Adobe’s New Terms Spark Outrage: Is Your Creative Work at Risk?
Adobe's Machine Learning Ambitions Come In Focus - Will Your Content Be Used to Train AI?
It’s been a tough week for Adobe. Their new terms are causing a massive uproar among creatives — and they’re letting Adobe know on social media.
1. ToS seems to give Adobe free rein including human review of your files if you upload to their cloud, thanks to a very broad and permissive sublicense.
2. Even if Firefly isn’t trained on user data today, the carve out for machine learning is broad enough to allow that use in the future no matter what execs say.
3. Creatives are also angry because the changes were introduced as a pop-up that blocked paying users from accessing Adobe’s apps until they accepted the updated terms.
I guess this all shouldn’t be a surprise since “data is the new oil.” But def a departure for Adobe, which has historically had terrible analytics on how people even use their darn products.
Of course CapCut, Descript, Canva and really any cloud based app already does this. Adobe is just catching up so they have wide latitude on what they can do with stuff uploaded to their cloud. Being stewards of this data is no longer sufficient when there’s immense latent value to be extracted.
And as the lines between offline and cloud based tools blur, it’s clear these tensions will only intensify. Adobe’s new terms are a stark reminder that in an era of cloud computing and machine learning “owning” your content is becoming an increasingly complex question.