Will AI eliminate art professions?
Surprisingly, this is not the main claim of the protest against Adobe. (Photo: Unsplash)
It all started last week, when the French comic writer Claire Wendling uploaded to Instagram a screenshot of a section of the privacy settings and personal data of Adobe's old and popular software, aka Photoshop.
The post was quickly shared on Twitter and from there went viral, garnering nearly 2 million views and thousands of retweets.
The concern among those who shared the tweet was that when Photoshop and other Adobe products track artists who use their applications to see how they work, they are effectively stealing the creative processes that graphic designers have developed over decades of work, in favor of automated AI-based systems designed to their profession.
One commenter accused Adobe of "business practices that prey on artists";
Another was concerned that "the masters of machine work steal from you while you work."
Another noted that this was "reason number 32405585382281858428 why you shouldn't use Adobe products."
On the importance of informed consent
But wait, if it's all about a setting that can be changed with a simple action, then what's all the fuss about? Well, to answer that question, let's talk about consent. Opt-in and opt-out are two methodologies that concern users' consent to accept themselves terms of use or certain settings.
Opt-in means that in order to join the service (in this case, tracking the actions the user does in Photoshop in order to give him AI-based recommendations), the user must mark that he is interested. In contrast, in Opt-out the box is checked in advance by default, and if you do not want to receive the service you must take action and remove the check mark.
The problem is that when such a problematic section is marked in advance, most likely you will not notice it and will register even if you are not interested in it. Some will say that it is not a real choice and therefore there was no This is informed consent.
In Kabbalah, a harasser against whom a complaint of sexual assault was filed will claim in his defense that the assaulted did nothing, meaning she wanted it.
But today it is already known that without enthusiastic consent there is nothing to strive for contact and the same applies to opt-out mechanisms - if I did not explicitly state that I am interested, it means that I am not interested.
Data protection experts also say they are concerned about the way Adobe handled the process.
"Under European privacy law, Adobe needs opt-in consent before reading data from people's devices for purposes that are not necessary for the service the user has requested," says Michael Weil, a professor at University College London who specializes in digital rights.
"Sharing data in this way is not only unnecessary, it goes way beyond the expectations of users, many of whom may have signed NDAs with their clients to ensure that the content they edit doesn't end up anywhere."
According to Weil, Adobe's opt-out clause may be subject to investigations under European privacy law, for which Apple was fined $8.5 million just last week.
Adobe's response to claims against it
In response to the publications, a spokesperson for the company, which is responsible for Photoshop, InDesign and other graphics software, said that "Adobe does not use data stored in customers' Creative Cloud accounts to train its experimental generative AI features" and added that "we are currently reviewing our policy to define a good more generative AI use cases.”
Indeed, Adobe's FAQ page cites examples of how the company might use machine learning to recognize and tag objects like dogs and cats or specific people.
"In Photoshop, machine learning can be used to automatically correct perspective in an image," the company says.
It can also be used to suggest context-based options, for example, if the app believes you're designing a website, it may suggest relevant buttons that you can include in your design.
"We give customers complete control over their privacy preferences and settings," an Adobe spokesperson said in a statement.
"The policy in question is not new and has been in place for a decade to help us improve our products for customers."
The spokesperson instructed any customer who prefers not to have their content included in the analysis to turn off that option on the privacy page.
However, Adobe has never clearly stated how it uses user content.
What is this protest actually about?
If it weren't for the astronomical explosion of the whole AI topic in the last couple of months, this whole story about informed consent might have slipped under the radar, as it has until now, but now, when all users are more aware of what is being done with their data, they simply cannot stand by and remain silent.
However, there are those who believe that this legitimate concern is out of context.
"People saw this little checkbox for sharing data for machine learning and connected it with all the current AI image creation drama going on right now," says Daniel Landerman, Los Angeles-based creative director and illustrator.
To Landerman, the machine learning data sharing feature has been in Adobe's apps for years, and it only applies to files stored in Adobe's cloud, which he says "no professional should do anyway."
Landerman has long been careful to uncheck all the options that share data with app manufacturers, as part of the process of working with clients who often require him to sign confidentiality agreements for working on projects.
"Everything is moving so fast with all the AI stuff: while artists are trying to advance current regulations, AI and NFT engineers are trying to outdo the artists," Landerman says.
"I'm not surprised that some unrelated issues get caught up in the storm."
you murdered and inherited?
It turns out that Adobe is not the only company that used user data without their consent.
David Holtz, founder of Midjourney, an AI-based image generator, caused consternation among the artist community when he admitted in an interview with Forbes in September that his company did not seek permission from the artists on whom its AI algorithms were trained.
"It's amazing that a paid service assumes it's okay to violate user privacy on such a scale," says Andrey Okonchennikov, an Austrian front-end developer and UI/UX designer.
"This is problematic because companies that offer to store data in the cloud assume that they own the data. This violates the intellectual property and privacy of millions of people while those same companies conduct business as usual. This must stop now."
Indeed, various artists around the world have already created tools designed to allow artists to opt out of having their work used for AI training.
The European Union has also questioned the legality of artificial intelligence tools that collect vast amounts of artwork to train their machine learning model, and even suggested that training algorithms for art purposes should only be done using works that are in the public domain and not subject to copyright.
However, until explicit legislation is implemented, it is likely that these technologies will continue to develop unimpeded at the expense of the artists.
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