cutting loose

For several years now, I’ve been passively attempting to break away from the Adobe product suite’s hold on my creative output. While I tremendously enjoy using Illustrator & After Effects, the recent intrusion of generative AI features (undismissable Generate Pattern tooltips, anyone?) has accelerated the rate at which I seek to distance myself from the company. The predatory subscription model Adobe’s been operating under for several years now doesn’t help.

In recent days, the gradual tumble Adobe’s products are taking towards the theft-by-forced-opt-in model has compelled me to remove my site from their hosting platform, and my endorsement from anything said theft-machine touches. Although distancing myself wholly from Adobe products is close to impossible if I wish to remain competitive in my field, it is both possible and ethically imperative to refuse to use generative AI tools to create finished work.

Generative AI is an exploitative, wasteful, and inaccurate form of uncredited, hypercommercialized collage. Its adoption across social media sites, workplace tools, and entertainment content is a direct symptom of corporate greed, not innovation or progress. As long as any AI model does not maintain complete transparency on the sourcing of their dataset, and as long as those datasets contain so much as a single work from an artist who did not explicitly consent to their work being used to train genAI, use of that model to produce any work that benefits the prompter or their client is theft.

The most innovative, disruptive thing any genAI model could do, at this point, would be to explicitly credit and directly, monetarily compensate every single artist on whose works the model was trained, according to that artist’s individual hourly or per-project rate.

Why is this painted as an impossible pipe dream by corporate decision-makers? The answer you’ll get is cost. AI is usually adopted as a cost-cutting measure to begin with.

But we keep getting grandiose promises from genAI proponents, so why is this one so infeasible? I believe the answer is that it means the money these models (and the people who use them to turn a profit) make on other people’s work will go directly to the people actually doing the labor. And making it harder for creative workers to receive compensation for their work was always the point.