Welp, it’s already happening…
Lots to talk about this time I suppose. TLDR: The online art world is on fire because the big art platforms that most professionals use to make, showcase, and promote their work have all decided to scrape the work of all of their customers in order to sell their platforms to non-artist customers who want to have “A.I.“ to make artwork for them, again.
This has already happened via the Laion 5b dataset which was taken for “research“ purposes and then sold to people as Dall-E 2, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, etc. 2 years ago these companies had everyone enamored by the novelty of an algorithm correlating data points, organizing pixels, vectors, and polygons into something that resembles professional artwork from the text a customer input. These companies then charged that same customer money to continue to use (train) these models further. Previously Deviantart made the same mistake and cannibalized their own user base considering it was an art platform intended for artists.
A couple of weeks ago Meta (owners of Facebook & Instagram) began scraping user content and many artists left those platforms and are flocking to an anti-AI platform started by artists called Cara (an Artstation/Instagram hybrid). Adobe’s Terms of Service (ToS) changed Feb 17th to inform their customers that they are scraping their projects, data, etc. to train their models to sell machine learning/ AI features but most people are seeing this for the first time because the end date to accept and sign this new ToS is up.
As someone who is just starting out in the industry and paying for Adobe services to be able to do this work, it makes it even more annoying. I can’t say I know of many agencies that don’t require Adobe Creative Cloud (Adobe CC) experience and/or require Adobe CC to collaborate with colleagues. It’s all really disappointing. I don’t want my work used to sell Adobe CC subscriptions without compensation. Commercial art is soulless enough by default and in some ways we agree to this by displaying our work on Behance (Adobe’s Social Media/Job platform). When we post our work we tell everyone we used an Adobe product to make our artwork and we advertise, positively rate, and promote Adobe’s platform— now Adobe wants to sell our work for free and potentially turn artists into a middleman to be cut out by AI solutions that make “good enough“ artwork with a couple clicks.
I feel like I have to sign to keep my career going… (gag) but either way I know I’m not making any personal art with an Adobe product until something changes and I’m not uploading personal work onto Behance until something changes. In the meantime, I may explore other art programs to use for my own work and keep my traditional work going as well.
