Adobe used to be known as the company that developed Acrobat and PhotoShop. However, Addobe is increasingly known as one of the great digital crooks of the modern age.
From its shonky subscription models to Let people pay for certain colors in PhotoShopthe company, like so many others during these turbulent times, is more interested in increasing its profits at all costs than taking a moment to consider the needs of its users or the consequences of their actions.
I’m bringing this up today because less than a week after I forced people to look, they hadn’t read it Onion history while learning the color thingthe company has announced it is turning its attention to AI art, which not only represents a massive crime, but also a serious threat to the livelihoods of artists around the world, big and small.
I have already made my feelings towards AI very clear on this website—I wrote this article in August while interviewing a number of artists from the video game and entertainment industries– and think it sucks, not only because it poses a threat to artists, but also art. While people’s jobs are obviously important, we’re not just talking about cotton gins and gins here that in many ways this is a breakdown of labor and capital; We are speaking of a process that engages in a fundamentally human pastime and creative endeavour.
Machines don’t make art. These are machines! They only make an approximate casserole of human art fed into it, in the vast majority of cases without credit or compensation. As says Dan Sheehan in his fantastic piece Art in the age of optimizationAI art is not about art, it is merely “a technology that clearly serves to remove the human element from the process of artistic expression”.
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However! Adobe released an announcement last week He said AI-generated art would be made available as part of the company’s vast library of archival images, going so far as to say the field “amplifies human creativity.” The company repeatedly boldly says that it has “thoroughly examined these issues and implemented a new submission policy that we believe our content uses AI technology responsibly by creators and customers alike” and that “generative AI is a huge leap forward.” ahead is for developers harnessing the incredible power of machine learning to generate ideas faster by developing images with words, sketches and gestures.”
Creator? Fuck off! These people create nothing! They enter words into a computer that has been fed indeed Art! And even if, as they claim, Adobe can only publish images that are “properly created, used, and disclosed,” it still sucks! Yeh! try to do well one One of the problems of AI art – art theft – does not absolve it from its others, like the fact that nothing with these images or their creation has anything to do with art!
Of course, the reaction among artists over the past six months has been as fiercely negative as any other AI art announcement, with some criticizing the company while others resorting to more traditional yells: that artists are just pirating PhotoShop rather than giving the company another dime give.
