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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

by adzm 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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.
bpodgursky 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
The problem isn't their specific practices, but more that they're in general one of the companies profiting from our slopcore future.
nonchalantsui 2y ago
For their pricing and subscription practices alone, they deserve far more backlash than they get.
- fxtentacle 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > proprietary file formats Gimp can't handle them?
    - mamonoleechi 2y ago
      If not, Affinity Photo or Photopea will probably do the job.
    - fxtentacle 2y ago
      For InDesign magazines with embedded images, for example, I'm not aware of any compatible 3rd party software
      - mandmandam 2y ago
        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/225143-what-does-everyone-else-do-that-has-switched-from-indesign-to-publisher-do/ https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/225143-wha...
    - jwitthuhn 2y ago
      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.
cosmotic 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Pixelmator Pro is very close... but Mac only, still. Image editing on Linux is rough.
  - dgellow 2y ago
    Have you tried Affinity?
f33d5173 2y ago
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_ 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > 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.
UtopiaPunk 2y ago
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 https://procreate.com/ai
- rmwaite 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Procreate is not owned by Apple, you're probably thinking of Pixelmator.
    - rmwaite 2y ago
      Oh snap, you’re right. My mistake!
- _bin_ 2y ago
  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.
deleted 2y ago
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giancarlostoro 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
They're making money off it. At least Meta gives their models to the public.
m463 2y ago
I remember pixelmator being a breath of fresh air.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      > 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.
nitwit005 2y ago
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/ https://www.clipstudio.net/en/news/202212/02_01/
- mubou 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  Talking to customers is a good thing. Let's normalize it.
Spooky23 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
> 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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ngcazz 2y ago
  Or that generative AI is ethical at all
  - esalman 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        > 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 2y ago
        AI could do it. Seems a good use of it.
  - int_19h 2y ago
    What exactly is unethical about generative AI, per se?
Bluescreenbuddy 2y ago
This Adobe. They don’t care about ethic. And frankly fuck them.
deleted 2y ago
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quitit 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Thanks. I will check this out. I was shocked how terrible the output of Photoshop AI tools are. Not even midjourney 4 level.
    - ZeroTalent 2y ago
      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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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.
      - 2y ago
sneak 2y ago
Subscriptionware is cancer. They deserve all the hate they get.
sdrothrock 2y ago
> 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.
- mesh 2y ago
  This is something that the teams within Adobe take really seriously. More info here: https://adobe.design/stories/leading-design/reducing-biased-and-harmful-outcomes-in-generative-ai https://adobe.design/stories/leading-design/reducing-biased-... (I work for Adobe)
devmor 2y ago
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 2y ago
SUPER ethical to try and put artists and entire industries out of business to be replaced with Adobe products.
mesh 2y ago
For reference, here is Adobe's approach to generative ai: https://www.adobe.com/fireflyapproach/ https://www.adobe.com/fireflyapproach/ (I work for Adobe)
washadjeffmad 2y ago
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 2y ago
ACME is the one major company trying to be ethical with its orphan crushing training data and no one even seems to care!
therealpygon 2y ago
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 2y ago
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.
nektro 2y ago
because customers don't want generative AI in their products, ethical or not
arthurtully 2y ago
Step 1. Make a stock photos library for everyone to upload. Step 2. Use that stock photo library to train your AI without letting users opt out. You couldn't remove photos without accepting the licence. Step 3. Allow users to use AI generated art on said stock library, even further ignoring artists by regurgitating art from other models. Step 4. Force new licences to users that use any file as potential training data. Step 5. Act shocked when everyone is mad.

by adzm 2y ago

Angostura 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago

> 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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.

bpodgursky 2y ago

> 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 2y ago

The problem isn't their specific practices, but more that they're in general one of the companies profiting from our slopcore future.

nonchalantsui 2y ago

For their pricing and subscription practices alone, they deserve far more backlash than they get.

fxtentacle 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > proprietary file formats Gimp can't handle them?
  - mamonoleechi 2y ago
    If not, Affinity Photo or Photopea will probably do the job.
  - fxtentacle 2y ago
    For InDesign magazines with embedded images, for example, I'm not aware of any compatible 3rd party software
    - mandmandam 2y ago
      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/225143-what-does-everyone-else-do-that-has-switched-from-indesign-to-publisher-do/ https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/225143-wha...
  - jwitthuhn 2y ago
    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.

cosmotic 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Pixelmator Pro is very close... but Mac only, still. Image editing on Linux is rough.
- dgellow 2y ago
  Have you tried Affinity?

f33d5173 2y ago

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_ 2y ago
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 2y ago
  > 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.

UtopiaPunk 2y ago

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 https://procreate.com/ai

rmwaite 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Procreate is not owned by Apple, you're probably thinking of Pixelmator.
  - rmwaite 2y ago
    Oh snap, you’re right. My mistake!
_bin_ 2y ago
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.

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giancarlostoro 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago

They're making money off it. At least Meta gives their models to the public.

m463 2y ago

I remember pixelmator being a breath of fresh air.

pavel_lishin 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago

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 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    > 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.

nitwit005 2y ago

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/ https://www.clipstudio.net/en/news/202212/02_01/

mubou 2y ago
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 2y ago
Talking to customers is a good thing. Let's normalize it.

Spooky23 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago

> 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.

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ngcazz 2y ago
Or that generative AI is ethical at all
- esalman 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      > 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 2y ago
        AI could do it. Seems a good use of it.
- int_19h 2y ago
  What exactly is unethical about generative AI, per se?

Bluescreenbuddy 2y ago

This Adobe. They don’t care about ethic. And frankly fuck them.

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quitit 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  Thanks. I will check this out. I was shocked how terrible the output of Photoshop AI tools are. Not even midjourney 4 level.
  - ZeroTalent 2y ago
    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 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago

> 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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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.
    - 2y ago

sneak 2y ago

Subscriptionware is cancer. They deserve all the hate they get.

sdrothrock 2y ago

> 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.

mesh 2y ago
This is something that the teams within Adobe take really seriously. More info here: https://adobe.design/stories/leading-design/reducing-biased-and-harmful-outcomes-in-generative-ai https://adobe.design/stories/leading-design/reducing-biased-... (I work for Adobe)

devmor 2y ago

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 2y ago

SUPER ethical to try and put artists and entire industries out of business to be replaced with Adobe products.

mesh 2y ago

For reference, here is Adobe's approach to generative ai: https://www.adobe.com/fireflyapproach/ https://www.adobe.com/fireflyapproach/ (I work for Adobe)

washadjeffmad 2y ago

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 2y ago

ACME is the one major company trying to be ethical with its orphan crushing training data and no one even seems to care!

therealpygon 2y ago

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 2y ago

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.

nektro 2y ago

because customers don't want generative AI in their products, ethical or not

arthurtully 2y ago

Step 1. Make a stock photos library for everyone to upload. Step 2. Use that stock photo library to train your AI without letting users opt out. You couldn't remove photos without accepting the licence. Step 3. Allow users to use AI generated art on said stock library, even further ignoring artists by regurgitating art from other models. Step 4. Force new licences to users that use any file as potential training data. Step 5. Act shocked when everyone is mad.