would have to justify how
| banning gen AI is a. feasible at all, particularly with
| open-weight models; and b. how it "promotes the progress
| of useful arts." You would lose in court because it's
| very difficult to argue that keeping art as a skilled
| craftsman's trade is worse for its progress than lowering
| the barriers to individuals expressing what they see.
|
| I think bad AI makes bad output and so a few people are
| worried it will replace good human art with bad AI art.
| Realistically, the stuff it's replacing now is bad human
| art: stock photos and clipart stuff that weren't really
| creative expression to start with. As it improves, we'll
| be increasingly able to go do a targeted inpaint to
| create images that more closely match our creative
| vision. There's a path here that lowers the barriers for
| someone getting his ideas into a visual form and that's
| an unambiguous good, unless you're one of the "craftsmen"
| who invested time to learn the old way.
|
| It's almost exactly the same as AI development. As an
| experienced dev who knows the ins and outs really well I
| look at AI code and say, "wow, that's garbage." But
| people are using it to make unimportant webshit
| frontends, not do "serious work". Once it can do "serious
| work" that will decrease the number of jobs in the field
| but be good for software development as a whole.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > Right, but "distaste" isn't grounds for trying to ban
| something
|
| I disagree. There are many laws on the books codifying
| social distastes. They keep your local vice squad busy.
| _bin_ wrote:
| I thought most people supported moving away from that and
| towards a more socially liberal model. If we're no longer
| doing that I have a whole stack of socially conservative
| policies I guess I'll go back to pushing.
|
| I don't think y'all really want to go down this road; it
| leads straight back to the nineties republicans holding
| senate hearings on what's acceptable content for a music
| album.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Many laws come down to distaste at the root. There's
| usually an alternative angle about market efficiency or
| social stability or whatever if you want to frame it that
| way. The same applies in this case as well.
|
| For but a few examples consider laws regarding gambling,
| many aspects of zoning, or deceptive marketing.
|
| What's the purpose of the law if not providing stability?
| Why should social issues be exempted from that?
| weregiraffe wrote:
| >Right, but "distaste" isn't grounds for trying to ban
| something.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_obscenity_law
| 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:
| You just chided people for having strong opinions about
| AI infringement without a court ruling to back them up
| but now you're saying that creating/promoting an entire
| industry based on a legal grey area is a social norm that
| you have no strong feelings about. I would have thought
| the same high bar to speak on copyright for those who
| believe it infringes would be applied equally to those
| saying it does not, especially when it financially
| benefits them. I don't think we'll find consensus.
| bawolff wrote:
| This is silly. What are you proposing? A coup to ban AI?
| Because that is the alternative to waiting for
| legislators and courts.
| Riverheart wrote:
| Never proposed a ban, the issue is copyright, use
| licensed inputs and I could care less.
|
| Pro AI people need to stop behaving like it's a foregone
| conclusion that anything they do is right and protected
| from criticism because, as was pointed out, the legality
| of what is being done with unlicensed inputs, which is
| the majority of inputs, is still up for debate.
|
| I'm just calling attention to the double standard being
| applied in who is allowed to have an opinion on what the
| legal outcome should be prior to that verdict. Temporal
| said people shouldn't "pretend or assume" that lots of AI
| infringes on other people's work because the law hasn't
| caught up but the same argument applies equally to them
| (AI proponents) and they have already made up their mind,
| independent of any legal authority, that using unlicensed
| inputs is legal.
|
| The difference in our opinions is that if I'm wrong, no
| harm done, if they're wrong, lots of harm has already
| been done.
|
| I'm trying to have a nuanced conversation but this has
| devolved into some pro/anti AI, all or nothing thing. If
| you still think I want to ban AI after this wall of text
| I don't know what to tell you dude. If I've been unclear
| it's not for lack of trying.
| bawolff wrote:
| But this is hardly limited to AI.
|
| Copyright is full of grey areas and disagreement over its
| rules happen all the time. AI is not particularly special
| in that regard, except perhaps in scale.
|
| Generally the way stuff moves forward is somebody tries
| something, gets sued and either they win or lose and we
| move forward from that point.
|
| Ultimately "harm" and "legality" are very different
| things. Something could be legal and harmful - many
| things are. In this debate i think different groups are
| harmed depending on which side that "wins".
|
| If you want to have a nuanced debate, the relavent issue
| is not if the input works are licensed - they obviously
| are not, but on the following principles:
|
| - de minimis - is the amount of each individual
| copyrighted work too small to matter.
|
| - is the AI just extracting "factual" information from
| the works separate from their presentation. After all
| each individual work only adjusts the model by a couple
| bytes. Is it less like copying the work or more like
| writing a book about the artwork that someone could later
| use to make a similar work (which would not be copyright
| infringement if a human did it)
|
| - fair use - complicated, but generally the more
| "transformative" a work is, the more fair use it would
| be, and AI is extremely transformative. On the other hand
| it potentially competes commercially with the original
| work, which usually means less likely to be fair use (and
| maybe you could have a mixed outcome here, where the AI
| generators are fine, but using them to sell competing
| artwork is not, but other uses are ok).
|
| [Ianal]
| 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.
| jillyboel wrote:
| It's unauthorized commercial use. Which part of that is
| confusing to you?
| rcxdude wrote:
| So is google books, and that got ruled as fair use. That
| it's being used commercially is not a slam dunk case
| against an argument for fair use.
| 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.
| rcxdude wrote:
| deterministic is neither here nor there for copyright
| infringement. a hash of an image is not infringing, and a
| slightly noisy version of it is.
| Riverheart wrote:
| Nobody is trying to copyright an image hash and
| determinism matters because it's why the outputs are
| derivative rather than inspired.
| bawolff wrote:
| That is not how copyright works. "Inspired" works can
| still be derrivative. In the US, entirely deterministic
| works are not considered derrivative works as they aren't
| considered new creative works (if anything they are
| considered the same as the original). See https://en.wiki
| pedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel...
| Riverheart wrote:
| "In the US, entirely deterministic works are not
| considered derrivative works as they aren't considered
| new creative works (if anything they are considered the
| same as the original)"
|
| Okay, so if the inputs to the model are my artwork to
| replicate my style, is the output copyrightable by you?
| You just said deterministic works aren't derivative,
| they're considered the same as the original. That's not
| anything I've heard AI proponents claim and the outputs
| are more original than a 1 to 1 photocopy but I assume
| like the case you linked to that the answer will be, no,
| you can't copyright.
| bawolff wrote:
| That depends on how much "creativity" is in the prompt,
| but generally i would lean towards no, the AI created
| work is not copyrightable by the person who used the
| model to "create" it.
|
| I believe that is the conclusion the US copyright office
| came to as well https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ (i didnt
| actually read their report, but i think that's what it
| says)
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Are anime artists all in copyright violation of each
| other?
| 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.
| Riverheart wrote:
| You know why we put up with copyrighted info in the human
| brain right? Because those are human beings, it's
| unavoidable. This? Avoidable.
|
| Also, the model isn't a human brain. Nobody has invented
| a human brain.
|
| And the model might not infringe if its inputs are
| licensed but that doesn't seem to be the case for most
| and it's not clearly transparent they don't. If the
| inputs are bad, the intent of the user is meaningless. I
| can ask for a generic super hero and not mean to get
| superman but if I do I can't blame that on myself, I had
| no role in it, heck even the model doesn't know what it's
| doing, it's just a function. If I Xerox Superman my
| intent is clear.
| tpmoney wrote:
| > You know why we put up with copyrighted info in the
| human brain right? Because those are human beings, it's
| unavoidable.
|
| I would hope we put up with it because "copyright" is
| only useful to us insofar as it advances good things that
| we want in our society. I certainly don't want to live in
| a world where if we could forcibly remove copyrighted
| information from human brains as soon as the "license"
| expired that we would do so. That seems like a dystopian
| hell worse than even the worst possible predictions of
| AI's detractors.
|
| > I can ask for a generic super hero and not mean to get
| superman but if I do I can't blame that on myself, I had
| no role in it, heck even the model doesn't know what it's
| doing, it's just a function.
|
| And if you turn around and discard that output and ask
| for something else, then no harm has been caused. Just
| like when artists trace other artists work for practice,
| no harm is caused and while it might be copyright
| infringement in a "literal meaning of the words" it's
| also not something that as a society we consider
| meaningfully infringing. If on the other hand, said
| budding artist started selling copies of those traces, or
| making video games using assets scanned from those
| traces, then we do consider it infringement worth
| worrying about.
|
| > If I Xerox Superman my intent is clear.
|
| Is it? If you have a broken xerox machine and you think
| you have it fixed, grab the nearest papers you can find
| and as a result of testing the machine xerox Superman,
| what is your intent? I don't think it was to commit
| copyright infringement, even if again in the "literal
| meaning of the words" sense you absolutely did.
| Riverheart wrote:
| I'm saying that retaining information is a natural,
| accepted part of being human and operating in society.
| Don't know why it needed to be turned into an Orwell
| sequel.
| tpmoney wrote:
| I had assumed when you said that a human retaining
| information was "unavoidable" and a machine retaining it
| was "avoidable" that the implication was we wouldn't
| tolerate humans retaining information if it was also
| "avoidable". Otherwise I'm unclear what the intent of
| distinguishing between "avoidable" and "unavoidable" was,
| and I'm unclear what it has to do with whether or not an
| AI model that was trained with "unlicensed" content is or
| isn't copyright infringing on its own.
| Riverheart wrote:
| I'm in the camp that believes that it's neither necessary
| nor desirable to hold humans and software to the same
| standard of law. Society exists for our collective
| benefit and we make concessions with each other to ensure
| it functions smoothly and I don't think those concessions
| should necessarily extend to automated processes even if
| they do in fact mimic humans for the myriad ways in which
| they differ from us.
| tpmoney wrote:
| So what benefit do we derive as a society from deciding
| that the capability for copyright infringement is in and
| of itself infringement? What do we gain by overturning
| the current protections the law (or society) currently
| has for technologies like xerox machines, VHS tapes,
| blank CDs and DVDs, media ripping tools, and site
| scraping tools? Open source digital media encoding, blank
| media, site scraping tools and bit-torrent enable
| copyright infringement on a massive scale to the tune of
| millions or more dollars in losses every year if you
| believe the media companies. And yet, I would argue as a
| society we would be worse off without those tools. In
| fact, I'd even argue that as a society we'd be worse off
| without some degree of tolerated copyright infringement.
| How many pieces of interesting media have been "saved"
| from the dust bin of history and preserved for future
| generations by people committing copyright infringement
| for their own purposes? Things like early seasons of Dr
| Who or other TV shows that were taped over and so the
| only extant copies are from people's home collections
| taped off the TV. The "De-specialized" editions of Star
| Wars are probably the most high quality and true to the
| original cuts of the original Star Wars trilogy that
| exist, and they are unequivocally pure copyright
| infringement.
|
| Or consider the youtube video "Fan.tasia"[1]. That is a
| collection of unlicensed video clips, combined with
| another individual's work which itself is a collection of
| unlicensed audio clips mashed together into a
| amalgamation of sight and sound to produce something new
| and I would argue original, but very clearly also full of
| copyright infringement and facilitated by a bunch of
| technologies that enable doing infringement at scale. It
| is (IMO) far more obviously copyright infringement than
| anything an AI model is. Yet I would argue a world in
| which that media and the technologies that enable it were
| made illegal, or heavily restricted to only the people
| that could afford to license all of the things that went
| into it from the people who created all the original
| works, would be a worse world for us all. The ability to
| easily commit copyright infringement at scale enabled the
| production of new and interesting art that would not have
| existed otherwise, and almost certainly built skills
| (like editing and mixing) for the people involved. That,
| to me, is more valuable to society than ensuring that all
| the artists and studios whose work went into that media
| got whatever fractions of a penny they lost from having
| their works infringed.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-6xk4W6N20&pp=ygUJZ
| mFuLnRhc...
| Riverheart wrote:
| The capability of the model to infringe isn't the
| problem. Ingesting unlicensed inputs to create the model
| is the initial infringement before the model has even
| output anything and I'm saying that copyright shouldn't
| be assigned to it or its outputs. If you train on
| licensed art and output Darth Vader that's cool so long
| as you know better than to try copyrighting that. If you
| train on licensed art and produce something original and
| the law says it's cool to copyright that or there's just
| no one to challenge you, also cool.
|
| If you want to ingest unlicensed input and produce
| copyright infringing stuff for no profit, just for the
| love of the source material, well that's complicated. I'm
| not saying no good ever came of it, and the tolerance for
| infringement comes from it happening on a relatively
| small scale. If I take an artists work with a very unique
| style and feed it into a machine then mass produce art
| for people based on that style and the artist is someone
| who makes a living off commissions I'm obviously doing
| harm to their business model. Fanfics/fanart of Nintendo
| characters probably not hurting Nintendo. It's not black
| or white. It's about striking a balance, which is hard to
| do. I can't just give it a pass because large
| corporations will weather it fine.
|
| That Fantasia video was good. You ever see Pogo's Disney
| remixes? Incredible musical creativity but also
| infringing. I don't doubt the time and effort needed to
| produce these works, they couldn't just write a prompt
| and hit a button. I respect that. At the same time, this
| stuff is special partly because there aren't a lot of
| things like it. If you made a AI to spit out stuff like
| this it would be just another video on the internet.
| Stepping outside copyright, I would prefer not to see a
| flood of low effort work drown out everything that feels
| unique, whimsical, and personal but I can understand
| those who would prefer the opposite. Disney hasn't taken
| it down in the last 17 years and god I'm old.
| https://youtu.be/pAwR6w2TgxY?si=K8vN2epX4CyDsC96
|
| The training of unlicensed inputs is the ultimate issue
| and we can just agree to disagree on how that should be
| handled. I think
| CaptainFever wrote:
| Appeal to nature fallacy.
|
| https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appe
| al-...
| Riverheart wrote:
| I'm not saying it's better because it's naturally
| occurring, the objective reality is that we live in a
| world of IP laws where humans have no choice but to
| retain copyrighted information to function in society. I
| don't care that text or images have been compressed into
| an AI model as long as it's done legally but the fact
| that it is has very real consequences for society since,
| unlike a human, it doesn't need to eat, sleep, pay taxes,
| nor will it ever die which is constantly ignored in this
| conversation of what's best for society.
|
| These tools are optional whether people like to hear it
| or not. I'm not even against them ideologically, I just
| don't think they're being integrated into society in
| anything resembling a well thought out way.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That's simply not good enough. This is not merely a
| machine that can be misused if desired by a bad actor,
| this is a machine that _specializes_ in infringement. It
| 's a machine which is internally biased, by the nature of
| how it works, towards infringement, because it is
| inherently "copying:" It is copying the weighted averages
| of millions perhaps billions of training images, many of
| which depict similar things. No, it doesn't explicitly
| copy one Indiana Jones image or another: It copies a shit
| ton of Indiana Jones images, mushed together into a "new"
| image from a technical perspective, but will inherit all
| the most prominent features from all of those images, and
| thus: it remains a _copy._
|
| And if you want to disagree with this point, it'd be most
| persuasive then to explain why, if this is not the case,
| AI images regularly end up infringing on various aspects
| of various popular artworks, like characters, styles,
| intellectual properties, when those things _are not being
| requested by the prompt._
|
| > 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.
|
| No, you aren't, because an artist is a person that
| doesn't want to suffer legal consequences for drawing
| something owned by someone else. Unless you specifically
| commission "Indiana Jones fanart" I in fact, highly doubt
| you'll get something like him because an artist will want
| to use this work to promote their work to others, and
| unless you are driven to exist in the copyright gray area
| of fan created works, which is inherently legally dicey,
| you wouldn't do that.
| 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.
| skissane wrote:
| There exist image generation models that were trained on
| purely licensed content, e.g. Getty's. I don't know about
| Adobe's specifically-but if not, it seems like a problem
| Adobe could easily fix-either buy/license a stock image
| library for AI training (maybe they already have one),
| and use that to train their own model-or else license
| someone else's model e.g. Getty's
| spookie wrote:
| Well they do license the art they use, but in... let's
| say... "interesting" ways through their ToS.
| bolognafairy wrote:
| They are training using licensed images! That's the
| thing! There's some sort of ridiculous brainworm
| infecting certain online groups that has them believing
| that stealing content is inherent in using generative AI.
|
| I watch this all quite closely, and It's chronically
| online, anime / fursona profile picture, artists.
|
| Exact same thing happened when that 'open' trust and
| safety platform was announced a few months ago, which
| used "AI" in its marketing material. This exact same
| group of people--not even remotely the target audience
| for this B2B T&S product--absolutely lost it on Bluesky.
| "We don't want AI everywhere!" "You're taking the
| humanity out of everything!" "This is so unethical!" When
| you tell them that machine learning has been used in
| content moderation for decades, they won't have a bar of
| it. Nor when you explain that T&S AI isn't generative and
| almost certainly isn't using "stolen" data. I had
| countless people legitimately say that having humans have
| to sift through gore and CSAM is a Good Thing because it
| gives them jobs, which AI is taking away.
|
| It's all the same sort of online presence. Anime profile
| picture, Ko-fi in bio, "minors dni", talking about not
| getting "commissions" anymore. It genuinely feels like a
| psy-op / false flag operation or something.
| subjectsigma wrote:
| > I had countless people legitimately say that having
| humans have to sift through gore and CSAM is a Good Thing
| because it gives them jobs, which AI is taking away.
|
| Link even a single example of someone explicitly saying
| this and I would be astounded
| CaptainFever wrote:
| The whole point is that Adobe's AI doesn't do this, yet
| is still hated. It reveals that some people simply hate
| the whole concept of generative AI, regardless of how it
| was made. You're never going to please them.
| blibble wrote:
| > It reveals that some people simply hate the whole
| concept of generative AI, regardless of how it was made.
| You're never going to please them.
|
| and unfortunately for adobe: these people are its
| customers
| 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?
| drilbo wrote:
| who else has would ever have a significantly large store of
| licensed material?
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Or alternatively, who else could afford the licensing
| costs?
| 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.
| crimony wrote:
| It's worse only if AI turns out to be of high value.
|
| In that case only large companies that can afford to
| license training data will be dominant.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _Adobe isn 't trying to be ethical, they are trying to be
| more legally compliant,_
|
| Ethics (as opposed to morals) is about codified rules.
|
| The law is a set of codified rules.
|
| So are these really _that_ different (beyond how the law is a
| hodge-podge and usually a minimum requirement rather than an
| ideal to reach for)?
| zmmmmm wrote:
| The ship has sailed, but I can understand artists feeling
| that no matter how any AI is trained prospectively, it was
| only made possible because the methods to do so were learned
| through unethical means - we now know the exact model
| architectures, efficient training methods and types of
| training data needed so that companies like Adobe can
| recreate it with a fraction of the cost.
|
| We obviously can never unscramble that egg, which is sad
| because it probably means there will never be a way to make
| such people feel OK about AI.
| 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.
| rmwaite wrote:
| Oh snap, you're right. My mistake!
| _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.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| It's like 95% of the way there for me--there are a few
| little workflow niggles that keep me from fully switching
| over, like the inability to do a full export-close cycle
| without saving, without having to use my mouse (moving the
| hand to the trackpad/mouse is annoying when it's not
| necessary).
|
| In Photoshop, likely because it's been used by pros for
| decades, little conveniences are all over the place, like
| the ability to press 'd' for 'Don't Save' in a save dialog
| box.
|
| That said, the past few versions of Photoshop, which moved
| away from fully-native apps to some sort of web UI
| engine... they are getting worse and worse. On one of my
| Macs, every few weeks it gets stuck on the 'Hand' tool, no
| matter what (even surviving a preferences nuke + restart),
| until I reboot the entire computer.
| 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.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I haven't seen a _single_ AI image that were _good_ let
| alone _great_.
|
| To be completely honest, I can't always _tell_ , but when I
| come across images that give me inexplicable gastric
| discomfort that I can't explain why, and then it was
| _revealed_ that it had been AI generated, that explains it
| all(doesn 't remove the discomfort, just explains it).
|
| I don't have reasons to believe that I have above-average
| eyes on art among HNers, but it'll be funny and painful if
| so. I mean, I'm no Hayao "I sense insult to life itself"
| Miyazaki...
| gs17 wrote:
| > I'm no Hayao "I sense insult to life itself" Miyazaki
|
| He was saying that in response to a computer-animated
| zombie that dragged itself along in a grotesque manner.
| It wasn't that it was animated by a computer, it was that
| he found it offensive in that it felt like it was making
| light of the struggles of people with disabilities. You
| definitely would also find it disgusting.
| gs17 wrote:
| > They don't hate good AI images, and when they see great
| AI images, they don't even realize they are made by AI.
|
| There's a decent size group of people who have a knee-jerk
| negative response toward AI regardless of quality. They'd
| see that image, like it, and then when told it's AI, turn
| on it and decide it was obviously flawed from the
| beginning. Is there a version of "sour grapes" where the
| fox did eat the grapes, they were delicious, but he
| declared they were sour after the fact to claim moral
| superiority?
| 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.
| becquerel wrote:
| If everyone hated AI images, nobody would be creating them.
| 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.
| gs17 wrote:
| I've never heard anyone (at least not anyone who wasn't
| already using GIMP) complain about the concept of paying for
| it, it's always been the way Adobe tries to squeeze extra
| money out of you. First it was bundles where you'd have to
| buy software you didn't need to get what you do. Then it was
| a subscription. Also, each CS version seemed to add very
| little for the price.
| 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
| esalman wrote:
| It's funny pg once compared hackers with painters, but
| given how people abuse crypto and generative AI, is seems
| hackers have more in common with thieves and robbers.
| labster wrote:
| Hollywood was right all along then about hackers being
| outlaws, then. Hacker News must be the very heart of the
| Dark Web (where "dark" is short for late-stage
| capitalism).
| jordanb wrote:
| > hackers being outlaws
|
| That gives them too much credit. "Outlaws" are folk
| heroes. Robin Hood was an outlaw, Bonnie and Clyde were
| outlaws. Luigi is an outlaw.
|
| Nobody's going to be telling fables about the exploits of
| Sam Altman.
| econ wrote:
| AI could do it. Seems a good use of it.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Probably want to look good to their customer base - artists
| XorNot wrote:
| Where did the poster say they think Adobe is motivated by
| that? They said Adobe _is_ operating that way.
| jfengel wrote:
| They don't have to be motivated by ethics. I'm fine with them
| grudgingly doing ethical things because their customer base
| is all artists, many of whom would look for an alternative
| product.
| djeastm wrote:
| You are fine with it, of course, because you're reasonable.
| But OP's claim was that Adobe is "trying to be ethical with
| its AI training data and no one seems to even care" as if
| we're _meant_ to give special consideration to a company
| for doing the only economically sensible thing when most of
| its customers are artists.
| ambicapter wrote:
| The great thing about loudly painting Adobe with the
| brush of "ethical AI training" (regardless of why they're
| doing it) is that the backlash will exponentially bigger
| if/when they do something that betrays that label.
| Potentially big enough to make them reverse course. It's
| not much, but it's something.
| nearbuy wrote:
| You should be. Otherwise, you're showing Adobe and other
| companies that ethical training is pointless, and isn't
| economically sensible after all.
| bolognafairy wrote:
| A strawman argument so you can condescendingly and snarkily
| lecture someone? I can see you were among those mouthing off
| at Adobe on Bluesky.
| eloisius wrote:
| "Mouthing off" is always uttered by someone with an
| undeserved sense of authority over the other party, like a
| mall cop yelling at a teenager for skateboarding
| 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.
| stafferxrr wrote:
| Thanks. I will check this out. I was shocked how terrible
| the output of Photoshop AI tools are. Not even midjourney 4
| level.
| ZeroTalent wrote:
| also check out gpt4o image generation. It can fit in up
| 20 objects with correct texts and it's very good at
| following instruction, in my experience.
| 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.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Yes and this is what I was worried about in my essay on AI.
|
| They have burned so much of goodwill that the community is not
| willing to engage even with positive things now.
|
| This broadly is happening to tech as well.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| There's no evidence that their generative tools are more
| ethical.
|
| Even if you believe everything they say, they are lying by
| omission. For example, for their text to image technology, they
| never specify what their text language model is trained on -
| it's almost certainly CLIP or T5, which is trained on plenty of
| not-expressly-licensed data. If they trained such a model from
| scratch - they don't have enough image bureau data to make
| their own CLIP, even at 400m images, CLIP only performs well at
| the 4-7b image-caption pair scale - where's the paper? It's
| smoke and mirrors dude.
|
| There's a certain personality type that is getting co-opted on
| social media like Hacker News to "mook" for Adobe. Something on
| the intersection of a certain obsessive personality and Dunning
| Kruger.
| AnthonyMouse 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 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.
| mjmsmith wrote:
| Most artists would prefer not to compete with an AI image
| generator that has been trained on their own artwork without
| their permission, for obvious reasons.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| That's exactly the moral argument Adobe is taking away from
| them, and the same argument has minimal economic relevance
| because it's so rare that a customer requires a specific
| individual artist's style.
| __loam wrote:
| Artists don't hate Adobe just because they're making an
| AI art generator, they hate Adobe because it's a
| predatory, scummy corporation that is difficult to work
| with and is the gatekeeper for common industry tools.
| Also, Adobe didn't take away the moral arguments against
| AI art, they just used previously liscened imagery that
| existed before they started making AI art generators.
| There's still an argument that it's deceptive to
| grandfather in previously licensed work into a new
| technology, and there's still an argument that spending
| resources on automating cultural expression is a shitty
| thing to do.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| As an artist, mine major complain about Adobe is their
| spyware software design. Constant calls for adobe
| servers, unable to work offline in field with their
| product and no support for linux.
|
| Also, I'm curious, when they start censoring exports from
| their software. They already do that for money scans.
|
| I'm not worry about image generators. They'll never
| generate art by definition. AI tools are same as camera
| back then - a new tool that still require human skills
| and purpose to create specific tasks.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Artists don't hate Adobe just because they're making an
| AI art generator, they hate Adobe because it's a
| predatory, scummy corporation that is difficult to work
| with and is the gatekeeper for common industry tools.
|
| From what I've seen from artists, they hate Adobe for
| both reasons, and the AI thing is often more of a
| dogmatic, uncompromising hate (and is not _based on_ any
| of the various rationalizations used to persuade others
| to act in accord with it) and less of the kind of hate
| that is nevertheless willing to accept products for
| utility.
| mjmsmith wrote:
| That must be why AI image prompts never reference an
| artist name.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The vast majority of AI image prompts _don 't_ reference
| an artist name, and the ones that do are typically using
| it as a proxy for a given style and would generally get
| similar results by specifying the name of the style
| instead of the name of the artist.
|
| The ones using the name of the artist/studio (e.g.
| Ghiblification) also _seem_ more common than they are
| because they 're the ones that garner negative attention.
| Then the media attention a) causes people perceive it as
| being more common than it is and b) causes people do it
| more for a short period of time, making it temporarily
| more common even though the long-term economic relevance
| is still negligible.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| The latter example (Ghibli) is also somewhat misleading.
| Other studios sometimes use very similar styles. They
| might not have the same budget for fine detail throughout
| the entire length of the animation, and they probably
| don't do every production with that single art style, but
| when comparing still frames (which is what these tools
| generate after all) the style isn't really unique to a
| single studio.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| He's arguing that artists are so scared of Adobe and AI
| that they actually want Adobe to be more evil so artists
| have more to complain about.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| They want AI image generation to go away. That isn't
| likely to happen, but their best hope would be to make
| copyright claims or try to turn the public against AI
| companies with accusations of misappropriation. Adobe's
| "ethical" image generator would be immune to those claims
| while still doing nothing to address their primary
| concern, the economic consequences. It takes away their
| ammunition while leaving their target standing. Are they
| supposed to like a company doing that or does it just
| make them even more upset?
| Sir_Twist wrote:
| I'd say that is a bit of an ungenerous characterization. Is
| it possible that it could be both? That while artists maybe
| do feel under attack in terms of competition, that there is a
| genuine ethical dilemma at hand?
|
| If I were an artist, and I made a painting and published it
| to a site which was then used to train an LLM, I would feel
| as though the AI company treated me disingenuously,
| regardless of competition or not. Intellectual property laws
| aside, I think there is a social contract being broken when a
| publicly shared work is then used without the artist's
| direct, explicit permission.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Artists do not want to get paid micropennies for use-of-
| training-data licenses for something that destroys the
| market for new art. And that's the only claim Adobe Firefly
| makes for being ethical. Adobe used a EULA Roofie to make
| all their Adobe Stock contributors consent to getting
| monthly payments for images trained on in Firefly.
| Sir_Twist wrote:
| Indeed, and I agree that Adobe is in the wrong here. For
| an agreement between Adobe and an artist to be truly
| permissive, the artist should have the ability to not
| give their consent. Ethically, I think Adobe is in the
| same position as the other AI companies - if the artist
| doesn't directly (EULAs are not direct, in my opinion)
| agree to the terms, and if they don't have the option to
| decline, then it isn't an agreement, it is an method of
| coercion. If an artist, like you said, doesn't want to be
| paid micropennies, they shouldn't have to agree.
|
| I believe it is completely reasonable for an artist to
| want to share their work publicly on the Internet without
| fear of it being appropriated, and I wish there was a
| pragmatic way they could achieve this.
| furyofantares wrote:
| I've never seen anyone make the complaint about image
| classifiers or image segmentation. It's only for generative
| models and only once they got good enough to be useful.
| lancebeet wrote:
| I'm not entirely convinced by the artists' argument, but
| this argument is also unconvincing to me. If someone
| steals from you, but it's a negligible amount, or you
| don't even notice it, does that make it not stealing? If
| the thief then starts selling the things they stole from
| you, directly competing with you, are your grievances
| less valid now since you didn't complain about the theft
| before?
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| Nothing was stolen from the artists but instead used
| without their permission. The thing being used is an
| idea, not anything the artist loses access to when
| someone else has it. What is there to complain about? Why
| should others listen to the complaints (disregarding
| copyright law because that is circular reasoning)?
| ChrisPToast wrote:
| So many problems with your reasoning.
|
| "Nothing was stolen from the artists but instead used
| without their permission"
|
| Yes and no. Sure, the artist didn't loose anything
| physical, but neither did music or movie producers when
| people downloaded and shared MP3s and videos. They still
| won in court based on the profits they determined the
| "theft" cost them, and the settlements were absurdly
| high. How is this different? An artist's work is
| essentially their resume. AI companies use their work
| without permission to create programs specifically
| intended to generate similar work in seconds, this
| substantially impacts an artist's ability to profit from
| their work. You seem to be suggesting that artists have
| no right to control the profits their work can generate -
| an argument I can't imagine you would extend to
| corporations.
|
| "The thing being used is an idea"
|
| This is profoundly absurd. AI companies aren't taking
| ideas directly from artist's heads... yet. They're not
| training their models on ideas. They're training them on
| the actual images artists create with skills honed over
| decades of work.
|
| "not anything the artist loses access to when someone
| else has it"
|
| Again, see point #1. The courts have long established
| that what's lost in IP theft is the potential for future
| profits, not something directly physical. By your
| reasoning here, there should be no such things as
| patents. I should be able to take anyone or any
| corporation's "ideas" and use them to produce my own
| products to sell. And this is a perfect analogy - why
| would any corporation invest millions or billions of
| dollars developing a product if anyone could just take
| the "ideas" they came up with and immediately undercut
| the corporation with clones or variants of their
| products? Exactly similar, why would an artist invest
| years or decades of time honing the skills needed to
| create imagery if massive corporations can just take that
| work, feed it into their programs and generate similar
| work in seconds for pennies?
|
| "What is there to complain about"
|
| The loss of income potential, which is precisely what
| courts have agreed with when corporations are on the
| receiving end of IP theft.
|
| "Why should others listen to the complaints"
|
| Because what's happening is objectively wrong. You are
| exactly the kind of person the corporatocracy wants -
| someone who just say "Ehhh, I wasn't personally impacted,
| so I don't care". And not only don't you care, you
| actively argue in favor of the corporations. Is it any
| wonder society is what it is today?
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| It's piracy, not theft. Those aren't the same thing but
| they are both against the law and the court will assess
| damages for both.
|
| The person you replied to derailed the conversation by
| misconstruing an analogy.
|
| > what's happening is objectively wrong.
|
| Doesn't seem like a defensible claim to me. Clearly
| plenty of people don't feel that way, myself included.
|
| Aside, you appear to be banned. Just in case you aren't
| aware.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > The person you replied to derailed the conversation by
| misconstruing an analogy.
|
| Curious why you say this. They seem to have made the
| copyright infringement analogous to theft and I addressed
| that directly in the comment.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| I dunno, man. Re-read your comment but change one
| assumption:
|
| > They still won in court based on the profits they
| determined the "theft" cost them, and the settlements
| were absurdly high.
|
| Such court determinations are wrong. At least hopefully
| you can see how perhaps there is not so much wrong with
| the reasoning, even if you ultimately disagree.
|
| > you actively argue in favor of the corporations
|
| I am also, per your reasoning, arguing against "the
| corporations".
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Is it possible that it could be both? That while artists
| maybe do feel under attack in terms of competition, that
| there is a genuine ethical dilemma at hand?
|
| The rights artists have over their work are economic
| rights. The most important fair use factor is how the use
| affects the market for the original work. If Disney is
| lobbying for copyright term extensions and you want to make
| art showing Mickey Mouse in a cage with the CEO of Disney
| as the jailer, that's allowed even though you're not
| allowed to open a movie theater and show Fantasia without
| paying for it, and even though (even because!) Disney would
| not approve of you using Mickey to oppose their lobbying
| position. And once the copyright expires you can do as you
| like.
|
| So the ethical argument against AI training _is_ that the
| AI is going to compete with them and make it harder for
| them to make a living. But substantially the same thing
| happens if the AI is trained on some other artist 's work
| instead. Whose work it was has minimal impact on the
| economic consequences for artists in general. And being one
| of the artists who got a pittance for the training data is
| little consolation either.
|
| The real ethical question is whether it's okay to put
| artists out of business by providing AI-generated images at
| negligible cost. If the answer is no, it doesn't really
| matter which artists were in the training data. If the
| answer is yes, it doesn't really matter which artists were
| in the training data.
| card_zero wrote:
| > But substantially the same thing happens if the AI is
| trained on some other artist's work instead.
|
| You could take that further and say that "substantially
| the same thing" happens if the AI is trained on _music_
| instead. It 's just another kind of artwork, right?
| Somebody who was going to have an illustration by
| [illustrator with distinctive style] might choose to have
| music instead, so the music is in competition, so all
| that illustrator's art might as well be in the training
| data, and that doesn't matter because the artist would
| get competed with either way. Says you.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| If you type "street art" as part of an image generation
| prompt, the results are quite similar to typing "in the
| style of Banksy". They're direct substitutes for each
| other, neither of them is actually going to produce
| Banksy-quality output and it's not even obvious which one
| will produce better results for a given prompt.
|
| You still get images in a particular style by specifying
| the name of the style instead of the name of the artist.
| Do you really think this is no different than being able
| to produce only music when you want an image?
| card_zero wrote:
| This hinges on denying that artists have distinctive
| _personal_ styles. Instead your theory seems to be that
| styles are genres, and that the AI only needs to be
| trained on the genre, not the specific artist 's output,
| in order to produce that artist's style. Which under this
| theory is equivalent to the generic style.
|
| My counter-argument is "no". Ideally I'd elaborate on
| that. So ummm ... no, that's not the way things are. Is
| it?
| pastage wrote:
| Actually moral rights is what allow you to say no to AI.
| It is also a big part of copyright and more important in
| places were fair use does not exist in the extent it does
| in the US.
|
| Further making a variant of a famous art piece under
| copyright might very well be a derivative. There are
| court cases here just some years for the AI boom were a
| format shift from photo to painting was deemed to be a
| derivative. The picture generated with "Painting of a
| archeologist with a whip" will almost certainly be deemed
| a derivative if it would go through the same court.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Actually moral rights is what allow you to say no to
| AI.
|
| The US doesn't really have moral rights and it's not
| clear they're even constitutional in the US, since the
| copyright clause explicitly requires "promote the
| progress" and "limited times" and many aspects of "moral
| rights" would be violations of the First Amendment.
| Whether they exist in some other country doesn't really
| help you when it's US companies doing it in the US.
|
| > Further making a variant of a famous art piece under
| copyright might very well be a derivative.
|
| Well of course it is. That's what derivative works are.
| You can also produce derivative works with Photoshop or
| MS Paint, but that doesn't mean the purpose of MS Paint
| is to produce derivative works or that it's Microsoft
| rather than the user purposely creating a derivative work
| who should be responsible for that.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Well one could argue that this ought to be a discussion
| of morality and social acceptability rather than
| legality. After all the former can eventually lead to the
| latter. However if you make that argument you immediately
| run into the issue that there clearly isn't broad
| consensus on this topic.
|
| Personally I'm inclined to liken ML tools to backhoes. I
| don't want the law to force ditches to be dug by hand.
| I'm not a fan of busywork.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Adobe only trains its AI on properly licensed images that
| the artists have explicitly signed a contract with Adobe to
| train on.
| squigz wrote:
| I don't think all artists are treating this tool as such an
| existential threat.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _I don 't think all artists are treating this tool as such
| an existential threat._
|
| 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.
| squigz wrote:
| One could say much the same thing about photographers, or
| digital artists. They don't use paint, or sculpt marble,
| so they're not real artists.
| Juliate wrote:
| Who talked about "real" here?
|
| 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?
| luckylion wrote:
| > With AI prompters, the output is part function of the
| (very small) prompt, part function of the (huuuuuuuge)
| training set, part randomness.
|
| 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.
| Juliate wrote:
| Ludicrous rebuttal.
|
| 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.
| luckylion wrote:
| > Reducing this to "orientation of the camera" is such a
| dismissive take
|
| 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.
| Juliate wrote:
| You're confusing the tools (which are their own marvels)
| and the practice (which is art, using the tools).
|
| 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.
| squigz wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Oh, the irony...
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| So AI tools take you from "artist" to "art director".
| That's an interesting thought. I think I agree.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Historically, it took a long time for traditional artists
| (painters and sculptors) to see photographers as fellow
| artists rather than mere technicians using technology to
| replace art. The same thing was true of early digital
| artists who dared to make images without paint or
| pencils.
| stafferxrr wrote:
| Of course not. People who are actually creative will use
| new tools creatively.
|
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I went through a phase of using the A.I. tools to touch up
| photos and thought they were helpful. If I needed to add
| another row of bricks to a wall or remove something they get
| it done. I haven't used it in a few months because I'm taking
| different photos than I was back then.
| davidee wrote:
| We used that particular feature quite heavily. A lot of our
| clients often have poorly cropped photos or something with
| branding that needed removal and the context-aware
| generative fill was quite good.
|
| But we decided to drop Adobe after some of their recent
| shenanigans and moved to a set of tools that didn't have
| this ability and, frankly, we didn't really miss it that
| much. Certainly not enough to ever give Adobe another cent.
| timewizard wrote:
| > or to make a moral argument that some kind of
| misappropriation is occurring.
|
| They can also make a legal argument that the training set
| will fully reproduce copyrighted work. Which is just an
| actual crime as well as being completely amoral.
|
| > because then it exists and they have to compete with it
|
| The entire point of copyright law is: "To promote the
| Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited
| Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their
| respective Writings and Discoveries."
|
| Individual artists should not have to "compete" against a
| billion dollar corporation which freely engages in copyright
| violations that these same artists have to abide by.
| sneak wrote:
| Subscriptionware is cancer. They deserve all the hate they get.
| sdrothrock wrote:
| > Adobe is the one major company trying to be ethical with its
| AI training data
|
| I was actually contacted by someone at Adobe for a chat about
| disability representation and sensitivity in Japan because they
| were doing research to gauge the atmosphere here and ensure
| that people with disabilities were represented, and how those
| representations would be appropriate for Japanese culture. It
| really blew my mind.
| devmor wrote:
| If they are trying to be ethical, all it takes is one look at
| their stock photo service to see that they are failing
| horribly.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| SUPER ethical to try and put artists and entire _industries_
| out of business to be replaced with Adobe products.
| mesh wrote:
| For reference, here is Adobe's approach to generative ai:
|
| https://www.adobe.com/fireflyapproach/
|
| (I work for Adobe)
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| What can Photoshop AI do that ipadapter / controlnets can't and
| haven't done for the past two years?
|
| "Get artists to use it" is the free square :)
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| ACME is the one major company trying to be ethical with its
| orphan crushing training data and no one even seems to care!
| therealpygon wrote:
| Ethical? You realize most of their training data was obtained
| by users forced agreement to a EULA with the intention of their
| art being sold on Adobe's marketplace without it ever being
| made explicit their art was going to be used for AI training
| until much later, right?
| mort96 wrote:
| To people who care about ethics wrt. "AI", there is no such
| thing as ethical "AI".
|
| To people who are on board with the "AI" hype train, there is
| no ethical problem to be solved wrt. "AI".
|
| Neither side cares.
| 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.
| hitekker wrote:
| Bluesky has a real problem with outrage addiction; it's
| myopic to pin the blame on Adobe.
| 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.
| grayhatter wrote:
| > It's all about engagement.
|
| The problem with this sentence is that words mean
| things... I don't use social media, so take this with
| some salt, but I do write things I hope people will find
| useful. I could just as easily share them to a social
| media and still wouldn't be looking for 'engagement'. It
| would still be in that same hope someone finds it useful.
| While I wouldn't object that someone _could_ define or
| describe reading it as engagement. I wouldn 't.
| Engagement is what you chase if you're looking to sell
| ads, because engaged people interact with ads too.
|
| Saying everyone wants engagement as if that's the means
| and the ends is oblivious to the fact that people,
| humans, don't organically give a fuck about engagement.
| Attention, and therefore belonging, or appreciation. Yes,
| absolutely. You could also describe that goal as seeking
| engagement, but again because words mean things,
| attention, or belonging are both better words for the
| desire the human has.
|
| Influencers arguably want engagement, but I'd also
| describe them as companies in addition to being people.
| Truth be told, I'm only convinced they're the former.
|
| > 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 ?".
|
| I don't find it silly at all. A company who's earned it's
| reputation for taking from people, shows up and asks for
| more. Predictably, people said no! If Adobe wanted
| attention, and belonging, and came bearing gifts, like
| photos, artist resources, what have you. I suspect the
| vitriol wouldn't have been so bad. (They've earned their
| reputation) But at least they would be able to represent
| the idea they are seeking belonging. Paying in with the
| hope of getting something back. Instead they couldn't
| read the room, and demanded attention and engagement.
| lysace wrote:
| Meh. Adobe _is_ a large corp. You 'd want want them to
| masquerade as something they are not? Why would that be better?
|
| I am so over pile-ons by people who see themselves as being SO
| important.
|
| Also: it feels really weird to defend Adobe.
| WatchDog wrote:
| It's so bland I don't understand why it elicited any response
| at all.
| philipmnel wrote:
| The general mood on Bluesky is very opposed to AI, especially
| AI art. Since Adobe now has AI integrated into their
| products, people on Bluesky hate them.
| dlivingston wrote:
| There is an off-putting sort of attitude on BlueSky
| ("sneering mockery", I guess?). Same attitude was present
| on Twitter during the pre-Musk era and seems to have
| migrated over.
| EasyMark wrote:
| I'm not surprised but disheartened that people have so little
| going on in their life they thing trying to boycott a bsky
| corporate account is a good use of their time.
| drdaeman wrote:
| I think it's rather the opposite - there's way too much going
| on in their life, specifically stuff that they have no
| control over, so they vent all that stress wherever they can.
| s3p wrote:
| Disagree. I think when people are that busy they don't have
| time to find and attack a corporation on BlueSky.
| educasean wrote:
| You could say the same about most Internet activity: busy
| people don't have time to post on HN, or make stupid
| LinkedIn posts. Yet here we all are, reading and writing
| despite our busy startup lives.
| drdaeman wrote:
| Oh, my bad, I should've phrased it differently. I didn't
| mean that they're necessarily busy and have to handle a
| lot of matters, but rather that a lot of things are
| happening around them. It surely can be stressful even if
| one's not actively involved in something, but if they're
| merely witnessing something happening.
| bigyabai wrote:
| So what did _you_ do this friday?
| jrflowers wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the amount of time and energy it took you to
| write this post is more or less equal to the amount of time
| and energy energy it took somebody else to write a post
| making fun of the Adobe account
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| Much like you leaving this comment?
| jimbob45 wrote:
| The left has spent the last decade proudly bullying everyone
| for wrongthink, including going after employment and family
| members. It should come as no surprise then that corporations
| wouldn't participate above the bare minimum on a predominantly
| leftist forum.
| tstrimple wrote:
| It's likely both. In most large organizations I've worked with,
| there is a split between true believers and cynics. And often
| the true believers are so bought in they have trouble
| recognizing the cynics. There are likely earnest folks behind
| every bland social media post. Doesn't mean their product is
| worth anything either way.
| thiht wrote:
| It gives "how do you do fellow kids" vibes
| hammock wrote:
| I don't disagree, but what are they supposed to post otherwise?
| 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?
| chrisldgk wrote:
| Because switching to a competitors option is a much bigger
| task that just staying on whichever version you're on
| currently, which you can't do anymore since Adobe _only_
| offers subscriptions.
|
| Switching to a different creative software solution is a
| much bigger task than just buying the new license and
| installing the program. You have to relearn basic tasks
| that are second nature in the other thing, change workflows
| due to different file formats or you might just not have
| the option to because the rest of the industry depends on
| the competitors software. This is true for individual
| professionals as well as big companies, where switching to
| a different software package also means dropping efficiency
| for a while and hiring people to teach your employees your
| new software. This is a step that no company will ever take
| and Adobe has recognized that and taken away the only opt-
| out of paying them assloads forever, which was buying a
| perpetual license and staying on that version.
| 9x39 wrote:
| Some of the lower tier individual plans offer generous
| storage. There's value for having a copy with them vs doing
| everything yourself.
|
| There's a bit of maintenance even if you just stand still. On
| the photo side, I notice them updating distortion correction
| for new lenses that come out, new camera body support, etc --
| that's just a few examples of maintaining existing features,
| separate from the new features they rolled out. Whoever does
| that has bills to pay, and I think that's just a fact across
| the industry.
|
| Someone has to get paid to build, maintain, and extend these
| things, and I don't know if that classifies as rent-seeking.
| 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.
| 9x39 wrote:
| You wouldn't ever rent kit like a body or lens or lights?
| You'd just always buy something outright?
|
| While time goes on, any software toolchain needs maintenance,
| too. What's the ideal model for sustaining that?
|
| Is renting a problem in principle or financially or something
| else?
| 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.
| mattskr wrote:
| Adobe is losing more market share to Canva than anyone
| else. The amount of companies who send me "canva files"
| makes me want to summon the great solar flare that'll emp
| us back to the stone age, tomorrow. Most in house graphic
| design dabblers, typically admins or secretaries who have
| a slight creative flair, don't have Adobe subs anymore.
| They used to and would have the jankiest files ever...
| but they were psds, ai, and ind files. Now, it's all
| canva cloud with extra layers of vomit and headache.
|
| Hobbyists can and should use pro tools, of course. There
| should always be a good opening as many next gen
| professionals come from that route, and bring outside,
| lateral knowledge to grow that tool in novel ways.
|
| When you focus on lobotomizing a pro tool, that's when
| you actively lose market share. Affinity or someone else,
| just needs one or two banger spotlights and then Adobe
| will start seeing real problems. Right now, the lose is
| minor, but it's a crack in the wall. Remember Skype? I
| sure as fuck don't. They played the same fucky fuck game.
| One situation is all it took.
| -__---____-ZXyw wrote:
| > Macs are for rich people with zero taste and sense and
| too much money to burn.
|
| Yes!
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I don't really agree with the cost argument when the
| subscription is more expensive in the long run. Nobody needs to
| upgrade Photoshop every year, they're going to go 2-3 years (if
| not more) between upgrades. And when you do that, it's much
| cheaper to buy up front.
|
| Renting software is just plain a raw deal for the users. It's
| more expensive, plus you don't get to keep it after you stop
| paying. The only one who wins is the vendor.
| mattskr wrote:
| I don't fully disagree with you. The subscription business
| practice has become incredibly predatory and that's why it
| has a foul taste in everyone's mouth.
|
| However, something to understand, most professional graphic
| design does not happen in Photoshop. It happens more in
| InDesign and Illustrator. Once you go design firm, print
| house or corporate, like PS is... there... but not like...
| "gee I need this every single day". One of the key features
| to InDesign is the fact that printing to literally any
| commercial or industrial printer works perfectly. I used to
| work in a medium sized print shop (digital and offset
| presses). You used InDesign to send to the RIPs (software
| that converts the color data properly) and get your intended
| result the first time about 95% of the time (ICC color
| management is a whole different topic). If you try Photoshop,
| ha ha. No. Most normies need to stop subscribing to CC and
| just get the PS sub. Seriously, you're wasting your money.
|
| That's what I pay for in InDesign. Pure fucking consistency
| and less me screaming with difficulties. Quark and MS
| Publisher are great example competitors that thought it's all
| about design and not about output. Pure fucking trash because
| nothing ever printed or exported to PDF consistently. You
| know how MS Word formatting is a nightmare? Yeah, you don't
| get that in InDesign, ever. InDesign does nearly pure raw
| output to a rip with lots of controls. Now, if you have zero
| idea what you're doing, it's a nightmare. Kind of like the
| Manual setting to a pro-consumer DSLR camera. Once you learn
| how to use F-stop, shutter, ISO, etc, you refuse to use a
| camera without manual control. If you don't understand, you
| think it's stupid to not have the camera (or in this case
| software) think for you.
|
| Plus, InDesign has variable data and other features that make
| booklet layouts a breeze. Hard to wrap your head around at
| first, but once you understand how the tools work, making
| print and digital PDFs, and then maintaining those files,
| reusing those layouts effectively and a whole mess of other
| timing saving features, you'll very, very, very quickly
| understand why someone would be okay with paying 60 or 100
| bucks a month for it... as long as there are regular
| improvements. Blender has more regular, substantial
| improvements and it's free. Part of me thinks if they did a
| $600 one time buy license, then like a $10 a month "update
| subscription" that might be a better compromise. Not sure on
| the exact figures, but you get the point.
|
| Also, from a pro graphic designer/print designer's
| perspective that's been doing this since 2006: Adobe is a
| fuckton more than Photoshop and these anti-Adobe
| conversations treat it as if it's important. PS is more like
| the jingling keys for the normie/public to be distracted by.
| Like PS is important... like how backseats are important to a
| car (unless you're more a photographer... and you don't like
| Lightroom...). If I lost access to PS, I'd shrug and be
| slightly bummed out. But not by much. Illustrator and
| InDesign? Might as well change careers at that point.
| Effectively nerfed and nuked as a designer.
| 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.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| I think it depends on your identity. There are some personal
| identities (no, the identity is not about hating someone)
| that attract a lot of hatred and harassment on BlueSky.
| broodbucket wrote:
| People interact with brands differently to how they interact
| with humans.
| rchaud wrote:
| Indeed. Humans dont make you talk to a chatbot for help or
| have 'no-reply' in their email addresses.
| abhinavk wrote:
| It's kinder to people, especially kind people.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| absolutely not
| sandspar wrote:
| "Kind" people is a shibboleth. "I'm kind to kind people" =
| I'm looking for an excuse to not be nice to someone.
| moonlion_eth wrote:
| Alternative social media contains alternative personalities
| sandspar wrote:
| "Join our site if you're enraged" users act enraged.
| 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
| nullhole wrote:
| I mean, the stunt they pulled to effectively release CS2 as free-
| to-use abandonware was pretty good. Still use it to this day,
| still works fine.
| chrisldgk wrote:
| Another great reason to drop the great ,,For Profit (Creative)
| Software" video[1] for insight on why Adobe's and Autodesk's
| hostile business practices hurt creative professionals so much
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/I4mdMMu-3fc
| bobjordan wrote:
| I had to call it a day and cancel this year. Yearly sub
| approaching $700 per year just to open photoshop files a few
| times per year and maybe edit a pdf file? Fk it I'll find another
| way.
| modzu wrote:
| krita is the way
| misswaterfairy wrote:
| Affinity Photo is excellent, indeed Designer (Illustrator
| alternative) and Publisher (InDesign alternative) are excellent
| as well.
|
| Qoppa PDF Studio is a great alternative to Adobe Acrobat.
|
| Both offer perpetual licences.
| haswell wrote:
| As a photographer, I have a love/hate relationship with Adobe.
| I'm not a fan of many aspects of their business, but Lightroom is
| a (sometimes) excellent product.
|
| On the one hand, I don't have much sympathy for Adobe. On the
| other hand, this whole situation is why I am not on social media
| these days with the exception of HN and niche subreddits.
|
| Even if much of the criticism they receive is warranted, the
| social media climate is just so incredibly toxic that I want no
| part of it.
|
| Feels like there has to be a better way to be social on the
| Internet, but as time goes on I'm increasingly not sure if humans
| can handle it once a certain scale is reached.
| scarab92 wrote:
| Online communities have an inherent death spiral dynamic,
| unless you actively moderate away toxic people.
|
| These people drive away normal folks creating an ever more
| distilled community of unpleasant folks.
|
| How many normal people are going to hang around places like
| reddit and bluesky that are seemingly now filled with hate and
| conspiracy theories.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| Related: https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-
| evaporativ...
| sbszllr wrote:
| Yup, I prefer Lightroom to Capture One, especially for film-
| related workflows.
|
| But I just can't go back to their predatory pricing practices,
| and the absolute malware of a programme that creative cloud is.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I switched to capture 1 due to how poorly adobe handles
| fujifilm raw file even today. Workflow wise it is basically
| the same functions just in different places. Doesn't take
| long to get up and running.
| Peacefulz wrote:
| I still use PS7. No adobe creative cloud, and all you need to
| accomplish some awesome stuff.
| sandspar wrote:
| Social media really brings out the best in people doesn't it?
| Dogpiling, self-congratulation, mimicry, dehumanization,
| scapegoating. It's so lucky for society that many people spend
| hours a day on there!
| stego-tech wrote:
| Man, this was fun to see in real time. A site whose earliest
| adopters were Twitter refugees who hated the crypto/AI/NFT
| boosters, created actual art, and ultimately left Twitter because
| of rampant fascism and bigotry, effectively cyberbullied the
| company and its Head of Social Media so badly the latter left the
| site entirely.
|
| You have to be pretty bad at your job to misread the room so
| terribly. Just taking a casual look at Clearsky's block rankings
| would show how many lists are specifically blocking and targeting
| brands, griftos, fascists, and bigots of various stripes, and
| likely dissuade you from approaching the community without some
| form of battle plan.
|
| Treating BlueSky like a "new Twitter" is a dangerous mistake to
| make, something Adobe learned the hard way. To make matters
| worse, they also poisoned the community well to the point there's
| a fresh witch hunt out for brands and companies to add to block
| lists, thus harming everyone else's "engagement".
| junto wrote:
| This is a spot on analysis. Bluesky and Mastodon are full of
| people that felt and continue to feel disenfranchised and
| excluded. They embraced Bluesky because it reminded them of
| what Twitter used to be and had found themselves what they felt
| was a relatively safe space.
|
| Companies like Adobe and other major tech players have enabled
| the hostile environment we see growing every day. It's no
| wonder that disingenuous posts like this from predatory
| companies receive such a backlash.
| stego-tech wrote:
| Yup. The increasing fragmentation of social media means you
| really need to understand the community you're targeting
| before engaging in outreach. More communities are going to be
| less tolerant of brands and advertisers in general given
| current events and over-saturation of advertising in general,
| so every engagement point matters way more.
| 55555 wrote:
| Adobe runs what must be one of the largest deceptive rebills. The
| vast majority of users signing up for a monthly plan do not
| realize that it is actually an "annual plan, billed monthly" and
| thus that if they cancel after one month (for example) they'll be
| billed for the remaining 11 immediately. I honestly don't know
| how they haven't faced FTC action for this, as it's been their
| primary model for 5-10 years now.
| sepositus wrote:
| Wasn't there some action around this like a year ago? Can't
| find it now, but I thought it was investigated at some point.
| 55555 wrote:
| It seems you're right. I can't find how big the fine was.
| ChatGPT says it is still ongoing. Not sure if that's right.
| https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-
| releases/2024/06/...
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| We all have access to chatgpt. If we want hallucination
| ridden bullshit, we'll find it ourselves.
| elaus wrote:
| It doesn't seem to me like the linked page contains
| "hallucination ridden bullshit".
| bdelmas wrote:
| Yes. AI becoming the first place people go for
| information and replacing facts and first degree of
| source is going to be a scary world.
| caseyy wrote:
| I agree with you about ChatGPT "facts", but the parent
| commenter shared valuable information with a source. No
| need to treat them in such a rude way.
| kergonath wrote:
| The ChatGPT bit brings nothing. Just the source would be
| enough. Nobody feels the need to justify anything by
| saying "looked it up on Google". What matters is the
| actual source, and ChatGPT isn't one.
| simonklitj wrote:
| Yeah, you can change plans (at no cost), then cancel right
| after the change. You get 14 days of free cancellation, which
| resets on plan change.
| hapidjus wrote:
| Did exactly this, got hit with the cacellation fee a couple
| of days later.
| simonklitj wrote:
| Really? Worked for me in February. In that case, this
| workaround might've been patched.
| speff wrote:
| I still don't see why this is a point against Adobe. When you
| select a plan, they very clearly give you 3 options. Monthly,
| Annual billed monthly, and Annual prepaid. The Annual billed
| monthly is just flat-out better for end users over prepaid. Why
| do people want to get rid of it? Because some people FAFO when
| trying to get an annual price while still being able to cancel
| any time?
|
| I do not like Adobe in the slightest, but it's not because of
| their billing practices.
| 55555 wrote:
| It used to not be clear at all. Maybe it is now.
|
| https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-
| releases/2024/06/...
|
| Interestingly, just fyi, they do a reasonable-person test
| when trying these cases. That means they literally pull 100
| people off the street and ask each one to go through the
| funnel and then give them a quiz with questions like "How
| much am I going to be billed?"
|
| So if people are confused, it's basically on you, regardless
| of whether you think you were being clear about the terms.
| speff wrote:
| That's fair - I don't know what their sales page looked
| like prior to the FCC investigation. However in its current
| state, I see no issues with the way the information's
| presented. If a majority of the 100 people can't figure it
| out, I'm not sure what else they can do other than remove
| the option which is better for the consumer. I wouldn't be
| surprised it that's where it'll end up
| tirant wrote:
| Well, you would be surprised how many issues in financial
| education would 100 random people off the street have.
|
| But the contract plan is not aimed at them, but at literate
| computer users most of them working as freelancers (so with
| at least some financial knowledge).
|
| The same way a Pilot Operating Handbook cannot be judged by
| the understanding of random 100 people off the street.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| A pilot might want a PDF reader to read important
| aviation related information.
|
| No one needs a pilots license to read a PDF.
| derefr wrote:
| Signing a contract where, even if you stop using the
| company's service or having anything to do with the company,
| you still have to keep paying them nevertheless... sounds
| like one of those types of deals+ that we invented the
| concept of "inalienable rights" to prevent companies from
| offering.
|
| + I.e. the type of deal where the individual is being asked
| to trade away something they cannot reasonably evaluate the
| net present value of (their own future optionality in a
| future they can't predict) -- which will inevitably be
| presented by the company offering the deal, in a way that
| minimizes/obscures this loss of optionality. In other words,
| it's a deal that, in being able to make it, has the same
| inherent flaws as indentured servitude does -- just with
| money instead of labor.
| speff wrote:
| You're not buying a monthly plan for their Annual billed
| Monthly option. You're literally buying a year's worth, but
| paying it off in 12 installments over time. If someone were
| to buy the monthly plan, cancel it, and still get billed
| for it, yes you would have a point.
| derefr wrote:
| You're not buying "a year's worth." Adobe can't roll a
| truck up with all your future project rendering hours on
| it and dump them on your lawn, such that they would have
| a valid legal argument of "you can't cancel, we already
| gave you the whole thing." What Adobe are giving you,
| each month -- each second, even -- is the DRM licensing
| functionality built into Photoshop continuing to spit out
| a "valid" signal. Because that activation is a continuous
| online process, you _receive that service_ on a second-
| by-second basis (or maybe at most on an online-
| activation-check-granularity basis.)
|
| That being said, maybe we're talking past one-another
| here.
|
| Where I come from (Canada), even if you prepay for a
| service that _charges annually_ (no "annual charged
| monthly" language needed), as long as that service can be
| common-sense-construed as delivering value on a finer
| granularity (by the month, by the second, etc), then if
| you only _use_ that service for some fraction of the plan
| length, and then cancel it -- you are then legally
| obligated to a pro-rated refund of the remaining plan
| length. So if you cancel an annual-billed service after a
| month? You get 11 /12ths of your payment back. If you
| subscribe to a monthly-billed service on January 1 and
| cancel on January 2? You get 30/31ths of your payment
| back. Etc.
|
| Under such a legal doctrine, there is no difference _in
| the total amount owed_ between "billed monthly" when
| subscribed for one month, vs "billed annually" when
| subscribed for one month and then cancelled, vs "annual,
| billed monthly" when subscribed for one month and then
| cancelled.
|
| If you're curious about the set of countries where this
| doctrine applies, here's a page from the Microsoft Store
| support outlining the set of countries where they will
| give out pro-rated refunds for subscriptions:
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/account-
| billing/countrie...
|
| (And if it isn't sickening to you that in general,
| corporations will write logic into their billing systems
| to support this, _and then only activate that logic for
| countries where they 're legally obligated to do so_,
| while -- now with intentionality -- continuing to squeeze
| everyone else for services they've knowingly already cut
| off... then I don't know what to tell you.)
|
| ---
|
| And yes, if you're wondering, there _are_ a few
| exceptions to this pro-rated refund doctrine.
|
| One is real-estate leasing -- because chancery courts are
| weird and make their own rules; but also because a lot of
| the "work" of being a landlord _is_ up-front /annual.
| (Though, admittedly, we also have laws here that force
| real-estate annual leasing contracts to revert to month-
| to-month after a low set number of years -- usually 1 or
| 2 -- with the month-to-month lease rate carried over from
| the "annual, paid monthly" rate.)
|
| The other is for _commercial_ leasing of assets like
| vehicles, construction equipment, servers, etc. This is
| because corporations have much more predictable
| optionality, sure -- but it 's also because corporations
| don't "deserve" protections in the same way individuals
| do. (Same reason investment banks don't get the
| protections of savings banks.)
| sgustard wrote:
| This is useful and informative. But also, no I don't
| expect companies to keep track of everything that is
| illegal anywhere in the world, and then not offer it
| anywhere. Otherwise we'd have no alcohol or chewing gum
| or pet cats.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| The point is that they already have to be aware of and
| have logic to deal with this if they do business in the
| relevant countries. So they've already implemented it and
| are intentionally choosing to withhold it in countries
| that do not legally require them to provide it.
| jen729w wrote:
| I just cancelled my house insurance plan as we're moving
| out. Actually my partner did it, and she told me that there
| was a ~AU$50 cancellation fee.
|
| My natural instinct was to be ropable. But then I realised
| that I had actually been paying an annual insurance policy,
| monthly. I wasn't paying a monthly insurance policy.
|
| Presumably when we signed up, there was a monthly option.
| Presumably it cost more. And so I can hardly be annoyed
| that they're essentially making up that difference now that
| I've chosen to terminate that contract early.
| sanswork wrote:
| I just went back through the sign up process to check and it
| seems pretty obvious these days? I got three options at
| checkout annual billed monthly, monthly, annual.
|
| I hate annual billed monthly but the wording isn't hidden.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| I think it's still not great. The annual/monthly plan says:
|
| _> Annual, billed monthly_
|
| _> US$22.99/mo_
|
| _> Fee applies if you cancel after 14 days_
|
| There's a popup you can open with more information, but that
| just says:
|
| _> If you cancel after 14 days, your service will continue
| until the end of that month's billing period, and you will be
| charged an early termination fee._
|
| It doesn't tell you anywhere what that fee is, and I can't
| find any link to a page with more information.
| liendolucas wrote:
| Fee application for cancelling a subscription service
| should be absolutely illegal.
| maccard wrote:
| It's a fee for cancelling an annual subscription that you
| agreed to.
| liendolucas wrote:
| That's exactly why it should be illegal: so people don't
| have to agree to an abusive and money thirsty contract.
| maccard wrote:
| They have the option right next to that for a monthly
| only option.
| gruez wrote:
| Do you think multi-month agreements like car insurance or
| leases should also be illegal? Maybe if you leased a car
| but 3 months in you're not really feeling it, you should
| be able to cancel your lease without penalty?
| liendolucas wrote:
| You're extrapolating to cases that are different to a
| subscription to a digital software service. Companies
| have slowly but steadily made us shift and put
| subscriptions in our heads because is the easiest way to
| make more money and strictly control their software. This
| is just as pushing ads everywhere is the easiest way to
| make money on almost every website. The ideal, most fair
| consumer approach is to charge the user by its daily
| usage. Why? Because companies are doing exactly the
| opposite, they are charging us for future usage for max
| profitability. Just log each day I have used the app and
| charge me fairly. It can be perfectly done. But the
| excuse obviously from their side would be that is too
| much complex to do that, right? BS.
| gruez wrote:
| >You're extrapolating to cases that are different to a
| subscription to a digital software service. Companies
| have slowly but steadily made us shift and put
| subscriptions in our heads because [...]
|
| Sounds like you're less against the concept of "annual,
| billed monthly" or even the "dark patterns" that Adobe is
| using, and more against the fact that Photoshop is now
| behind a $30/month subscription rather than an one-time
| purchase price like in the Good Old Days(tm).
| liendolucas wrote:
| I'm against how all big companies have enshitified
| themselves and their products in every imaginable way to
| squeeze the last penny from its clients using bordeline
| consumer practices.
| gruez wrote:
| >I'm against how all big companies have enshitified [...]
|
| "enshitified" is so vague that the statement almost a
| tautology. "Bad things are bad". Moreover the original
| claim was not that, but "unfair business practices". Uber
| cutting back on their generous coupons is arguably
| "enshittification" or whatever, but as much as I miss
| those discounted rides/takeouts, it'd be totally
| ludicrous to complain that yanking those coupons was some
| sort of "unfair business practice", as if uber had some
| sort of obligation to offer such coupons in perpetuity.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Failure to disclose the exact amount of the fee up front
| should invalidate it.
| maccard wrote:
| It's 50% of the remaining balance. I do agree that should
| be listed there.
| benoau wrote:
| Because last year ...
|
| > Adobe knowingly "trapped" customers into annual
| subscriptions, the FTC alleged.
|
| > Adobe prioritized profits while spending years ignoring
| numerous complaints from users struggling to cancel costly
| subscriptions without incurring hefty hidden fees, the US
| Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleged in a lawsuit Monday.
|
| > According to the FTC, Adobe knew that canceling
| subscriptions was hard but determined that it would hurt
| revenue to make canceling any easier, so Adobe never changed
| the "convoluted" process. Even when the FTC launched a probe
| in 2022 specifically indicating that Adobe's practices may be
| illegal, Adobe did nothing to address the alleged harm to
| consumers, the FTC complaint noted. Adobe also "provides no
| refunds or only partial refunds to some subscribers who incur
| charges after an attempted, unsuccessful cancellation."
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/06/ftc-sues-
| adobe-o...
| vishnugupta wrote:
| Almost every single one of Adbobe post on HN has a top comment
| about this evil subscription plan.
|
| I fell for it once. But I'm in India so I just cancelled my
| debit card and that was that. Good luck to them to chase me
| through legal means in India. It was still bit of a hassle
| though.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| I had to cancel a card thanks to PayPal's shenanigans.
|
| Now it's much easier to deal with the subscription problems
| due to the new RBI norms.
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| Which norms?
| devsda wrote:
| > actually an "annual plan, billed monthly" and thus that if
| they cancel after one month (for example) they'll be billed for
| the remaining 11 immediately
|
| I don't know if this is a recent policy change, but it is not
| the complete amount but only 50% of the remaining annual amount
| as per their website[1].
|
| If it were something involving physical goods or services I can
| understand, but 50% penalty is still a crazy amount for a
| hosted software service.
|
| 1. https://www.adobe.com/legal/subscription-terms.html
| r33b33 wrote:
| That's why you always use throwaway cards for this.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| I would be too lazy to bother with a throwaway in almost
| all circumstances, but I would 100% attempt a charge back
| in anger. I'm uncertain how my bank would ultimately
| respond though.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Throwaways/virtual cards are my default state. If it's
| worth subscribing, it's worth the seconds it takes to
| generate and copy.
|
| Think about it: you're in control. Not being at the mercy
| of... _whoever_ is great. You said it yourself:
| _attempt_.
|
| Why play with your money? The toys/experiences it can
| afford are _way_ more fun.
|
| Chargebacks are more effort, and IIRC, weigh negatively
| on you as well. Can only do so many. I expect your bank
| would take issue if you _really_ relied on this strategy.
|
| Painful to unsub? How terrible for them. I can be painful
| to bill. _PLONK_ says the pause button.
|
| Learned everything I needed to know from gyms. If they
| don't take a virtual card, but want bank details/etc...
| they're on some bullshit. Pass.
| maayank wrote:
| How do you make virtual cards?
| sensanaty wrote:
| Lots of banks have them these days. In the US there's
| also stuff like privacy.com (unaffiliated, not even in
| the US personally :p)
|
| Last I used Revolut 2 years ago, they even had a
| "disposable" virtual card, meaning after 1 charge it's
| automatically deleted.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Aye, _' privacy.com'_ is who I go with. Would prefer a
| first-party solution like other countries/financial
| services.
|
| It's a little counter-intuitive to introduce _another_
| party to improve privacy. I find it worthwhile for the
| pausable and vendor-locked cards.
| myself248 wrote:
| They can force-post right past Privacy.com's veil,
| NYTimes did it to me. Here's what Privacy's support rep
| had to say about it:
|
| > Hi, Firstname
|
| > I've been reviewing your dispute and wanted to touch
| base with you to explain what happened.
|
| > It appears that the disputed charge is a "force post"
| by the merchant. This happens when a merchant cannot
| collect funds for a transaction after repeated attempts
| and completes the transaction without an authorization --
| it's literally an unauthorized transaction that's against
| payment card network rules. It's a pretty sneaky move
| used by some merchants, and unfortunately, it's not
| something Privacy can block.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| How does the force post get to _you_ though? Surely that
| involves privacy.com participating.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Exactly. The number of times I've caught support for
| various companies outright lying to me is actually fairly
| alarming.
|
| It's also very obviously not against the payment network
| rules, otherwise privacy.com wouldn't be actively
| participating.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Absolutely, you have excessive chargebacks and you will
| find your credit card issuer "opting to end their
| relationship with you".
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| It's rather off topic though. To date I've only
| encountered dispute worthy things approximately once or
| twice a decade. I feel the Adobe example would qualify if
| it happened to me though, despite the fact that it sounds
| as though I'd likely lose on that one.
| gruez wrote:
| Adobe did a pretty good job at disclosing the "annual
| plan, billed monthly" aspect so they'll likely win any
| chargebacks. That said, your bank might just cave and
| reimburse you out of pocket.
| reisse wrote:
| Of course it's highly unlikely they'll go in court for a
| single user, but if everyone starts doing this, they'll
| sue. It doesn't matter the payment failed, you still
| legally owe Adobe (or any other service) money.
| croes wrote:
| They could lose because of unfair business practices.
| Taek wrote:
| Elaborating on this, it's almost certainly a civil case
| that goes to arbitration, which really means that the
| arbitrator has to feel like Adobe is in the right. It's
| quite informal relative to typical legal settings, and if
| the arbitrator doesn't feel like siding with Adobe...
| they won't.
|
| Furthermore, it's going to cost Adobe a minimum of $1500
| to even bring the case to arbitration, and probably $15k
| more in legal fees to actually win.
|
| So yes, it's actually a difficult battle for Adobe to win
| and the costs will be much higher than the payout.
| brookst wrote:
| This.
|
| Adobe knows this. It's a numbers game; if they have an
| honest monthly subscription and someone cancels, they get
| nothing.
|
| If they have this scammy subscription and they collect
| 50% of the remainder for 50% of people, it's like a free
| 25% (of the remaining "annual" term).
| gruez wrote:
| Is it? It clearly says "Annual, billed monthly" and "Fee
| applies if you cancel after 14 days." next to the price.
| Bluestrike2 wrote:
| _This is a bit longer than I would have wanted to spend
| writing about Adobe billing practices, but oh well._
|
| Is it the most manipulative dark pattern in e-commerce?
| Hardly--there are plenty far more vicious--but it's still
| an attempt to prime a would-be subscriber to focus on the
| _annual, billed monthly_ and play on their understanding
| of the word "monthly" by using it in both options.
|
| "Annual, billed monthly" is set in smaller italicized
| type right under the actual price of _US$59.99 /mo_ on
| the main pricing page[0]. You've now been primed to focus
| on the $59.99 price. Only when you select a plan and a
| modal pops up do you see that there's a separate
| _monthly_ option available from the _annual, billed
| monthly_ option that 's been helpfully pre-selected or a
| third _annual, prepaid_ option.
|
| The point is to quickly shepherd subscribers through the
| payment process. The user sees the $59.99 option they
| expected is pre-selected, so most hit continue and move
| on. If they look beyond the price in bold to the plan
| descriptions in smaller italics, well, there are
| literally decades of eye tracking studies showing users
| skim websites rather than carefully reading every single
| word. The price in bold draws in the eye, the word
| "monthly" _is_ present so the user catches the word, and
| then they move on to the continue button.
|
| Adobe could have easily labeled the plan _Annual, billed
| in 12 installments_ or even _Annual, billed in monthly
| installments_ to better differentiate the two options.
| They didn 't for a reason. The word "monthly" comes with
| certain expectations. Using it for both the actual
| monthly plan and the default _annual, billed monthly_
| plan allows those expectations to bleed over to both.
|
| While it mentions a fee for cancelling after 14 days,
| you'll find nary a mention of _what_ that fee actually is
| until you track down a legal page[1] that isn 't linked
| to any point during the payment process up until the
| sign-in prompt (I didn't bother creating a new account to
| look beyond that). At the very least, it's not present
| during the stage when you're still relatively uncommitted
| and somewhat more likely to notice any more onerous terms
| were they present.
|
| Finally, there's an option for a 30-day free trial of
| Adobe Stock. I'd have sworn it was pre-selected a few
| years ago, but I may be mistaken on that. If it was, then
| at least that's a change for the better. Anyhow, did you
| notice how it's on a 30 day trial period whereas the
| normal plan has a 14 day cancellation window? Let those
| deadlines fall to the back of your mind for a week or
| two, and will you remember which is 14 days and which is
| 30? There was no reason why Adobe had to use 30 days for
| Stock or only 14 days for their other offerings. But it
| adds to the confusion, and that's the entire purpose of a
| dark pattern. Stock is also an "annual, billed monthly
| plan," but nowhere in the checkout process is it
| mentioned that Stock also has a large cancellation fee.
| That's hidden in a separate part of the Subscription
| Terms page.[1]
|
| Adobe could easily just choose to settle for a straight-
| up monthly payment plan with no bullshit and completely
| sidestep recurring--but largely toothless, given the
| state of most alternatives to their software--criticism
| over their billing practices. They could eliminate the
| dark patterns and make their plan selection and payment
| process more transparent. They don't, presumably because
| those patterns generate more revenue than the lost
| goodwill they create is worth. That goodwill is diffused,
| and even if people grumble about it online, it generally
| doesn't rise to the level of leaving.
|
| 0. https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html
|
| 1. https://www.adobe.com/legal/subscription-terms.html
| gruez wrote:
| >but it's still an attempt to prime a would-be subscriber
| to focus on the annual, billed monthly and play on their
| understanding of the word "monthly" by using it in both
| options.
|
| Do you think "$500 biweekly" car ads, or "$2000/month"
| apartment rentals are the same?
|
| >"Annual, billed monthly" is set in smaller italicized
| type right under the actual price of US$59.99/mo on the
| main pricing page[0].
|
| I might be sympathetic to this reasoning if this was a $2
| coffee or something, but $60/month is nothing to be
| sneezed at, and I'd expect buyers to read the very
| legible text under the price tag. Otherwise, this makes
| as much sense as complaining about supermarket price tags
| that show "$4" in huge font, and "/lb" in small font,
| claiming that it misled buyers into thinking an entire
| package of ground beef costs $4, because the $4 price tag
| "primed" them or whatever.
|
| >While it mentions a fee for cancelling after 14 days,
| you'll find nary a mention of what that fee actually is
| until you track down a legal page[1] that isn't linked to
| any point during the payment process up until the sign-in
| prompt (I didn't bother creating a new account to look
| beyond that). At the very least, it's not present during
| the stage when you're still relatively uncommitted and
| somewhat more likely to notice any more onerous terms
| were they present.
|
| Okay but if you read most complaints, it's clear that
| they're not even aware that such early termination fee
| even existed. There's approximately zero people who were
| aware the termination fee existed, found it too hard to
| figure out what it actually was, but somehow still went
| with the "Annual, billed monthly" option.
|
| >Finally, there's an option for a 30-day free trial of
| Adobe Stock. I'd have sworn it was pre-selected a few
| years ago, but I may be mistaken on that. If it was, then
| at least that's a change for the better. Anyhow, did you
| notice how it's on a 30 day trial period whereas the
| normal plan has a 14 day cancellation window? Let those
| deadlines fall to the back of your mind for a week or
| two, and will you remember which is 14 days and which is
| 30? There was no reason why Adobe had to use 30 days for
| Stock or only 14 days for their other offerings. But it
| adds to the confusion, and that's the entire purpose of a
| dark pattern. Stock is also an "annual, billed monthly
| plan," but nowhere in the checkout process is it
| mentioned that Stock also has a large cancellation fee.
| That's hidden in a separate part of the Subscription
| Terms page.[1]
|
| This feels like grasping at straws. If we're going to
| invoke "people might get two numbers confused with each
| other", we might as well also invoke "people can't
| calculate dates properly, and therefore a 14 day
| cancellation window is misleading because they think 14
| days = 2 weeks, and set up a cancellation reminder for
| the same day of the week 2 weeks afterwards, not
| realizing that would be just over 14 days and thus
| outside the window".
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| It isn't grasping at straws because confusing or
| misleading people is literally how dark patterns work.
|
| > Do you think "$500 biweekly" car ads, or "$2000/month"
| apartment rentals are the same?
|
| The rentals make it very clear what the contract period
| is and what the penalty for breaking early is. Those
| terms are also tightly regulated in most jurisdictions
| for exactly the reason that they are prone to abuse.
|
| > I'd expect buyers to read the very legible text under
| the price tag.
|
| Given that the text fails to provide details about the
| fee is this even a valid contract to begin with? _On
| multiple levels_ there 's clearly been no meeting of the
| minds.
|
| > if you read most complaints, it's clear that they're
| not even aware that such early termination fee even
| existed.
|
| Isn't that a strong case that it's an unfair practice?
| gruez wrote:
| >The rentals make it very clear what the contract period
| is and what the penalty for breaking early is.
|
| On the billboard or in the multi-page rental agreement
| that they send for you to sign? How is this different
| from than the ToS/fine print on adobe's site?
|
| >Given that the text fails to provide details about the
| fee is this even a valid contract to begin with?
|
| It's probably buried in the fine print somewhere, which
| courts have generally held to be enforceable.
|
| >Isn't that a strong case that it's an unfair practice?
|
| No, the legal standard is "reasonable person", not
| whether there's enough people bamboozled by it to raise a
| ruckus on reddit or whatever.
| croes wrote:
| They could write they get the blood of your first born.
|
| Just because it's written doesn't make it legal
|
| Ask the FTC what they think or at least thought before
| Trump
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40707558
| gruez wrote:
| >They could write they get the blood of your first born.
|
| Sounds like a pretty good deal given how much money you'd
| save and how drawing modest amounts of blood has
| basically zero downsides.
|
| >Just because it's written doesn't make it legal
|
| And just because you invoke "Just because it's written
| doesn't make it legal", doesn't make it invalid.
| croes wrote:
| That's why I wrote they could lose not they would lose.
| autoexec wrote:
| What it doesn't say next to the price is that if you
| don't connect to the internet and allow your device to
| beg them for permission to use the thing you already
| purchased your software will stop working, or that if
| their servers are ever down or inaccessible for any
| reason you may not be able to use the software you paid
| for on your own machine. Adobe is a shit company. The
| business practices they use should be outlawed.
| gruez wrote:
| >What it doesn't say next to the price is that if you
| don't connect to the internet and allow your device to
| beg them for permission to use the thing you already
| purchased your software will stop working
|
| Neither does netflix. It also doesn't mention that
| photoshop doesn't run on linux. Are you going to complain
| about that as well?
|
| >or that if their servers are ever down or inaccessible
| for any reason you may not be able to use the software
| you paid for on your own machine
|
| Again, netfilx. Also, isn't there usually enough of a
| grace window that unless you're working off a cruise ship
| for months at a time, you'll be fine? This feels like a
| edge case that gets trotted out in comments than happens
| in reality.
| wyclif wrote:
| Who are they going to sue in that scenario? They can't go
| after every user who pays with a throwaway card.
| connicpu wrote:
| Reverse class action isn't a thing, there's no way to sue
| thousands of people all at once, so they'd have to bring
| their suit against every individual who did it. Costs
| would be guaranteed to be much higher than any possible
| recovery.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| Why would they sue? Just send it to collections and let
| them sort it out?
| notpushkin wrote:
| Good luck finding Asfghjs Fghdjsk using only his email
| address, fdsfgsd@tempemail.test.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| They use the billing address. KYC makes it easy.
| pizzaplatinum wrote:
| Good luck finding Zyyzzyzx Balleyhew whose address on the
| temporary card is registered at PO Box 42069, Utqiagvik,
| AK
| lukan wrote:
| And you can just get a card with a fake adress?
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| https://support.google.com/googlepay/answer/11234179?hl=e
| n&c...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Those don't have a fake address. You still have to put
| the right name and billing to pass verification.
|
| A prepaid Visa/MC/Amex gift card might work, but those
| are easily blockable. I'd expect Adobe to do so.
| notpushkin wrote:
| I mean, that's one way of getting users to pirate your
| software _and_ hate you at the same time.
| notpushkin wrote:
| No, but you can type in any fake address in your zipcode.
| (Or - if your card is from outside US - you can type in a
| completely random address and generally it will work.)
| jrockway wrote:
| Collections rarely does anything. I mean they will nag
| you, but you ask them to only contact you in writing, and
| it basically goes away. The collection agency could sue
| you, but it's rare. It involves putting together a
| realistic case (we are sure this person signed this
| contract and owes us $X) and that is expensive.
|
| The billing your credit card 50% is a "well we tried"
| type thing. They're happy if it works out, but not
| unhappy if it doesn't.
| nrb wrote:
| In the US, a collection on your credit report can tank
| your FICO score by more than 100 points, affecting your
| ability to borrow at the best rate, rent a home, or get
| certain jobs. This would be a very risky move if the
| purchase was made in such a way that you are personally
| liable.
| askonomm wrote:
| And in Europe collection means all of your bank accounts
| get frozen and in some countries they even have the power
| to direct your salary from your employer straight to them
| until the debt is paid. You definitely don't want to end
| up in this situation.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| Depending on who you're talking to, none of those are
| realistic prospects anyway. Your borrowing rate will be
| crap, no matter what, because of your age/credit
| history/place of residence/skin color (and, if you really
| need funding, you turn to the BNPL shadow lenders or
| GFM); you will never earn enough to rent an entire home,
| or an apartment with a corporate landlord; none of those
| jobs will ever even look at your resume.
|
| We are reaching a critical mass of people who have no
| buy-in to these structures because they've been
| previously cut out.
| r33b33 wrote:
| How about fuck them then and do class action for
| illegitimate business practice. Also, lawsuits aren't
| real.
| akudha wrote:
| Or better, just avoid companies like Adobe as much as
| possible. It is not like they are the only game in town
| anymore, right?
| sethammons wrote:
| We successfully stopped paying for a collection of Adobe
| products that were for a student license last year. We randomly
| were charged again in January and February of this year and
| when I called they couldn't find any records of charges. They
| recommended contesting the charges on the card and we've not
| been charged since. Still, crazy that they couldn't even verify
| they charged my card.
| liendolucas wrote:
| I will never do subscriptions. As you mentioned, the fact
| that you you have to "successfully stop an automatic payment"
| is an experience that I'm not willing to go through.
| dharmab wrote:
| Capital One has a feature where you can generate temporary
| card numbers. Each one can be authorized for "a single
| charge" or "repeating charges at one merchant". And you
| have a toggle switch in the latter case to dis/enable
| payments. Really handy for subscriptions.
| KurSix wrote:
| Yeah, that whole "annual plan billed monthly" thing feels
| intentionally shady
| maccard wrote:
| Should adobe only offer an annual subscription up front and a
| monthly rolling bill? Should they not offer a discount for
| people who want to make an annual commitment but don't have
| the cash flow for the annual spend all in one go?
| Jarwain wrote:
| From what I recall, it's difficult to figure out how to
| just pay for the non-discounted monthly, which is the
| biggest part of the problem.
| maccard wrote:
| When you click buy now there's three options. Annual,
| monthly, annual paid monthly. They could put the
| cancellation fee for annual paid monthly, I agree. But
| short of that they'll run into the "how can anyone ever
| be expected to read all that information when they just
| want to sign up to a service" problem.
| gcau wrote:
| When I tried to cancel a regular monthly subscription, they
| tried to force me to pay a fee to be able to cancel the
| subscription, and they don't let you disconnect your payment
| methods. Luckily, I used paypal so I could unauthorise them on
| paypal. If this happened again to me I would be contacting the
| consumer rights organisation my country has.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Contact them anyways.
| maccard wrote:
| I don't get it, honestly. It's very clear. You get a discount
| for an annual commitment and they let you pay monthly. It's
| super clear which you're signing up for when you do it. I'm in
| the UK, and there's a 14 day cooling off period on the plans
| too, unless you buy the full blown annual one.
|
| I'm no adobe supporter generally, and sure they could do more,
| but they take an awful lot of flak for people who won't read
| two lines of text and then scream bloody murder.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Shown by the video embedded in [1] (which has a screenshot at
| 2:00), Adobe changed their sign-up process and added those
| clear options _after_ being sued by the US for deceptive
| subscription fees.
|
| https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/adobe-sued-over-
| subscription-f...
| maccard wrote:
| ok so the problem is they _used_ to do this.
|
| I'm not suggesting we just forgive and forget, but warning
| people against abusive billing practices that aren't in
| place any more is a bit silly. If your argument is we
| shouldnt support a corporation who requires being taken to
| court to treat their users fairly then there's probably a
| very long list of companies that fail that test much harder
| than adobe do, especially now.
| lmm wrote:
| > I'm not suggesting we just forgive and forget
|
| That seems to be exactly what your posts amount to
| though?
| maccard wrote:
| No, I'm saying call them out on the shit they _are_ doing
| that you don't want them to do, and don't drag every
| mention of them into the same topic ad nauseum.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| > ad nauseum
|
| I disagree. Abusive relationships need constant call-out
| and their BlueSky post was exactly that, a reminder.
|
| Just because your fed up with hearing it; I am not. It's
| a a real history to how they acted, got away and
| demonstrates that they would happily screw you again.
|
| They are just another $corp who show no respect to their
| users, they've done it once, they will do it again. Let
| it be a count of permanent mark of how they treat their
| user-base.
| maccard wrote:
| At a certain point it's just beating a dead horse. A bit
| like screaming "Embrace Extend Extinguish" in every
| Microsoft thread, you're not really adding anything the
| discussion when you necro certain topics, and this one in
| particular has passed this threshold.
|
| > They are just another $corp who show no respect to
| their users,
|
| Great, so talk about the ways they're _actually_ doing
| that not just getting mad about something that 's no
| longer an issue.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| > At a certain point it's just beating a dead horse.
|
| Horses decay which where if Adobe were being dissolved
| than it would have no relevance; Adobe isn't defunct so I
| don't agree. Adobe is far from dead so while they are
| still operating it's worth a call out of their previous
| scummy behavior. It was a recent event in time.
|
| > just getting mad about something that's no longer an
| issue.
|
| I'm not mad. I don't use paid software where I don't need
| to. When a corporation screws up on their part, I'm going
| to call them out on it. It sounds like you have more of
| an issue rather than just skipping past. "Sssh, lets not
| mention that part because I'm tired of hearing it".
|
| If you want to hear another another grudge from me with
| Adobe. One is that my mother forked PSPS for the whole
| CS2 Suite on DVD. Adobe has now made it impossible to use
| without requiring a hack. Why should my mother not be
| allowed to use her own copy of CS2?
|
| She doesn't require the latest nor can she afford the
| subscription in her elderly age with other life admin
| costs. Another show of that Adobe doesn't care for it's
| users. They extort for money. Not new as history
| dictates.
|
| This is moot as I not going to change your mind, nor will
| you change mine. The pricing scandal was recent and that
| this topic on HN how Adobe trying to act cute does make
| it relevant to whole conversion of "oh by the way Adobe
| xyz".
|
| Shall we start ignoring about how Nazi Germany, Adolf
| Hitler were setting up concentration camps? Because that
| would beating a dead horse yet it's still taught in
| schools.
|
| Adobe isn't comparable to a mass-genocide of innocent
| people but that was history of an important event in
| time. By not mentioning it you are letting it be
| forgotten which is bad. History is being rewritten; you
| can see it in action with AI censorship.
|
| The next generation of children will have no clue of such
| history and that's sad.
| basisword wrote:
| For me the scummy part is that you can't cancel the recurring
| subscription in advance. If my renewal date is 2 months from
| now and I try to cancel they will charge me a fee immediately
| and end the subscription. The only way to cancel without
| charge is to come back right as the rebill is about to occur.
| There is no excuse for that other than they want to fuck over
| as many people as possible.
| maccard wrote:
| Yep, that's shitty. So let's give them flak for that, not
| for something they don't do anymore.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Non dark pattern sites show the total price for the annual
| subscription and the lower /month discount below.
| ciabattabread wrote:
| I have one of those "annual plan, billed monthly". How the hell
| do I figure out when I initially signed for it? Along the way,
| I got two free months for getting a Logitech mouse, does that
| change my annual month?
| wildpeaks wrote:
| When you're logged in at https://account.adobe.com/plans,
| click the first link in the left sidebar with your current
| plan, it should mention the day you signed up.
| __jonas wrote:
| Yeah this is terrible, I remember for creative suite there used
| to be some weird workaround where you could switch your plan to
| the cheapest one (I think it was Photoshop+Lightroom) and then
| cancel, and then it would not charge you for the remaining
| time. I wonder if that still works.
| ivolimmen wrote:
| I would love to know how this goes in the Netherlands where we
| have strict rules on this. If it's not really clear rules
| dictate the customer is right, so that yearly subscription is
| simply a monthly subscription.
| ziml77 wrote:
| I looked at their plans a few years back and it was very clear
| that they had 3 payment options: Monthly, Annual, and Annual
| billed Monthly. Of course if you get the third option, getting
| out of the contract is going to cost you. Otherwise what would
| ever be the point of choosing the Monthly plan when both Annual
| options have a discount for going with a longer subscription
| period?
| mk89 wrote:
| I only see annual and annual billed monthly in photoshop
| pricing plans. Where do you see the monthly one?
|
| Edit: I just clicked on buy, and it leads to what you said.
| Apparently the monthly one is not mentioned in the front
| page. Weird.
| mk89 wrote:
| Out of curiosity I went to their website to understand how they
| sell it, because it wasn't clear...
|
| https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/plans.html
|
| I am not sure why this should face FTC or any similar mechanism
| to prevent "deception".
|
| It's written right there:
|
| US$22.99/mo Annual, billed monthly
|
| And if you slightly scroll down the very first question is how
| much it costs:
|
| > There are several Creative Cloud plans that include
| Photoshop. You can purchase it as a standalone app for
| US$22.99/mo. for the annual billed monthly plan or opt for
| annual billing at US$263.88/yr.
|
| Buying it with the annual billing would save you 1$ per month.
|
| I have seen this model used elsewhere: if you opt in for the
| yearly subscription, you still pay per month but you save X%
| over the monthly subscription.
|
| Not sure what could they do to make it more obvious, besides
| writing big: we only offer yearly subscriptions, although you
| can pay monthly..
|
| Edit: if you click on buy it, it leads to another option too,
| the monthly one. Is this the scam one? Because it says you
| cancel any time...
|
| Edit again: it seems that they did quite some nasty stuff in
| the past and then US sued them, so now they are more
| transparent about their subscriptions.
|
| God bless such organizations that sue the hell out of such bad
| actors until they behave well.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| I found this out the hard way...
|
| But you know what? Karma's a bitch. I think I am likely not
| alone in having used a cracked version of photoshop for far,
| far more time than I ever did an actual paid up copy.
|
| I'm not unaware that piracy was part of their strategy for
| market penetration, and I guess it's now a case of "we have the
| market cornered, let's monetise".
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > I honestly don't know how they haven't faced FTC action for
| this
|
| _FTC Takes Action Against Adobe and Executives for Hiding
| Fees, Preventing Consumers from Easily Cancelling Software
| Subscriptions_
|
| June 17, 2024
|
| https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/06/...
| ajxs wrote:
| I posted elsewhere in this thread that when I tried to cancel,
| and discovered that I was actually paying for an _annual_ plan
| on a _monthly_ basis, I told their support person I 'd be
| speaking with the local consumer affairs regulator[1]. They
| instantly waived the cancellation fee. I'm tempted to think
| they've had some trouble with regulators on this issue before.
|
| 1: https://www.fairtrading.nsw.gov.au/
| mjmas wrote:
| It seems like this would/should be covered under Australia's
| unfair contracts law, which requires the term to have a
| legitimate interest as well as being transparent (which I dont
| think would be met if they are charging 50% of the remainder,
| when they would have been happy for you to get a monthly
| subscription and cancel after a month, only having spent a
| fifth of what they would charge for termination)
| hliyan wrote:
| The phenomenon at work here is: if product being produced by a
| profit-seeking enterprise can be rented instead of being sold,
| said enterprise will eventually find a way to do it, then over
| time, rather than a single bill, it will attempt to rent out
| individual aspects of the now product-turned-service, followed by
| cost cutting that degrades the default service level while
| introducing additional service levels for which the consumer will
| have to pay additional fees, and finally making switching away to
| competitors progressively difficult for the consumer. This is a
| natural outcome of profit-maximization.
| __loam wrote:
| This is the primary reason why creatives despise Adobe despite
| some people here arguing that it's for the AI art generation.
| They hate that too but the biggest pain point by far is the
| toxic business relation you have to maintain to continue to use
| industry standard tooling.
| illegally wrote:
| Single bill for modern software doesn't make sense economically
| anymore.
|
| Do you want updates? You want new versions? New features?
| Support?
|
| Single bill it's like buying an IPhone once and then you expect
| to get a new one for free each year.
| jspdown wrote:
| All the digital artists I know don't use and want new
| features in Photophop. And more generally, most non-tech
| businesses values more stability than having new features.
|
| Single bill makes a lot of sense for many users.
| valiant55 wrote:
| Does a JetBrains style license not address this exactly? You
| buy the current version and one year of updates. If you want
| updates after that you have to renew.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| >Do you want updates? You want new versions? New features?
| Support?
|
| No. This was a solved problem decades ago. Purchase includes
| minor version updates, then you keep it for life without
| updates. Upgrading to the next version is a choice.
|
| Why did we collectively agree that customer choice does not
| matter?
| tofof wrote:
| It depends, what are you charging for the new features in the
| update/version? Twenty years ago, you'd put out a new version
| and I could go find what new features it had and decide for
| myself whether those were worth the price you ask to get
| them. If the answer is yes, I pay and I get the new features.
| If the answer is no, I don't pay and I keep using the program
| I already bought.
|
| Why do you think the company is automatically entitlted to
| rent seeking and the removal of user choice just because they
| tweaked the ui?
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > has left Adobe's standing with many photographers in shambles
|
| What does this mean? Do normie photographers have any realistic
| choice except Adobe products? Are their sales falling? I doubt
| it. This quote reads like sour grapes.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| What did Adobe possibly think they could gain by posting on a
| communist web site?
|
| They really didn't think this one through.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| > "Adobe couldn't explain why it let its once excellent
| relationship with photographers and media lapse, only that it is
| sorry that happened."
|
| Maybe shouldn't have listened to asshat MBAs and overpaid
| management consultants that infiltrate your boardroom with their
| "haha number go up" bullshit
| throwaway743 wrote:
| Pirate their shit.
| aktuel wrote:
| Artists who hate Adobe should actively support the development of
| open source alternatives. That is the only way this situation is
| going to improve.
| somedude895 wrote:
| > "Go back to the fascist-owned site where they enjoy supporting
| AI-generated art like your brand does," wrote Evlyn Moreau.
|
| Yeah this is why Bluesky will never be a serious and widely used
| social platform. It's the same sort of cesspool as the right-wing
| alternatives that popped up a few years back, just more self-
| righteous.
| Kye wrote:
| There's a whole mute list for this sort of person:
| https://bsky.app/profile/mackuba.eu/lists/3kp6zdqoscy2x
|
| You can also run Blockenheimer on likes and reposts for any
| especially toxic anti-AI takes to catch huge chunks of them:
| https://blockenheimer.click
| gs17 wrote:
| The block lists presented as a solution are a part of why I
| didn't care to stick around on Bluesky. 99% of what I did was
| manually blocking/muting people who I wouldn't want to
| interact with. The site almost never presented me with people
| I _would_ want to talk to, and outsourcing the blocking to
| some stranger doesn 't really solve the real problem.
| slimebot80 wrote:
| I don't trust them at all. The amount of traffic to various
| domains is incredible coming out of their desktop apps.
|
| But mostly, when they first started the subscription model I
| wasn't furious about it - until I realised I was stuck on a
| yearly plan, and I'm usually pretty good at detecting when I'm
| being tricked into that. A part of me doubts I was ever asked
| correctly.
| torginus wrote:
| I just don't get how Adobe didn't get dethroned after being so
| unpopular for so long. There are so many Photoshop competitors,
| many of which are quite good, they seem to be ripe for
| disruption. The last version I used was CS6, which came out more
| than a decade ago, and even that had more than a good enough
| feature set.
|
| Blender is slowly taking over 3D, why can't 2D be disrupted
| similarly?
| oreally wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it's because just about every applicable art
| school has enforced their student's output to be done in
| adobe's products - meaning that Adobe has a firm grip on the
| educator's market. As the saying goes, hook them in when
| they're young and they'll be too lazy and vested to move away
| from their products for a lifetime.
| bdangubic wrote:
| To a degree, Oracle was doing the same thing. Years ago I was
| teaching Data Science courses at the local Uni and Dean
| pulled me in and asked me if I can teach Introductory course
| in Web Dev, the current teacher was going on maternity leave.
| I was like heck yea, LFG. Student reaches out to me few days
| before the quarter was to start and asks if they need to buy
| the book since it is $285 (like $500 in today's dollars). I
| was taken aback and went to my office and book was actually
| at my desk, "web development with oracle forms" ... :) that
| was the course that was thought... (I didn't of course - that
| was the last quarter I was asked :) )
| karaterobot wrote:
| The problem is that Adobe still makes the best tools in a lot
| of categories.
|
| They also have the whole ecosystem lock-in model that also
| worked for Apple: their products work together, so if you try
| to replace Photoshop, you're probably still using
| Illustrator, and After Effects, etc. except your workflow
| isn't as smooth anymore, because there's one tool in the
| chain that works differently than the rest.
| gs17 wrote:
| And on top of that, if your clients are Adobe users, you
| probably will have to be as well or you risk what they send
| you not opening properly.
|
| Back in the Creative Suite days, my parents (small graphic
| design studio) upgraded largely because a client upgraded and
| they needed to be compatible with the newer version of the
| file format. Creative Cloud "fixed" that, I guess.
| zemo wrote:
| > every applicable art school has enforced their student's
| output to be done in adobe's products
|
| do instructors really require people submit PSDs or do
| students export their stuff to jpg/png/whatever and submit
| the export
| graemep wrote:
| That is how free market capitalism is supposed to work.
|
| If you do not like products you switch to a competitor. That is
| the fundamental assumption on which the system is built
| saidinesh5 wrote:
| Not exactly related, but i enjoyed this tiny slightly funny clip
| about this topic:
|
| Every "AI" artist right now -
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Sjnr_tLLKQ0
| rpastuszak wrote:
| I keep a list of alternatives to Adobe software (for posts like
| this):
|
| https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/alternatives-to-adobe/
| vung wrote:
| Bluesky isn't representative of Adobe's userbase, so this
| reaction doesn't really matter.
|
| The people who decide to write a scathing reply to Adobe's
| Bluesky account are irrelevant outside of their Bluesky bubble.
| nomilk wrote:
| > Adobe's unpopularity can be traced back to a decision it made
| over 10 years ago when it shifted from perpetual software
| licensing to subscription pricing.
|
| My understand is that Adobe deliberately made it difficult to
| cancel. I don't even use Adobe, yet am well aware of their
| antics, indicating how far bad behaviour spreads via word of
| mouth.
| MaxGripe wrote:
| In my country, what Adobe is doing is punishable by imprisonment
| for a period of 6 months to 8 years. Yet, for some reason, they
| operate in this market without the slightest problem.
|
| "Whoever, with the intention of obtaining financial gain, causes
| another person to enter into a financially disadvantageous
| arrangement, or otherwise dispose of their own or someone else's
| assets, by means of deception, or by exploiting a mistake or
| their inability to understand the nature of the action
| undertaken, shall be liable to imprisonment for a period of 6
| months to 8 years"
| thiht wrote:
| That sounds like a huge stretch.
| MaxGripe wrote:
| How exactly? They lead people into signing a one-year
| contract without any possibility of withdrawal by misleading
| customers into believing it's a monthly subscription.
| Personally, I know two people who had to block their payment
| cards through their banks because it was otherwise impossible
| to cancel their Adobe subscription.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| I'm happy with kdenlive and gimp TYVM...
| danielktdoranie wrote:
| Everything woke turns to shit
| Crosseye_Jack wrote:
| As mush as I enjoy shitting on Adobe, I also want to encourage
| companies to embrace platforms other than Twitter. Simply because
| at times it's the best way to get customer service these days.
|
| I think I would have had more respect for Adobe if they had left
| the posts up.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| They haven't figured out yet that you should make software for
| customers, not for your MBAs/Product Managers.
| delfugal wrote:
| Adobe has perfected digital blackmail.
|
| After using and promoting their products for years to create our
| work, the switch off access to view or print any of it unless we
| keep paying blackmail monthly fees.
|
| I don't want to edit my old work, but to lock me out of viewing
| it is nothing short of BLACKMAIL. As people change jobs or
| retire, they lose all access to their work. Sick.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Adobe charging subscription is one of the most asshole moves I've
| seen in software.
|
| I understand that you can charge monthly if you provide a
| service. You can charge monthly for SaaS or PaaS, but charging
| monthly for a desktop application can't win the goodwill of the
| people.
| mrangle wrote:
| A company who who has a shiny thing that it charges money for,
| posting on a site specifically created for the expression of the
| malcontent characteristic of toxic malcontents, and the output is
| predictable.
|
| Undoubtedly Adobe has legions of users who take a more nuanced
| view of Adobe and who would also be the type to use Bluesky. And
| yet.
|
| I'd consider the complaints to be essentially the emotions that
| come up when people covet unaffordable privately created
| property.
| wildpeaks wrote:
| They'd get a lot less pushback if the annual plan was billed
| anually like other services, they wouldn't even need to refund
| part of the remaining time when users cancel auto-renew.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > there would be no respite if I paid annually, nor could I
| receive one of those special invitations for a 35% discount
|
| Offering a discount to new customers while no discounts for
| existing, loyal customers always seemed backwards to me. Back in
| the Zortech days, we'd offer upgrades to existing customers at a
| steep discount.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Well this seems needlessly hostile.
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