Adobe deletes Bluesky posts after backlash

This.

Adobe knows this. It’s a numbers game; if they have an honest monthly subscription and someone cancels, they get nothing.

If they have this scammy subscription and they collect 50% of the remainder for 50% of people, it’s like a free 25% (of the remaining “annual” term).

So many problems with your reasoning.

"Nothing was stolen from the artists but instead used without their permission"

Yes and no. Sure, the artist didn't loose anything physical, but neither did music or movie producers when people downloaded and shared MP3s and videos. They still won in court based on the profits they determined the "theft" cost them, and the settlements were absurdly high. How is this different? An artist's work is essentially their resume. AI companies use their work without permission to create programs specifically intended to generate similar work in seconds, this substantially impacts an artist's ability to profit from their work. You seem to be suggesting that artists have no right to control the profits their work can generate - an argument I can't imagine you would extend to corporations.

"The thing being used is an idea"

This is profoundly absurd. AI companies aren't taking ideas directly from artist's heads... yet. They're not training their models on ideas. They're training them on the actual images artists create with skills honed over decades of work.

"not anything the artist loses access to when someone else has it"

Again, see point #1. The courts have long established that what's lost in IP theft is the potential for future profits, not something directly physical. By your reasoning here, there should be no such things as patents. I should be able to take anyone or any corporation's "ideas" and use them to produce my own products to sell. And this is a perfect analogy - why would any corporation invest millions or billions of dollars developing a product if anyone could just take the "ideas" they came up with and immediately undercut the corporation with clones or variants of their products? Exactly similar, why would an artist invest years or decades of time honing the skills needed to create imagery if massive corporations can just take that work, feed it into their programs and generate similar work in seconds for pennies?

"What is there to complain about"

The loss of income potential, which is precisely what courts have agreed with when corporations are on the receiving end of IP theft.

"Why should others listen to the complaints"

Because what's happening is objectively wrong. You are exactly the kind of person the corporatocracy wants - someone who just say "Ehhh, I wasn't personally impacted, so I don't care". And not only don't you care, you actively argue in favor of the corporations. Is it any wonder society is what it is today?

Is it? It clearly says "Annual, billed monthly" and "Fee applies if you cancel after 14 days." next to the price.

Adobe did a pretty good job at disclosing the "annual plan, billed monthly" aspect so they'll likely win any chargebacks. That said, your bank might just cave and reimburse you out of pocket.

So what benefit do we derive as a society from deciding that the capability for copyright infringement is in and of itself infringement? What do we gain by overturning the current protections the law (or society) currently has for technologies like xerox machines, VHS tapes, blank CDs and DVDs, media ripping tools, and site scraping tools? Open source digital media encoding, blank media, site scraping tools and bit-torrent enable copyright infringement on a massive scale to the tune of millions or more dollars in losses every year if you believe the media companies. And yet, I would argue as a society we would be worse off without those tools. In fact, I'd even argue that as a society we'd be worse off without some degree of tolerated copyright infringement. How many pieces of interesting media have been "saved" from the dust bin of history and preserved for future generations by people committing copyright infringement for their own purposes? Things like early seasons of Dr Who or other TV shows that were taped over and so the only extant copies are from people's home collections taped off the TV. The "De-specialized" editions of Star Wars are probably the most high quality and true to the original cuts of the original Star Wars trilogy that exist, and they are unequivocally pure copyright infringement.

Or consider the youtube video "Fan.tasia"[1]. That is a collection of unlicensed video clips, combined with another individual's work which itself is a collection of unlicensed audio clips mashed together into a amalgamation of sight and sound to produce something new and I would argue original, but very clearly also full of copyright infringement and facilitated by a bunch of technologies that enable doing infringement at scale. It is (IMO) far more obviously copyright infringement than anything an AI model is. Yet I would argue a world in which that media and the technologies that enable it were made illegal, or heavily restricted to only the people that could afford to license all of the things that went into it from the people who created all the original works, would be a worse world for us all. The ability to easily commit copyright infringement at scale enabled the production of new and interesting art that would not have existed otherwise, and almost certainly built skills (like editing and mixing) for the people involved. That, to me, is more valuable to society than ensuring that all the artists and studios whose work went into that media got whatever fractions of a penny they lost from having their works infringed.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-6xk4W6N20&pp=ygUJZmFuLnRhc...