Adobe deletes Bluesky posts after backlash

So is a xerox machine. It's whole purpose is to make copies of things whatever you put into it with no regard to whether you have a license to make that copy. Likewise with the record capability on your VCR. Sure you could hook it up to a cam corder and transfer your home movie from a Super-8 to a VHS with your VCR (or like one I used to own, it might even have a camera accessory and port that you could hook a camera up to directly) and yet, I would wager most recordings on most VCRs were to commit copyright infringement. Bit-torrent specializes in facilitating copyright infringement, no matter how many Linux ISOs you download with it. CD ripping software and DeCSS is explicitly about copyright infringement. And let's be real, while MAME is a phenomenal piece of software that has done an amazing job of documenting legacy hardware and its quirks, the entire emulation scene as a whole is built on copyright infringement, and I would wager to a rounding error none of the folks that write MAME emulators have a license to copy the ROMs that they use to do that.

But in all of these cases, the fact that it can (and even usually is) used for copyright infringement is not in and of itself a reason to restrict or ban the technology.

> And if you want to disagree with this point, it'd be most persuasive then to explain why, if this is not the case, AI images regularly end up infringing on various aspects of various popular artworks, like characters, styles, intellectual properties, when those things are not being requested by the prompt.

Well for starters, I'd like to clarify to axioms:

1) "characters" as a subset of "intellectual properties"

2) "style" is not something you can copyright or infringe under US law. It can be part of a trademark or a design patent, and certainly you can commit fraud if you represent something in someone else's style as being a genuine item from that person, but style itself is not protected and I don't think it should be.

So then to answer the question, I would argue that AI images don't "regularly end up infringing on ... intellectual properties, when those things are not being requested by the prompt". I've generated quite a few AI images myself in exploring the various products out there and not a one of them has generated an infringing work, because none of my prompts have asked it to generate an infringing work. It is certainly possible that a given model with a sufficiently limited training set for a given set of words might be likely to generate an infringing image on a prompt, and that's because with a limited set of options to draw from, the prompt is inherently asking for an infringing image no matter how much you try to scrape the serial numbers off. That is, if I ask for an image of "two Italian plumbers who are brothers and battle turtles", everyone knows what that prompt is asking for. There's not a lot of reference options for that particular set of requirements and so it is more likely to generate an infringing image. It's also partly a function of the current goals of the models. As it stands, for the most part we want a model that takes a vague description and gives us something that matches our imagined output. Give that description to most people and they're going to envision the Mario Brothers, so a "good" image generation model is one that will generate a "Mario Brothers" inspired (or infringing) image.

As the technology improves and we get better about producing models that can take new paths without also generating body horror results, and as the users start wanting models that are more creative, we'll begin to see models that can respond to even that limited training set and generate something more unique and less likely to be infringing.

> No, you aren't, because an artist is a person that doesn't want to suffer legal consequences for drawing something owned by someone else.

Sorry, I think you're wrong. If you commission it for money from someone with enough potential visibility, you might encounter people who go out of their way to avoid anything that could be construed as Indiana Jones, but I bet even then you'd get more "Indiana Jones with the serial numbers filed off" images than not.

But if you just asked random artists to draw that prompt, you're going to get an artists rendition of Indiana Jones. It's clear thats what you want from the prompt and that's the single and sole cultural creative reference for that prompt. Though I suppose you and I are going to have to agree to disagree on what people will do unless you're feeling like actually asking a bunch of artist on Fiver to draw the prompt for you.

And realistically what do you expect them to draw when you make that request? When that article showed up with the headline, EVERYONE reading the headline knew the article was talking about an AI generating Indiana Jones. Why did everyone know that? Because of the limited reference for that prompt that exists. "Archeologist that wears a hat and uses a whip" describes very uniquely a single character to almost every single person.

There's a reason no one is writing articles about AIs ripping off Studio Ghibli by showing the output from the prompt "raccoon with giant testicles." No one writes articles talking about how the AI spontaneously generated Garfield knockoffs when prompted to draw an "orange stripped cat". There's no articles about AIs churning out truckloads of Superman images when someone asks for "super hero". And those articles don't exist because there's enough variations on those themes out there, enough different combinations of those words to describe enough different combinations of images and things that those words don't instantly conjure the same image and character for everyone. And so it goes for the AI too. Those prompts don't ask specifically for infringing art so they don't generally generate infringing art.

The discussion is about whether or not ignoring something that is of little consequence to you diminishes a later case you might bring when something substantially similar causes you noticeable problems. The question at hand had nothing to do with damages due to piracy (direct, perceived, hypothetical, legal fiction, or otherwise).

It's confusing because the basis for the legal claim is damages due to piracy and the size of that claim probably hasn't shifted all that much. But the motivating interest is not the damages. It is the impact of the thing on their employment. That impact was not present before so no one was inclined to pursue a protracted uphill battle.

In some things, expectations are made to be disappointed. This is one of those.

We know that people use all sorts of cognitive shortcuts to make processing their environments easier. It doesn't matter if you're smart, dumb, foolish, or perfectly average. It's just how our brains have evolved to function, and companies have been consulting with industrial and organizational psychologists for decades to help them optimize their marketing and business strategies to maximize the chances that those shortcuts play out in a way that breaks in their favor. Before I/O psychologists, companies tried to do the same by guess and trial and error...and they stumbled upon lots of strategies that were later confirmed by psychological experiments.

Cereal boxes marketed to children have cartoon characters whose eyes are drawn looking down so as to appear as if they're making eye contact with kids walking down the cereal aisle.[0] There are all sorts of "tricks" commonly used by salespeople selling things to sophisticated buyers who are capable of recognize them for what they are. Why did pharma reps take doctors to dinner and give them cheap pens and swag? Or consider the success of psychological pricing[1] and how those strategies somehow manage to be successful despite it being commonly accepted wisdom that odd prices (i.e. $1.99 instead of $2) is a marketing gimmick. We know it's a gimmick, and yet, it still has an impact on our buying behavior.

Yes, the text is there below it, but the whole point of a dark pattern is to manipulate a large enough percentage of buyers/users in a way that generates more revenue than is lost due to any frustration or annoyance created by the same patterns. Most people skim through websites, pluck out key words, and continue on. We can bemoan people for not reading the fine print, but that's not going to change the behavior.

As for the beef metaphor, per unit pricing can absolutely be used to trip up would-be buyers into buying a bit more than they planned. Not because the foolish shoppers don't know any better, but because mixed units usually require a bit more cognitive engagement. Grocery stores absolutely recognize that and benefit from it. On the other hand, you can't really sell beef in a way other than by weight, so it's the opportunity for abuse is much more limited.

> Okay but if you read most complaints, it's clear that they're not even aware that such early termination fee even existed. There's approximately zero people who were aware the termination fee existed, found it too hard to figure out what it actually was, but somehow still went with the "Annual, billed monthly" option.

Sure, because Adobe purposely hides information about the fee. That's one of the dark pattern at play. In the absence of that information, users will insert their own expectations to create meaning. If there's a fee, we'd expect it's probably a reasonable one (even if we have countless examples in our lives of how fees can be anything but reasonable). Does half the annual cost of a subscription seem reasonable to most people? Would that be most people's first guess? Probably not. I might not have been clear about this in my original comment, but there are multiple dark patterns at work here.

> This feels like grasping at straws. If we're going to invoke "people might get two numbers confused with each other",[...]

That particular dark pattern is less about people confusing two different numbers with each other when they're directly in front of them, so much as it is about giving you two different numbers to remember two weeks after you've made your decision and gone on with your life. Literally nobody on the planet is going to keep the free trial or cancellation period as a mental priority over the course of two weeks, so it becomes little more than a random thought at the back of your mind. At best, you might jot it down or set aside the receipt until closer to the deadline. The pattern's purpose is that, if you think of the cancellation/trial periods at all, the numbers will be easily conflated. Think about the times in your life when you've asked yourself something like did I see/do/hear [insert thing] last Monday or was it Tuesday? and weren't quite confident in your answer.

Dark patterns doesn't have to trip up all subscribers or even most of them. But if it trips up a some of them, well, Adobe isn't going to complain about the opportunity. Multiple, more subtle dark patterns together can work just as effectively as one particularly vicious one. They can even be preferable, in that they won't piss off your customers nearly as much, either on their own or as a whole.

0. https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2014/04/food-psychologists-...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_pricing

i also use separate cards for everything, just through privacy.com, so i also can just cancel things. services have started falsely blocking it for abuse though which is really sad :/

That comparison would be fair if the generative AI you use is trained exclusively on your own (rightfully acquired) data and work.

Existing generative AIs are feeding on the work of millions of people who did not consent.

That’s a violation of their work and of their rights.

And that should also alert those that expect to use/benefit of their own production out of these generators: why would it be 1/ protectable, 2/ protected at all.

It is no coincidence that these generators makers’ philosophy aligns with an autocrat political project, and some inhuman « masculinity » promoters. It’s all about power and nothing about playing by the rules of a society.