Adobe employees unhappy with company response to AI drama

Adobe employees are allegedly extremely unhappy about how the company has been managing the latest AI controversy. Business Insider obtained screenshots from conversations on Slack channels showing how disgruntled many Adobe workers are over the latest furore.

In case you’ve been living off-grid under a rock this last week, you’ll know that Adobe managed to anger the vast majority of its clients by updating its Terms of Service.

The updated Terms were not just vague but implied that Adobe would be monitoring subscribers’ images and then using them to train its AI data set. This, of course, sparked an immediate response and backlash from the creative communities, and Adobe quickly backpedalled, presumably after seeing a sizeable number of subscription cancellations.

Unhappy staff

Now, it appears that Adobe employees are also unhappy with how the company managed the problem and are calling for better communication strategies with customers.

According to the screenshots, employees complained about the company’s poor response to the controversy and demanded a better long-term communication plan. They also pointed out how Adobe had got itself into similar tangles in the past and that lessons had clearly not been learned from those.

“If our goal is truly to prioritize our users’ best interests (which, to be honest, I sometimes question), it’s astonishing how poor our communication can be,” says one employee in Slack. “The general perception is: Adobe is an evil company that will do whatever it takes to F its users.”

“Let’s avoid becoming like IBM,” they add.

Content analysis

The biggest point of contention in the updated Terms of Service was the clause that said that Adobe “may analyze your content” using machine learning technology to “improve our Services and Software.”

Obviously, this was, at best, going to ruffle feathers, especially considering that up until now, Adobe has claimed to be ‘ethical’ on how it trains its Firefly AI data set and only uses images in its stock site.

It has emerged recently that several huge tech companies, such as Apple and OpenAI, have been making secret deals with stock image sites to train their AI image generators. Huge sums of money have exchanged hands. Of course, the actual artists, photographers and videographers never saw a dime of that money. Adobe is also not innocent, allegedly using internet scraper Midjourney to train its AI.

There are also other less scrupulous companies that have no qualms about training and stealing content without permission. OpenAI allegedly trained much of its data for Sora using YouTube videos, which wasn’t consented to under the platform’s T+Cs. AI watchdogs have also found that children’s photos have been used without parents’ consent to train AI data sets. Some have had the course of their entire childhoods taken.

Blog posts and back-peddles

Adobe’s response was not just one but two attempts via the blog to mend the situation. “We’ve never trained generative AI on customer content, taken ownership of a customer’s work, or allowed access to customer content beyond legal requirements. Nor were we considering any of those practices as part of the recent Terms of Use update,” the second blog post says.

However, it remains to be seen if people will actually believe that. Trust is already worn pretty thin in the creator communities. Employees with a better finger on the pulse of the real-world noted that there is still a general feeling of discontent on social media when it comes to Adobe.

“Still, a loud ‘F Adobe’ and ‘Cancel Adobe’ rhetoric is happening within the independent creator community that needs to be addressed,” said one employee.

Another asked, “What are we doing meaningfully to prevent this, or is this only acted on when called out?”

Not enough

They may have a point. It isn’t enough to try to patch up the situation after the fact when you get called out on it. Otherwise, it just feels like Adobe is trying to pull a fast one on its customers and only cares when they get subscription cancellations.

Adobe’s chief strategy officer, Scott Belsky, posted on X that the company was long overdue for an overhaul that is in line with current technology. “As technology evolves, every company’s terms of use must also evolve to directly address new concerns on creators’ minds. We should have done this sooner, but the team is committed to getting it right,” Belsky wrote.

Apparently, an Adobe spokesperson told Business Insider that it will roll out new and updated Terms by June 18th. Let’s hope they are a little more transparent and favourable.

[via business insider]