Adobe Tries To Win Back Users After Being Accused Of Stealing Their Creative Work With New Policy
Adobe has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons recently. The company was frowned upon by its own users who accused the firm of stealing their creative work without any form of consent or compensation.
Now, Adobe is working hard to try and amend its Terms of Use in a manner that sits well with so many others. This includes a complete rework of its working to ensure there’s no more confusion on how it does or does not access its material.
The company rolled out a statement on this front which claims that they were re-accepting all the Terms of Use which led to some major concerns about what the terms are and what their actual meaning could be.
The firm’s CSO mentioned through a recent blog post how the next few days were crucial for them as they vowed to speak to all their clients regarding a new policy that would shape up by June 18 this year.
It reaffirmed how it wouldn’t be using customer creations or any kind of material for training its AI tools. In the same manner, they revealed how they have never in the past used private content without consent or gone beyond any of its respective legal limits to benefit.
They also added how they weren’t considering any such practices as they happened to be a part of the company’s recent Terms of Use mentioned in the policy.
The company also admitted how it was the right time to make its terms of use more comprehensible for others to understand as it was once called out to be too complex due to the difficult legal terms outlined.
They did admit the error on their part regarding how they should have addressed the matter before. Adobe added how technology does evolve with time and so should legal policies in place to better suit the changes made on this front.
This past week, the company had a lot of backlash coming in its direction when clients including those linked to the art and film industry accused the company of stealing their creative material for AI training purposes. And that had many leaving the platform and resorting to better options where they knew their creativity wouldn’t be stolen.
The company spoke about accessing and viewing content belonging to users and also carrying out an analysis with the help of its AI tools that many found to be unforgiving and just not fair.
A lot of the material was yet to be published and that in itself said so much. Meanwhile, the language also failed in terms of detailing how and to what extent Adobe was seeing users’ work online in places like its popular editing app Photoshop.
But Adobe is not backing down and it hopes to make matters better with a new policy that can better address people’s concerns and remove any form of confusion linked to the spread of abusive material online that would stop the processing of content itself or from other apps it hosts online.
Adobe added how this update’s main focus was designed to achieve clarity about the matter and how more improvements done to its moderation could fix the situation and win back fans’ confidence.
It also admitted how the current trend of Generative AI and its commitment to better innovation were at stake here so that is why it has rolled out more human moderation on this front to ensure content is better reviewed and processed.
Now the question on many people’s minds is what this really means. Will all of the users’ content uploaded through the cloud on Adobe be subject to scanning by the company’s systems? Well, Adobe says only local material that’s sted on the computer won’t be accessed in this regard. But anything else is usually scanned as a routine for Creative Cloud to make sure no explicit material gets uploaded. Human reviews only take center stage if illegal content gets flagged by the whole automated system.
We can see why users were concerned to begin with and the company does hope to mention in its altered terms of use that user content will not be used without consent for training AI models.
Image: DIW-Aigen
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