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Adobe Lightroom uses photos for AI training by default

265 points by velmu 4y ago

photoGrant 4y ago
I hope to come back to this thread with someone tamping the reality because right now this is as bad and immoral as it gets (as a photographer). You'd expect at least a fake sense of consumer/artist protection from a company like Adobe that NEEDS these customers to survive. But hey, another reason to hate the prison guard landlord.
- rado 4y ago
  This behaviour is totally on-brand for this company.
  - BonoboIO 4y ago
    Kind of a brand identity
  - saiya-jin 4y ago
    True but look at their earnings, when they came up with their cloud crap in their product lines their revenue jumped through the roof. Clearly people en masse don't care enough, despite a very vocal minority like me who were cursing at cloud-anything from day 1
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    Another Darkpattern, Only Being Evil
thot_experiment 4y ago
The discourse around this stuff seems so insane to me. Am I wrong on this? It feels like the cat is out of the bag and the only way to have generally good outcomes is to go ham on open source models. IMO there's a zero percent chance that generative AI can be meaningfully controlled and any efforts to restrict training will only result in fewer people having access to the good models. They will still be created, only by people who don't care about the ethics at all, or big corpos who seek to collect rent. I think the only way I see a good outcome is that the FOSS models are so good there's no money to be made competing.
- vanderZwan 4y ago
  I don't disagree with you, but this discussion was about Adobe using its customer's photos without their consent, right? (no, I do not consider the small print to count here. Not on a moral level) I feel like the discussion of ethical use of ML models, while a valid one, comes a couple of steps after that. Like, the hypothetical existence of good and fair FOSS models won't make this transgression by Adobe magically irrelevant, will it?
- wongarsu 4y ago
  How is open source supposed to compete with commercial players that can get a lot more data with unethical means (like say Adobe using all pictures their users sync with Lightroom). Face recognition had this problem for a long time: motivated companies with the right product, the right connections or the right amount of money can get much better datasets than what is available to researchers. Generative AI will face the exact same problem, along with the other difficulties of funding such models
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tpxl 4y ago
  I have absolutely no problem with generative models, not even for producing 'illegal' images and texts, but the copyright infringement by big players is disgusting. Microsoft (copilot), openai, Adobe, ... etc will wholesale breach copyright and not give a damn, but god forbid if you copy a line of their code they will use all their might to crush you. If they want to use copyrighted stuff for their models, they should license it.
  - andybak 4y ago
    This comment is a bit hard to unpick. It's not clear that training violates copyright. However plagarism (created by any means AI or not) is already covered by existing IP law. (The difficult part is telling whether AI generated stuff infringes on the copyright of stuff in the training data. And the fact the onus is on the end-user of AI tools sucks...) However - if you're arguing that copyright law should be extended to prevent use in training - that's a much tougher sell and one where I'm not 100% sure of my position.
im_jerry87 4y ago
Wow! I thought nothing would surprise me anymore about Adobe. But this is a new low even for them. This is ripping off artists and accessing unauthorised content of your customers executed at the highest level. Boggles my mind how this is even legal anywhere especially in countries under EU? Like how this is an opt out and not an opt in? Seems like Content Analysis is turned on by default for the whole creative cloud suite. And, to make it worse, you have to go their site, login to your account and then opt out? Oh boy, I smell a gigantic lawsuit waiting to happen. tweets from artists: https://twitter.com/CrownePrints/status/1610441583899418624?t=E84zfiFxRW9jXRk3f3l0aQ&s=19 https://twitter.com/CrownePrints/status/1610441583899418624?... https://twitter.com/SamuelDeats/status/1610365369134333955?t=E84zfiFxRW9jXRk3f3l0aQ&s=19 https://twitter.com/SamuelDeats/status/1610365369134333955?t...
- 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  so you use their software and they can use YOUR IP because YOU gave THEM permission but god forbid you try to pirate THIER IP. then all bets are off and their lawyers will hound you... i had a friend who was "Being audited" by "Adobe and autodesk" because he had been using a student account being a college student and a family member was running a business and he says "one google ad last year i had put my own name along with that family member". the point of the audit was "to assess if there was any violation of copyright and if they were using only licensed software in their machines" and failing which they would be liable to pay full amount of the software with back payments." i told the friend to tell them to "fuck off".... that was last year,
  - BonoboIO 4y ago
    Good day, Photoshop inspector Mr Smith is here. Open the door or I will have to use force /s I will never give Adobe money, they are a pain for the whole mankind.
    - gareth_untether 4y ago
      I’d love to drop them, but they’re industry standard. Good open source alternatives such as Gimp are somewhat lacking the AI features. Which have most likely been trained illegally!
2Gkashmiri 4y ago
ah. so people will continue to use this because its the "industry standard" so they have the monopoly to fuck around people all the while these same people will not use/improve/suggest/fund open source alternatives in the classic chicken or egg problem... i am so glad blender project is slowly being accepted. i have a friend who laughed at me 7-8 years ago when i recommended him blender. recently we were talking about some stuff and he brought up blender as in "this is something i should test". i see that as an absolute win... hopefully there are many other softwares like kdenlive or darktable or inkscape or others that need blender-like movement so that they can be capable alternatives
- thot_experiment 4y ago
  I swapped to using RawTherapee years ago and never looked back, at least for my workflow it's miles better than Lightroom. Blender is best in class when it comes to FOSS creative software, a real exemplar of the best case. Inkscape on the other hand is like shoving forks in my eyes every time I try to use it. I started working on an web-based SVG editor just to cover my own usecases. I'm just using the browser renderer because the Inkscape frontend is a total joke. There's tearing when I try to resize a rectangle, and it updates at like 8fps. It's actually embarrassing that software can be that slow doing something so basic. It's incomprehensible to me, I can render and display these staggeringly realistic game worlds at 240fps and the very same hardware struggles to resize a rectangle.
  - 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
    have you used krita?
    - red_trumpet 4y ago
      Krita is great for drawing, but I think their SVG capabities are lacking.
    - thot_experiment 4y ago
      Yeah! Should have mentioned that one too. I literally had it open and was doodling when I wrote the post. It's not perfect but I still prefer it to Photoshop most of the time. Unfortunately it's pretty useless for vectors.
rado 4y ago
FYI Pixelmator Pro has fully replaced Photoshop for me
- Gualdrapo 4y ago
  But this is about Lightroom. Won't be a something like Darktable (or the already mentioned RawTherapee) a closer alternative for it?
  - robin_reala 4y ago
    Pixelmator’s equivalent of Lightroom is Pixelmator Photo: https://www.pixelmator.com/photo/ https://www.pixelmator.com/photo/
    - Hamuko 4y ago
      "Built exclusively for iPhone and iPad" Doesn't sound like it.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    And neither is good enough. IMO the best alternative for Lightroom is Capture One.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      If can cope with the totally different workflow, Darktable is working really well as well. AT least from what I can tell lookin at the same RAW files being post-processed by me using Darktable and my dad using Lightroom / Photoshop. It is really good so, that there are alternatives to Adobe out there.
  - SanjayMehta 4y ago
    DXO Photolab is a commercial alternative.
    - tsujamin 4y ago
sonu27 4y ago
This is actually ridiculous of them
traceroute66 4y ago
I assume this is "Lightroom" and not "Lightroom Classic" (both of which are available via Adobe CC, but Classic is offline, whilst the other was always full-cloud). Historically I've used Lightroom Classic, but I've always been worried about Adobe killing it off one day. I think I might go back to Phaseone Capture One[1]. I tried it a while ago and found it pretty decent, despite the name its not just for Phaseone camera users. [1]https://www.captureone.com/en https://www.captureone.com/en
- piva00 4y ago
  I moved from LR Classic to Capture One because I was getting fed up with Adobe's business practices. I'm much happier with C1, even more after I switched from Nikon to Fujifilm and RAW processing for Fuji X-Trans was so much better on C1. I used to be a customer for the LR + PS bundle, got grandfathered when they turned LR into LR Classic but then Adobe tried to force me to upgrade to a more expensive plan multiple times, I stopped using Adobe completely and get all my photo editing needs from C1 + Affinity Photo. It's been a bliss to be away from Adobe.
  - 4ad 4y ago
    Don't worry, Capture One will screw you over too! https://www.dpreview.com/news/3164356226/capture-one-perpetual-licenses-no-longer-include-new-features-functionality-after-purchase https://www.dpreview.com/news/3164356226/capture-one-perpetu...
ThinkBeat 4y ago
Does anyone know what they are using it for? Photoshop is improving its "remove background" like feature quite a bit lately. Sporting "AI" in their description. I am not as outraged if that is the main use case. I wonder if Google or Apple uses some form of the images they hold for similar purposes. I can easily argue though that once they have the data they can use it to train all sorts of features including generating art which to me is far more upsetting.
- nkozyra 4y ago
  > I am not as outraged if that is the main use case. Boy, I wish I could be this generous. No matter how noble the intended use is, they're taking someone's work and using it without explicit permission in a very sneaky way. And it's opt out Nope. Sorry, I can't find a way to look past that.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    If it was opt-in, and creators would be compensated for the use of their work, it would be ok. As implemented it is just... well... on-brand for Adobe I guess.
- actualwitch 4y ago
  They are probably using those to train stable diffusion/dall-e/imagen like model as it's current state of the art AFAIK. As for whether google or apple do it too, unless some employee makes a throwaway account and shares, we don't know. If I had to guess though, I would say google probably does, as well as publicly crawlable images. Apple most likely does too, unless they just bought the data from some other service, because they too have ml powered image capabilities and they couldn't have achieved it without obtaining a sufficiently large dataset first.
- janosdebugs 4y ago
  The expectation from a cloud storage is that it's yours. They are not supposed to help themselves to your files in any shape or form. If the big could providers start breaking this unspoken promise to save on content acquisition costs, people will lose trust in the cloud. Even if this is legally ok (which is questionable), it is extremely short sighted.
kypro 4y ago
Specifically, what's the issue here? Seems a lot of people are hating on Adobe here, but as far as I'm aware it's fairly standard for companies to process your data to train their models. At least I see this kind of opt-in / opt-out everywhere. Is it that this is an opt-out not an opt-in, or is that it's even an option to begin with? If we as consumers want companies like Adobe to provide us with cool AI tools then it seems this is unfortunately just what's required. And if you don't like it, you can opt-out. So I'm guessing the issue is that it's an opt-out not an opt-in? Which seems kinda minor and would perhaps violate GDPR in the EU.
- nkozyra 4y ago
  The most egregious part is opt out by default, obviously. That this has become a standard that doesn't shock you should register as an issue itself.
  - kypro 4y ago
    Well you say obviously, but people in this thread are complaining about how Adobe is ripping off artists which doesn't seem particularly relevant to the issue of acceptable data consent practises. I agree it should be opt-out by default (and believe this is a violation of GDPR if it applies in the EU), but they are allowing you to opt-out and they are explaining how they'll use the data so this seems like a relatively minor issue to me honestly. Because yes, unless you're extremely naive your assumption should always be that every time your data is sent to a server or put on some cloud that it will be used in ways that you didn't consent to and potentially even disapprove of. Obviously I don't agree with that, but I'm sure there are companies doing exactly this without giving you an opt-out and without even telling you they're doing it.
    - nkozyra 4y ago
      I think people can complain about the less obvious stuff. The opt-out default is just ... people kind of throw their hands up at this point.
SanjayMehta 4y ago
I'm on LR5 and will never upgrade.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Things like this are the main reason I went to Linux for everything except certain games, and locally installed open source for office and photo post processing. I really miss the days of locally installed OS's, local software suites, when you did not need online accounts and cloud computing for the most mundane tasks. And I really hope those days will come back, or at the very least things like Ubuntu, LibreOffice and Darktable will stick around for quite a while. Funny thing so, the old versions of lightroom and photoshop, the offline ones, still work perfectly fine under Win 10. So if you have a license key I don't see how Adobe could kill those.
  - t0bia_s 4y ago
    How would you open RAW files from new camera in old SW?
    - non-nil 4y ago
      One workaround, possibly with caveats, is to convert the raw files to DNG, Adobe has a (free) utility specifically for this: https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/using/adobe-dng-converter.html https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/using/adobe-dng-converter...
      - t0bia_s 4y ago
        Which slows workflow and triple amount of data storage and cost a money.
lvl102 4y ago
They are charging you to train AI on your data so that they can charge you even more later.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Can you imagine a better business model? You have to ignore even the least trace amount of ethics, but at this point I don't expect anything else from big tech anymore (or everyone else, to be honest).
- BonoboIO 4y ago
  A classic Adobe /s
- MrBurrito 4y ago
  AFAIK, using these images for training without proper consent makes the resulting dataset and model legally problematic.
  - archontes 4y ago
    It has nothing to do with training. The only part that copyright would protect against is transmitting your photos' information to Adobe. There's probably a clause in there about Adobe being able to do exactly that for reasons.
    - MrBurrito 4y ago
      I disagree (but also, IANAL). They use the private images to train their models. Means the image is part of a data set, and this is subject to licensing. The image is however part of your private collection, so the license, besides the wording in the privacy page, is sketchy at best. Also, it will collide with GDPR and CCPA rules on data processing. Data models are subject to licensing too, and using images without proper licenses “poisons the well”.
      - archontes 4y ago
        Usually the copyright on a data set is held by the person who accumulated the data, but mere compilation is not enough to bestow copyright. The arrangement and selection itself needs to be sufficiently creative or original. Putting all your photos in a folder does create a dataset, but doesn't meet the threshold of creative input for that dataset to be copyrightable as a compilation. Now, you do hold the copyright on all of your photos. This means that you can restrict their transmission to others. You can even transmit them to someone as part of a contract that they not engage in a particular activity, like training an AI. But if they proceed to train an AI using them, they've committed a breach of contract, not copyright. And I'll tell you, I'm not a lawyer myself, but instead a SME who works with a lawyer, and in order to receive relief for breach of contract, a judge is going to look to said contract in order to calculate damages. If you have a contract that says that something is a breach, but no language that assists a judge in calculating damages, you shouldn't assume you're going to get any relief in excess of, perhaps, an injunction. And I'm afraid my knowledge is very US-specific.
version_five 4y ago
To me this is industrial espionage rather than copyright infringement. If I post a picture online and you use it some way i didn't give permission for, maybe there's an infringement case, that's not very interesting. Here, we have effectively malware that is taking stuff that was never shared, from a personal or business cloud, and using it for some other purpose. That's a much bigger deal, because it involves stuff nobody agreed to make public. I strongly suspect Microsoft does this too with Office. I'm always catching them trying to make excuses to upload images for "connected experiences" (industrial espionage) and I imagine in the end they just do it. This is a big problem, for example when working as a contractor and dealing with private client data. There is a risk that's hard to manage of big vendors stealing data through their software that I don't know how to manage
- dotancohen 4y ago
  [flagged]
- archontes 4y ago
  This continues to be a confusion in copyright. You can't put a photo online and tell me how I can consume it. You can tell me I can't distribute it to anyone else.
zython 4y ago
This is honestly very convenient. If I ever accidentally delete a picture I can just ask adobe for a backup. Very consumer consious decision on adobes part.
- hef19898 4y ago
  They could, but I guess you get the same response you get from, e.g. the NSA, if you ask for a back-up of your deleted e-mails and text messages...
gniting 4y ago
Where does one find this setting on the iOS apps? I am not using lightroom anywhere else.
- ubermonkey 4y ago
  It's an online setting, in "Manage your account" on the Adobe site.
PaulHoule 4y ago
It doesn't seem to affect Lightroom classic which is what I use.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  This appears to be true for now unless you're syncing Lightroom Classic with Adobe Cloud. But I think it's safe to say that Adobe would not have a problem farming your local catalogs for images in the future without warning. https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/how-to/sync-photos-lightroom-mobile.html https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/how-to/sync-photos...
nerdjon 4y ago
Now I don't see anything that implies that this is being used for training AI generated work... but I don't see any reason it can't be. This has me seriously concerning for not only the future of art but all created work and who actually has the rights to that depending on what you use to make it. What particularly bothers me is how quickly this was just accepted by society. I saw so many people defending it as "fun" because they just don't understand how it actually works. I was really hoping that society would push back against AI generated things... that was proven wrong very very quickly. I am sending this to all of my artist friends.
dylan604 4y ago
A few updates ago, they made it very difficult to save files to your local system. I wonder if this has anything to do with that. It is at the least a very dark UI pattern to get people to use their cloud storage offerings. Add to it that they use any data in the cloud storage as training data just really goes over the top.
nbzso 4y ago
WOW. Now do this with Figma. >Prompt: Give me an Accessible Design System with all available user stories and tokenize it fully. Let's go, Adobe. The future is now. I will grow my own food and f*ck around in the woods. I will own nothing and I will be happy. I promise.
- frozencell 4y ago
  We should start a war against those systems.
aceazzameen 4y ago
I'm not a professional photographer, so I don't have their needs. But Google Picasa still works for my photos. I use Dropbox to sync them off my phone onto my PC. And Krita and Photopea has replaced my need for Photoshop after I dumped Adobe several years ago. And then there's mobile apps like Procreate and Infinite Painter. I also own the Affinity products which are quite nice. But I admittedly don't use them much. I lost trust in Adobe years ago, especially when every new release for the yearly Adobe Max was full of new bugs. Seeing news like this reminds me to never go back.
jwalton 4y ago
If anyone else is looking for how to opt out: https://account.adobe.com/privacy https://account.adobe.com/privacy
IceHegel 4y ago
This is the kind of behavior that customers should be able to sue Adobe for, perhaps winning the rights to any AI system developed using their images. I use Lightroom 5-10 times a year and there was no chance I would have found this option. Feels incredibly invasive to use my work without consent.
- t0bia_s 4y ago
  Why are you paying for LR that you barelly use?
wahnfrieden 4y ago
how is this worse than what stable diffusion / openai etc. are doing? these other models also don't seek consent, opt-in, licensing
- CharlesW 4y ago
  This is a key question. What Adobe's doing is incredibly anti-creator but arguably better because you can at least opt out. There's a lot of cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy about this right now even in communities that should know better.
- cesarb 4y ago
  From what I understood, one big difference which makes this one worse is that it is using unpublished photos. Which can include works in progress, finished work under non-disclosure agreements, and even intimate things like personal nude pictures. It's more than just lacking consent or opt-in or licensing; these are files which shouldn't be available to these models (or to the public in general) at all.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Yep, the problem is they are providing the illusion of privacy and violating it. They should just make everyone’s cloud storage public access for viewing if they want to treat it like public data.
ubermonkey 4y ago
Thanks for this post. I've just opted out.
tethys 4y ago
Here Adobe provides some more information: > Adobe may analyze your Creative Cloud or Document Cloud content to provide product features and improve and develop our products and services. Nothing in that document seems to indicate this is opt-in. > Let's say that you access Creative Cloud or Document Cloud via a personal account and prefer that Adobe doesn't analyze your content to develop and improve our products and services. In that case, you may turn off content analysis at any time from your Adobe account. https://helpx.adobe.com/manage-account/using/machine-learning-faq.html https://helpx.adobe.com/manage-account/using/machine-learnin...
alkonaut 4y ago
I assume they either make money or plan to make money from it. And as long as it’s optional I guess it’s fine BUT why not give a little cut to those who provide images in the form of a reduced fee?
- Gigachad 4y ago
  This is almost certainly illegal under the gdpr because it’s effectively charging users money to opt for privacy.
  - alkonaut 4y ago
    Doesn’t feel very clear cut. It the images aren’t kept after they are fed into training, then it’s hard to say where there is PII stored. Selling privacy for money is legal, that’s what every store membership card where you get a member rebate does (in which case they of course associate all your purchases with the account).
t0bia_s 4y ago
It's off for me (EU). This is one of many reason why piracy is trend again. You have no option if you want use Adobe SW that you pay for, to use offline.
t0bia_s 4y ago
If I sign exclusive licence contract with my client that guarantee originality of my work (ie logo) without option to sell copyright to others and Adobe break it just like that, it's great for lawsuit. Or piracy could be cheaper answer.

265 points by velmu 4y ago

I hope to come back to this thread with someone tamping the reality because right now this is as bad and immoral as it gets (as a photographer). You'd expect at least a fake sense of consumer/artist protection from a company like Adobe that NEEDS these customers to survive. But hey, another reason to hate the prison guard landlord.

rado 4y ago
This behaviour is totally on-brand for this company.
- BonoboIO 4y ago
  Kind of a brand identity
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  True but look at their earnings, when they came up with their cloud crap in their product lines their revenue jumped through the roof. Clearly people en masse don't care enough, despite a very vocal minority like me who were cursing at cloud-anything from day 1
- dotancohen 4y ago
  Another Darkpattern, Only Being Evil

thot_experiment 4y ago

The discourse around this stuff seems so insane to me. Am I wrong on this? It feels like the cat is out of the bag and the only way to have generally good outcomes is to go ham on open source models. IMO there's a zero percent chance that generative AI can be meaningfully controlled and any efforts to restrict training will only result in fewer people having access to the good models. They will still be created, only by people who don't care about the ethics at all, or big corpos who seek to collect rent. I think the only way I see a good outcome is that the FOSS models are so good there's no money to be made competing.

vanderZwan 4y ago
I don't disagree with you, but this discussion was about Adobe using its customer's photos without their consent, right? (no, I do not consider the small print to count here. Not on a moral level) I feel like the discussion of ethical use of ML models, while a valid one, comes a couple of steps after that. Like, the hypothetical existence of good and fair FOSS models won't make this transgression by Adobe magically irrelevant, will it?
wongarsu 4y ago
How is open source supposed to compete with commercial players that can get a lot more data with unethical means (like say Adobe using all pictures their users sync with Lightroom). Face recognition had this problem for a long time: motivated companies with the right product, the right connections or the right amount of money can get much better datasets than what is available to researchers. Generative AI will face the exact same problem, along with the other difficulties of funding such models
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tpxl 4y ago
I have absolutely no problem with generative models, not even for producing 'illegal' images and texts, but the copyright infringement by big players is disgusting. Microsoft (copilot), openai, Adobe, ... etc will wholesale breach copyright and not give a damn, but god forbid if you copy a line of their code they will use all their might to crush you. If they want to use copyrighted stuff for their models, they should license it.
- andybak 4y ago
  This comment is a bit hard to unpick. It's not clear that training violates copyright. However plagarism (created by any means AI or not) is already covered by existing IP law. (The difficult part is telling whether AI generated stuff infringes on the copyright of stuff in the training data. And the fact the onus is on the end-user of AI tools sucks...) However - if you're arguing that copyright law should be extended to prevent use in training - that's a much tougher sell and one where I'm not 100% sure of my position.

im_jerry87 4y ago

Wow! I thought nothing would surprise me anymore about Adobe. But this is a new low even for them. This is ripping off artists and accessing unauthorised content of your customers executed at the highest level. Boggles my mind how this is even legal anywhere especially in countries under EU? Like how this is an opt out and not an opt in? Seems like Content Analysis is turned on by default for the whole creative cloud suite. And, to make it worse, you have to go their site, login to your account and then opt out? Oh boy, I smell a gigantic lawsuit waiting to happen. tweets from artists: https://twitter.com/CrownePrints/status/1610441583899418624?t=E84zfiFxRW9jXRk3f3l0aQ&s=19 https://twitter.com/CrownePrints/status/1610441583899418624?... https://twitter.com/SamuelDeats/status/1610365369134333955?t=E84zfiFxRW9jXRk3f3l0aQ&s=19 https://twitter.com/SamuelDeats/status/1610365369134333955?t...

2Gkashmiri 4y ago
so you use their software and they can use YOUR IP because YOU gave THEM permission but god forbid you try to pirate THIER IP. then all bets are off and their lawyers will hound you... i had a friend who was "Being audited" by "Adobe and autodesk" because he had been using a student account being a college student and a family member was running a business and he says "one google ad last year i had put my own name along with that family member". the point of the audit was "to assess if there was any violation of copyright and if they were using only licensed software in their machines" and failing which they would be liable to pay full amount of the software with back payments." i told the friend to tell them to "fuck off".... that was last year,
- BonoboIO 4y ago
  Good day, Photoshop inspector Mr Smith is here. Open the door or I will have to use force /s I will never give Adobe money, they are a pain for the whole mankind.
  - gareth_untether 4y ago
    I’d love to drop them, but they’re industry standard. Good open source alternatives such as Gimp are somewhat lacking the AI features. Which have most likely been trained illegally!

2Gkashmiri 4y ago

ah. so people will continue to use this because its the "industry standard" so they have the monopoly to fuck around people all the while these same people will not use/improve/suggest/fund open source alternatives in the classic chicken or egg problem... i am so glad blender project is slowly being accepted. i have a friend who laughed at me 7-8 years ago when i recommended him blender. recently we were talking about some stuff and he brought up blender as in "this is something i should test". i see that as an absolute win... hopefully there are many other softwares like kdenlive or darktable or inkscape or others that need blender-like movement so that they can be capable alternatives

thot_experiment 4y ago
I swapped to using RawTherapee years ago and never looked back, at least for my workflow it's miles better than Lightroom. Blender is best in class when it comes to FOSS creative software, a real exemplar of the best case. Inkscape on the other hand is like shoving forks in my eyes every time I try to use it. I started working on an web-based SVG editor just to cover my own usecases. I'm just using the browser renderer because the Inkscape frontend is a total joke. There's tearing when I try to resize a rectangle, and it updates at like 8fps. It's actually embarrassing that software can be that slow doing something so basic. It's incomprehensible to me, I can render and display these staggeringly realistic game worlds at 240fps and the very same hardware struggles to resize a rectangle.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  have you used krita?
  - red_trumpet 4y ago
    Krita is great for drawing, but I think their SVG capabities are lacking.
  - thot_experiment 4y ago
    Yeah! Should have mentioned that one too. I literally had it open and was doodling when I wrote the post. It's not perfect but I still prefer it to Photoshop most of the time. Unfortunately it's pretty useless for vectors.

rado 4y ago

FYI Pixelmator Pro has fully replaced Photoshop for me

Gualdrapo 4y ago
But this is about Lightroom. Won't be a something like Darktable (or the already mentioned RawTherapee) a closer alternative for it?
- robin_reala 4y ago
  Pixelmator’s equivalent of Lightroom is Pixelmator Photo: https://www.pixelmator.com/photo/ https://www.pixelmator.com/photo/
  - Hamuko 4y ago
    "Built exclusively for iPhone and iPad" Doesn't sound like it.
- jacooper 4y ago
  And neither is good enough. IMO the best alternative for Lightroom is Capture One.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    If can cope with the totally different workflow, Darktable is working really well as well. AT least from what I can tell lookin at the same RAW files being post-processed by me using Darktable and my dad using Lightroom / Photoshop. It is really good so, that there are alternatives to Adobe out there.
- SanjayMehta 4y ago
  DXO Photolab is a commercial alternative.
  - tsujamin 4y ago

sonu27 4y ago

This is actually ridiculous of them

traceroute66 4y ago

I assume this is "Lightroom" and not "Lightroom Classic" (both of which are available via Adobe CC, but Classic is offline, whilst the other was always full-cloud). Historically I've used Lightroom Classic, but I've always been worried about Adobe killing it off one day. I think I might go back to Phaseone Capture One[1]. I tried it a while ago and found it pretty decent, despite the name its not just for Phaseone camera users. [1]https://www.captureone.com/en https://www.captureone.com/en

piva00 4y ago
I moved from LR Classic to Capture One because I was getting fed up with Adobe's business practices. I'm much happier with C1, even more after I switched from Nikon to Fujifilm and RAW processing for Fuji X-Trans was so much better on C1. I used to be a customer for the LR + PS bundle, got grandfathered when they turned LR into LR Classic but then Adobe tried to force me to upgrade to a more expensive plan multiple times, I stopped using Adobe completely and get all my photo editing needs from C1 + Affinity Photo. It's been a bliss to be away from Adobe.
- 4ad 4y ago
  Don't worry, Capture One will screw you over too! https://www.dpreview.com/news/3164356226/capture-one-perpetual-licenses-no-longer-include-new-features-functionality-after-purchase https://www.dpreview.com/news/3164356226/capture-one-perpetu...

ThinkBeat 4y ago

Does anyone know what they are using it for? Photoshop is improving its "remove background" like feature quite a bit lately. Sporting "AI" in their description. I am not as outraged if that is the main use case. I wonder if Google or Apple uses some form of the images they hold for similar purposes. I can easily argue though that once they have the data they can use it to train all sorts of features including generating art which to me is far more upsetting.

nkozyra 4y ago
> I am not as outraged if that is the main use case. Boy, I wish I could be this generous. No matter how noble the intended use is, they're taking someone's work and using it without explicit permission in a very sneaky way. And it's opt out Nope. Sorry, I can't find a way to look past that.
- hef19898 4y ago
  If it was opt-in, and creators would be compensated for the use of their work, it would be ok. As implemented it is just... well... on-brand for Adobe I guess.
actualwitch 4y ago
They are probably using those to train stable diffusion/dall-e/imagen like model as it's current state of the art AFAIK. As for whether google or apple do it too, unless some employee makes a throwaway account and shares, we don't know. If I had to guess though, I would say google probably does, as well as publicly crawlable images. Apple most likely does too, unless they just bought the data from some other service, because they too have ml powered image capabilities and they couldn't have achieved it without obtaining a sufficiently large dataset first.
janosdebugs 4y ago
The expectation from a cloud storage is that it's yours. They are not supposed to help themselves to your files in any shape or form. If the big could providers start breaking this unspoken promise to save on content acquisition costs, people will lose trust in the cloud. Even if this is legally ok (which is questionable), it is extremely short sighted.

kypro 4y ago

Specifically, what's the issue here? Seems a lot of people are hating on Adobe here, but as far as I'm aware it's fairly standard for companies to process your data to train their models. At least I see this kind of opt-in / opt-out everywhere. Is it that this is an opt-out not an opt-in, or is that it's even an option to begin with? If we as consumers want companies like Adobe to provide us with cool AI tools then it seems this is unfortunately just what's required. And if you don't like it, you can opt-out. So I'm guessing the issue is that it's an opt-out not an opt-in? Which seems kinda minor and would perhaps violate GDPR in the EU.

nkozyra 4y ago
The most egregious part is opt out by default, obviously. That this has become a standard that doesn't shock you should register as an issue itself.
- kypro 4y ago
  Well you say obviously, but people in this thread are complaining about how Adobe is ripping off artists which doesn't seem particularly relevant to the issue of acceptable data consent practises. I agree it should be opt-out by default (and believe this is a violation of GDPR if it applies in the EU), but they are allowing you to opt-out and they are explaining how they'll use the data so this seems like a relatively minor issue to me honestly. Because yes, unless you're extremely naive your assumption should always be that every time your data is sent to a server or put on some cloud that it will be used in ways that you didn't consent to and potentially even disapprove of. Obviously I don't agree with that, but I'm sure there are companies doing exactly this without giving you an opt-out and without even telling you they're doing it.
  - nkozyra 4y ago
    I think people can complain about the less obvious stuff. The opt-out default is just ... people kind of throw their hands up at this point.

SanjayMehta 4y ago

I'm on LR5 and will never upgrade.

hef19898 4y ago
Things like this are the main reason I went to Linux for everything except certain games, and locally installed open source for office and photo post processing. I really miss the days of locally installed OS's, local software suites, when you did not need online accounts and cloud computing for the most mundane tasks. And I really hope those days will come back, or at the very least things like Ubuntu, LibreOffice and Darktable will stick around for quite a while. Funny thing so, the old versions of lightroom and photoshop, the offline ones, still work perfectly fine under Win 10. So if you have a license key I don't see how Adobe could kill those.
- t0bia_s 4y ago
  How would you open RAW files from new camera in old SW?
  - non-nil 4y ago
    One workaround, possibly with caveats, is to convert the raw files to DNG, Adobe has a (free) utility specifically for this: https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/using/adobe-dng-converter.html https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/using/adobe-dng-converter...
    - t0bia_s 4y ago
      Which slows workflow and triple amount of data storage and cost a money.

lvl102 4y ago

They are charging you to train AI on your data so that they can charge you even more later.

hef19898 4y ago
Can you imagine a better business model? You have to ignore even the least trace amount of ethics, but at this point I don't expect anything else from big tech anymore (or everyone else, to be honest).
BonoboIO 4y ago
A classic Adobe /s
MrBurrito 4y ago
AFAIK, using these images for training without proper consent makes the resulting dataset and model legally problematic.
- archontes 4y ago
  It has nothing to do with training. The only part that copyright would protect against is transmitting your photos' information to Adobe. There's probably a clause in there about Adobe being able to do exactly that for reasons.
  - MrBurrito 4y ago
    I disagree (but also, IANAL). They use the private images to train their models. Means the image is part of a data set, and this is subject to licensing. The image is however part of your private collection, so the license, besides the wording in the privacy page, is sketchy at best. Also, it will collide with GDPR and CCPA rules on data processing. Data models are subject to licensing too, and using images without proper licenses “poisons the well”.
    - archontes 4y ago
      Usually the copyright on a data set is held by the person who accumulated the data, but mere compilation is not enough to bestow copyright. The arrangement and selection itself needs to be sufficiently creative or original. Putting all your photos in a folder does create a dataset, but doesn't meet the threshold of creative input for that dataset to be copyrightable as a compilation. Now, you do hold the copyright on all of your photos. This means that you can restrict their transmission to others. You can even transmit them to someone as part of a contract that they not engage in a particular activity, like training an AI. But if they proceed to train an AI using them, they've committed a breach of contract, not copyright. And I'll tell you, I'm not a lawyer myself, but instead a SME who works with a lawyer, and in order to receive relief for breach of contract, a judge is going to look to said contract in order to calculate damages. If you have a contract that says that something is a breach, but no language that assists a judge in calculating damages, you shouldn't assume you're going to get any relief in excess of, perhaps, an injunction. And I'm afraid my knowledge is very US-specific.

version_five 4y ago

To me this is industrial espionage rather than copyright infringement. If I post a picture online and you use it some way i didn't give permission for, maybe there's an infringement case, that's not very interesting. Here, we have effectively malware that is taking stuff that was never shared, from a personal or business cloud, and using it for some other purpose. That's a much bigger deal, because it involves stuff nobody agreed to make public. I strongly suspect Microsoft does this too with Office. I'm always catching them trying to make excuses to upload images for "connected experiences" (industrial espionage) and I imagine in the end they just do it. This is a big problem, for example when working as a contractor and dealing with private client data. There is a risk that's hard to manage of big vendors stealing data through their software that I don't know how to manage

dotancohen 4y ago
[flagged]
archontes 4y ago
This continues to be a confusion in copyright. You can't put a photo online and tell me how I can consume it. You can tell me I can't distribute it to anyone else.

zython 4y ago

This is honestly very convenient. If I ever accidentally delete a picture I can just ask adobe for a backup. Very consumer consious decision on adobes part.

hef19898 4y ago
They could, but I guess you get the same response you get from, e.g. the NSA, if you ask for a back-up of your deleted e-mails and text messages...

gniting 4y ago

Where does one find this setting on the iOS apps? I am not using lightroom anywhere else.

ubermonkey 4y ago
It's an online setting, in "Manage your account" on the Adobe site.

PaulHoule 4y ago

It doesn't seem to affect Lightroom classic which is what I use.

CharlesW 4y ago
This appears to be true for now unless you're syncing Lightroom Classic with Adobe Cloud. But I think it's safe to say that Adobe would not have a problem farming your local catalogs for images in the future without warning. https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/how-to/sync-photos-lightroom-mobile.html https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/how-to/sync-photos...

nerdjon 4y ago

Now I don't see anything that implies that this is being used for training AI generated work... but I don't see any reason it can't be. This has me seriously concerning for not only the future of art but all created work and who actually has the rights to that depending on what you use to make it. What particularly bothers me is how quickly this was just accepted by society. I saw so many people defending it as "fun" because they just don't understand how it actually works. I was really hoping that society would push back against AI generated things... that was proven wrong very very quickly. I am sending this to all of my artist friends.

dylan604 4y ago

A few updates ago, they made it very difficult to save files to your local system. I wonder if this has anything to do with that. It is at the least a very dark UI pattern to get people to use their cloud storage offerings. Add to it that they use any data in the cloud storage as training data just really goes over the top.

nbzso 4y ago

WOW. Now do this with Figma. >Prompt: Give me an Accessible Design System with all available user stories and tokenize it fully. Let's go, Adobe. The future is now. I will grow my own food and f*ck around in the woods. I will own nothing and I will be happy. I promise.

frozencell 4y ago
We should start a war against those systems.

aceazzameen 4y ago

I'm not a professional photographer, so I don't have their needs. But Google Picasa still works for my photos. I use Dropbox to sync them off my phone onto my PC. And Krita and Photopea has replaced my need for Photoshop after I dumped Adobe several years ago. And then there's mobile apps like Procreate and Infinite Painter. I also own the Affinity products which are quite nice. But I admittedly don't use them much. I lost trust in Adobe years ago, especially when every new release for the yearly Adobe Max was full of new bugs. Seeing news like this reminds me to never go back.

jwalton 4y ago

If anyone else is looking for how to opt out: https://account.adobe.com/privacy https://account.adobe.com/privacy

IceHegel 4y ago

This is the kind of behavior that customers should be able to sue Adobe for, perhaps winning the rights to any AI system developed using their images. I use Lightroom 5-10 times a year and there was no chance I would have found this option. Feels incredibly invasive to use my work without consent.

t0bia_s 4y ago
Why are you paying for LR that you barelly use?

wahnfrieden 4y ago

how is this worse than what stable diffusion / openai etc. are doing? these other models also don't seek consent, opt-in, licensing

CharlesW 4y ago
This is a key question. What Adobe's doing is incredibly anti-creator but arguably better because you can at least opt out. There's a lot of cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy about this right now even in communities that should know better.
cesarb 4y ago
From what I understood, one big difference which makes this one worse is that it is using unpublished photos. Which can include works in progress, finished work under non-disclosure agreements, and even intimate things like personal nude pictures. It's more than just lacking consent or opt-in or licensing; these are files which shouldn't be available to these models (or to the public in general) at all.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Yep, the problem is they are providing the illusion of privacy and violating it. They should just make everyone’s cloud storage public access for viewing if they want to treat it like public data.

ubermonkey 4y ago

Thanks for this post. I've just opted out.

tethys 4y ago

Here Adobe provides some more information: > Adobe may analyze your Creative Cloud or Document Cloud content to provide product features and improve and develop our products and services. Nothing in that document seems to indicate this is opt-in. > Let's say that you access Creative Cloud or Document Cloud via a personal account and prefer that Adobe doesn't analyze your content to develop and improve our products and services. In that case, you may turn off content analysis at any time from your Adobe account. https://helpx.adobe.com/manage-account/using/machine-learning-faq.html https://helpx.adobe.com/manage-account/using/machine-learnin...

alkonaut 4y ago

I assume they either make money or plan to make money from it. And as long as it’s optional I guess it’s fine BUT why not give a little cut to those who provide images in the form of a reduced fee?

Gigachad 4y ago
This is almost certainly illegal under the gdpr because it’s effectively charging users money to opt for privacy.
- alkonaut 4y ago
  Doesn’t feel very clear cut. It the images aren’t kept after they are fed into training, then it’s hard to say where there is PII stored. Selling privacy for money is legal, that’s what every store membership card where you get a member rebate does (in which case they of course associate all your purchases with the account).

t0bia_s 4y ago

It's off for me (EU). This is one of many reason why piracy is trend again. You have no option if you want use Adobe SW that you pay for, to use offline.

t0bia_s 4y ago

If I sign exclusive licence contract with my client that guarantee originality of my work (ie logo) without option to sell copyright to others and Adobe break it just like that, it's great for lawsuit. Or piracy could be cheaper answer.