Adobe used to be known as the company that made Acrobat and PhotoShop. However, Addobe is becoming increasingly known as one of the great digital scammers of the modern age.
From their shonky subscription models to make people pay for certain colors in PhotoShop (a big shout out to Pantone there, too), the company, like so many others in these tumultuous times, is more concerned with growing its bottom line at any cost than taking a moment to consider the needs of its users, or the consequences of their actions. acts.
I bring this up today because, less than a week after forcing people to check that they weren’t reading a Onion story by learning about the colorsthe company has announced that it is embracing the art of AI, which is not only a huge scam, but also a serious threat to the livelihood of artists around the world, large and small.
I have already made my feelings about AI very clear on this website:I wrote this article in August interviewing a variety of artists from the gaming and entertainment industry.—and I think it sucks not only because it’s a threat to artists, but also to Art. While the jobs of people are, of course, important, we’re not just talking about cotton gins here, and how this is in many ways a breakdown of labor versus capital; we are talking about a process that is encroaching on a fundamentally human pastime and creative quest.
Machines do not make art. They are machines! They are simply making a rough casserole out of the human art that has been fed, in the vast number of cases without credit or compensation. What Dan Sheehan says in his fantastic piece Art in the age of optimizationAI art is not about art, it is simply “a technology that clearly exists to remove the human element from the process of artistic expression.”
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In any case! Last week, Adobe released an announcement saying that AI-generated art would be available as part of the company’s vast library of stock images, going so far as to say that the field is “amplifying human creativity.” The company boldly, repeatedly, says things like that they have “deeply considered these questions and implemented a new submission policy that we believe will ensure our content uses AI technology responsibly by both creators and customers,” and that “generative AI is a big step forward.” for creators, harnessing the incredible power of machine learning to ideate faster by developing images using words, sketches, and gestures.”
creators? Fuck off! These people are not creating anything! They are typing words into a computer that has been powered current Art! And even if Adobe can, as they claim, only post images that have been “properly constructed, used and disclosed”, it still sucks! Gah! trying to do good a one of AI art’s (art theft) problems doesn’t absolve him of his others, such as the fact that nothing to do with these images or their creation has anything to do with art.
The reaction among artists, of course, has been as wildly negative as any AI art announcement in the last six months, with some criticizing the company while others resorting to more traditional cries: namely, that the artists just they hack PhotoShop instead of giving this company another dime.
