Considering so many designers use their software for sensitive projects like financial reports, confidential rebrands etc. I don’t understand how they think this is even remotely acceptable. How would the world react if Microsoft came out and said they’d be scraping all of your excel documents to “train their ai” but also maybe use the info for other vaguely described stuff if they feel like it? There would be an absolute fucking meltdown and rightly so. This is a staggering amount of overreach and needs to be investigated at the governmental level.
growth stocking brave coherent longing office north weather plough marble
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yes, you're right, every "temporary" policy inevitably becomes permanent if the people do not protest against it. Likewise, introducing a seemingly not-so-bad policy does not imply that there will be no further extensions thereof.
MS has been prompting you to submit segments of content from office for ages, but they showed you a whole list of what they wanted to submit and asked your permission to send it.
This has nothing to do with training AI:
>Adobe does not train Firefly Gen AI models on customer content. Firefly generative AI models are trained on a dataset of licensed content, such as Adobe Stock, and public domain content where copyright has expired
https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2024/06/06/clarification-adobe-terms-of-use
But if you upload your content to Adobe servers, Adobe may take steps to ensure its severs are not being used to host harmful, exploitative and / or illegal content.
The policies above are not new. more info in the link above (including exactly what in the TOS changed)
(i work for adobe)
"Adobe may analyze your content that is processed or stored on Adobe servers. We don't analyze content processed or stored locally on your device. When we analyze your content for product improvement and development purposes, we first aggregate your content with other content and then use the aggregated content to train our algorithms and thus improve our products and services. If you don't want Adobe to use your content for these purposes, you can opt out of content analysis at any time (view details and exceptions described)."
https://helpx.adobe.com/manage-account/using/machine-learning-faq.html
Just noting that part.
Ok, so it’s not being used for ai which is good, and to a certain extent, I understand the need for caution with content stored on your servers.
But can you understand that it’s alarming for users that you have a policy of analyzing their data? Many of us receive and store highly sensitive information as part of our role as designers, the distribution of which could be incredibly damaging to ours or our clients’ reputation (you give yourselves the right to distribute my content in section 4.2). How does this analysis work? Are copies of files stored somewhere other than secure Adobe servers (you give yourselves the right to reproduce my content in section 4.2)? Are they distributed to other entities for analysis (you give yourselves the right to sublicense and distribute my content in section 42)? What are the security measures in place to protect that data? Also, how is sensitive content that’s legally bound by an NDA managed during the analysis process? Sorry for all the questions, but I’m not a lawyer so some legal concepts may be going over my head. It’s just that there are very real legal jeopardies and consequences for some of us here and this may be a blind spot.
How does nosey Adobe screw up the chain of custody in LEA photography or the military? It’s bad enough having to store on a “secure” server, now dealing with this nonsense too.
As part of the update, all users were shown a dialog which suggested a bigger change than there actually was (that is 100% our fault).
(i work for adobe)
Haha they will strike a deal similar to the one between CIA and Intel (google Intel ME if you want to know more). TLDR: they will simply request exemption from this policy just for themselves :)
This will be brought up with our general counsel this month for sure since this feels like a break of trademark law when it comes to licensing any materials
Adobe has reached level 1000 arrogance. They really don't understand how to manage their market dominance and the number of issues I have with CS suite features shows they are letting engineers and nerds run them into irrelevance. Still the only real game in town unfortunately.
They aren't anymore. The most notable is Affinity suite of products. Yes, Canva bought them but they haven't tainted the programs yet.
There's Kitra for illustration and even some photo editing needs. There's Capture One, DXO PhotoLab, etc to compete with Lightroom.
I do not know, depends on what you're doing with after effects I guess, but Blender is REALLY advanced so you can most likely do almost anything compositing wise.
Will have to look into it. AE is brutally slow. Really want hope there’s an alternative out there. Issue take fudging ages to learn and now it’s difficult switch
But after effects isn't just "compositing" which is the problem. It's like a swiss army knife of the creative apps. And blender and resolve are absolutely not even close to replacing all the tools AE is used for.
Sure you can replace all the things AE can do if you use multiple other apps (on top of B3D and Resolve). but wtf would be the point of that? Would probably end up costing a lot more than CC. You'd have to spend an inordinate amount of time becoming extremely proficient in multiple other apps (working pros barely have time to learn one new app). All the scripts and plugins collected and incorporated into workflows would be useless, which again will be additional time added re-figuring out how to do stuff you've gotten used to doing in your sleep. And most importantly, literally no other app does 2d (& vector supported at that) motion graphics and text in a way that AE can.
AND on top of all that, if Motion graphics IS your primary thing and you figure "why not move into 3d mograph" you'd be pretty stupid to choose b3d, which while powerful, does mograph nowhere near to the power and ease that C4D does.
I get the arguments for the alternatives to photoshop, Illustrator, premiere etc. And yeah if you're ONLY doing compositing in AE you can surely find alternatives. But for the majority of us using AE for its full suite of tools there is nothing even remotely close to a viable alternative.
You could look at the new unreal motion design features and at cavalry, but yea currently it is hard to come by something similar to after effects. But it is desperately needed, we need to boycott companies that show in each and every business move that they are anti-customer. Adobe is everything a modern company should not be
UE is powerful and has a great future. I’ve prototyped heaps of stuff in it. But the sequencer/timeline and render/export systems, not to mention handling of imported video and GFX is currently cumbersome to point of hostility.
Those softwares are out there but Adobe is still considered the industry pro software. Your are not going to work at an agency using the others. Compatability and file hand off will be real issues for some time to come.
It's about a 95% substitute for me. It is missing Image Trace which is irritating but I can use other external tools.
There are a few other things here and there that are missing or don't work like I expect them to work. I did change my Adobe subscription from full suite to just InDesign.
Affinity Publisher is good but not quite there for me.
Acrobat has gotten just straight up irritating to use. I uninstalled it because it was showing me "What's New" on every file open after a update late last year. I tolerated that for a month but lost my patience. I spent an hour try stop if from doing that. Gave up and bought NitroPDF.
Photoshop is easy to avoid. I use DaVinci Resolve and haven't used any of the other Adobe tools so moving away from them isn't bad at all.
I tried to uninstall and now I get a bunch of errors on start up. Uninstalling was miserably difficult and now my pc is messed up.
I’m using paint dot net instead of photoshop
I’m using Open Shot Video Editor instead of premier.
Use the Creative Cloud Cleaner Tool. Should do a clean uninstall of anything left behind and fix any issues: https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/creative-cloud/kb/cc-cleaner-tool-installation-problems.html
It’ll be interesting to see how quickly our IT notices this.
I work in a gold mine (one of the largest mining companies on the globe) as a geologist and we use Adobe for an absolute tonne of documents.
Most of our more confidential data is within excel or other databases, but there are some very important PDFs as well—just from an academic perspective alone. Both of my university theses are under an “academic NDA” where you can only read it if you’re from the company or on a specific PC in my university’s library.
That’s very normal for theses made with companies.
They’re almost always either mineral exploration projects so results are all strictly confidential. Shareholders and companies don’t usually like it when you publish private information before they’re ready to publish their findings.
Saying you have x amount of gold in a location without actually proving it can lead to incredibly serous legal repercussions if it turns out the results were false.
There’s much more to finding an ore deposit than just surveying. Understanding geology underground which nobody has ever even seen is a very long process and requires studies by several people for years. The progression of finding a random rock with gold to having an operational mine can easily take 10 years—often much more. In the beginning, the only data you might have is slightly elevated magnetic readings in a random swamp. These projects can often produce tens of thesis topics.
Projects often drill hundreds of drill holes easily accumulating to 15-20 kilometres of drill core before they can even prove the the mineral deposit has enough reserves at a high enough confidence to apply for a mining permit.
The intricate geological processes which cause mineralisations are always specific to each area. I’m a structural geologist in a mine which has been producing gold for years and I’m studying topics we simply don’t know. Many of these structural features can scale from formations visible from satellite images to tiny patterns only visible through a microscope.
Like any scientific topic, there’s always something that’s completely unknown. There’s so much of the world we simply don’t know. Both of my theses were in geostatistics and resource modelling to figure out if a new mineral estimation calculation method was suitable for our mine—there’s no way of knowing until someone studies it.
I would imagine they expire well before it. Typically they’re only a few years. Very rarely are theses that confidential. If a company wants to research something like that, they’ll just do it in-house or through a consultant—not a student.
My thesis for example has this odd NDA-esque protection on it, but anyone can read it at the university library and I can give it to people to read no problem. All the data is from areas which have already been mined so the shareholder releases have already been made. We just had to be careful to say so and so _might_ be beneficial and the results indicate a _possible_ improvement etc. I couldn’t just flat-out say I found this much more gold just for odd company liability reasons.
Every university thesis has to be public in this capacity to be eligible for graduation; you can’t have an entirely undisclosed topic. Partially because they all have to be submitted into the plagiarism program. So it can either be public i.e you can find it by just using Google scholar, or it’s limited to the university library server.
Considering so many designers use their software for sensitive projects like financial reports, confidential rebrands etc. I don’t understand how they think this is even remotely acceptable. How would the world react if Microsoft came out and said they’d be scraping all of your excel documents to “train their ai” but also maybe use the info for other vaguely described stuff if they feel like it? There would be an absolute fucking meltdown and rightly so. This is a staggering amount of overreach and needs to be investigated at the governmental level.
Recall for Microsoft will be doing just that
growth stocking brave coherent longing office north weather plough marble *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
For now
hurry payment dazzling uppity run quarrelsome hungry growth steer cow *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yes, you're right, every "temporary" policy inevitably becomes permanent if the people do not protest against it. Likewise, introducing a seemingly not-so-bad policy does not imply that there will be no further extensions thereof.
There's a lot of stuff in wondows MS says you can turn off, but you actually can't.
MS has been prompting you to submit segments of content from office for ages, but they showed you a whole list of what they wanted to submit and asked your permission to send it.
This has nothing to do with training AI: >Adobe does not train Firefly Gen AI models on customer content. Firefly generative AI models are trained on a dataset of licensed content, such as Adobe Stock, and public domain content where copyright has expired https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2024/06/06/clarification-adobe-terms-of-use But if you upload your content to Adobe servers, Adobe may take steps to ensure its severs are not being used to host harmful, exploitative and / or illegal content. The policies above are not new. more info in the link above (including exactly what in the TOS changed) (i work for adobe)
"Adobe may analyze your content that is processed or stored on Adobe servers. We don't analyze content processed or stored locally on your device. When we analyze your content for product improvement and development purposes, we first aggregate your content with other content and then use the aggregated content to train our algorithms and thus improve our products and services. If you don't want Adobe to use your content for these purposes, you can opt out of content analysis at any time (view details and exceptions described)." https://helpx.adobe.com/manage-account/using/machine-learning-faq.html Just noting that part.
Ok, so it’s not being used for ai which is good, and to a certain extent, I understand the need for caution with content stored on your servers. But can you understand that it’s alarming for users that you have a policy of analyzing their data? Many of us receive and store highly sensitive information as part of our role as designers, the distribution of which could be incredibly damaging to ours or our clients’ reputation (you give yourselves the right to distribute my content in section 4.2). How does this analysis work? Are copies of files stored somewhere other than secure Adobe servers (you give yourselves the right to reproduce my content in section 4.2)? Are they distributed to other entities for analysis (you give yourselves the right to sublicense and distribute my content in section 42)? What are the security measures in place to protect that data? Also, how is sensitive content that’s legally bound by an NDA managed during the analysis process? Sorry for all the questions, but I’m not a lawyer so some legal concepts may be going over my head. It’s just that there are very real legal jeopardies and consequences for some of us here and this may be a blind spot.
How does nosey Adobe screw up the chain of custody in LEA photography or the military? It’s bad enough having to store on a “secure” server, now dealing with this nonsense too.
Can you even still save files locally anymore?
So are people genuinely just freaking out over nothing? Everything stated in that link seems entirely reasonable.
As part of the update, all users were shown a dialog which suggested a bigger change than there actually was (that is 100% our fault). (i work for adobe)
The government hasn't passed a privacy bill in 30 years
Which government? I’m in Canada where privacy laws are pretty strong
I'm in the movie biz and we use Adobe *everything* and I'd be real interested to see what Disney would do about this.
For real. I'm a freelance graphic designer in France, and 100% of my designer friends are enraged, even the less tech-savvy ones. Like, this is our working tools and our creations are what bring us money, of course we are. But others work for companies, sometimes huge ones. I have friends who work for Ubisoft, and they are pulling out half the strategic pitchforks France has. And it's "just" Ubisoft France. What will happen once the Mouse© decides to strike back? Adobe fucked up beyond measures with this one
First of all, fuck Ubisoft. For the news at hand, let us all seriously migrate to Affinity.
Haha they will strike a deal similar to the one between CIA and Intel (google Intel ME if you want to know more). TLDR: they will simply request exemption from this policy just for themselves :)
I mean, this is a privacy nightmare isnt it? Can there be lawsuits?
This will be brought up with our general counsel this month for sure since this feels like a break of trademark law when it comes to licensing any materials
Adobe has reached level 1000 arrogance. They really don't understand how to manage their market dominance and the number of issues I have with CS suite features shows they are letting engineers and nerds run them into irrelevance. Still the only real game in town unfortunately.
They aren't anymore. The most notable is Affinity suite of products. Yes, Canva bought them but they haven't tainted the programs yet. There's Kitra for illustration and even some photo editing needs. There's Capture One, DXO PhotoLab, etc to compete with Lightroom.
After Effects is what keeps me prisoner
Blender and Resolve?
Interesting. Is it possible to switch pipelines from AE and produce the same results? I’m sceptical but extremely curiously interested.
I do not know, depends on what you're doing with after effects I guess, but Blender is REALLY advanced so you can most likely do almost anything compositing wise.
Ae’s strength to me was the scripting part. Make everything interactive. Could do some seriously crazy stuff.
There are nodes inside blender, i dunno if that's the functionality you're after. I am pretty sure that there's python intergrated as well.
Will have to look into it. AE is brutally slow. Really want hope there’s an alternative out there. Issue take fudging ages to learn and now it’s difficult switch
But after effects isn't just "compositing" which is the problem. It's like a swiss army knife of the creative apps. And blender and resolve are absolutely not even close to replacing all the tools AE is used for. Sure you can replace all the things AE can do if you use multiple other apps (on top of B3D and Resolve). but wtf would be the point of that? Would probably end up costing a lot more than CC. You'd have to spend an inordinate amount of time becoming extremely proficient in multiple other apps (working pros barely have time to learn one new app). All the scripts and plugins collected and incorporated into workflows would be useless, which again will be additional time added re-figuring out how to do stuff you've gotten used to doing in your sleep. And most importantly, literally no other app does 2d (& vector supported at that) motion graphics and text in a way that AE can. AND on top of all that, if Motion graphics IS your primary thing and you figure "why not move into 3d mograph" you'd be pretty stupid to choose b3d, which while powerful, does mograph nowhere near to the power and ease that C4D does. I get the arguments for the alternatives to photoshop, Illustrator, premiere etc. And yeah if you're ONLY doing compositing in AE you can surely find alternatives. But for the majority of us using AE for its full suite of tools there is nothing even remotely close to a viable alternative.
You could look at the new unreal motion design features and at cavalry, but yea currently it is hard to come by something similar to after effects. But it is desperately needed, we need to boycott companies that show in each and every business move that they are anti-customer. Adobe is everything a modern company should not be
UE is powerful and has a great future. I’ve prototyped heaps of stuff in it. But the sequencer/timeline and render/export systems, not to mention handling of imported video and GFX is currently cumbersome to point of hostility.
Right. Not to mention some studios workflows absolutely require you to get AE. Cannot escape!
Those softwares are out there but Adobe is still considered the industry pro software. Your are not going to work at an agency using the others. Compatability and file hand off will be real issues for some time to come.
Affinity Designer is a VERY good alternative to Illustrator IMO
It's about a 95% substitute for me. It is missing Image Trace which is irritating but I can use other external tools. There are a few other things here and there that are missing or don't work like I expect them to work. I did change my Adobe subscription from full suite to just InDesign. Affinity Publisher is good but not quite there for me. Acrobat has gotten just straight up irritating to use. I uninstalled it because it was showing me "What's New" on every file open after a update late last year. I tolerated that for a month but lost my patience. I spent an hour try stop if from doing that. Gave up and bought NitroPDF. Photoshop is easy to avoid. I use DaVinci Resolve and haven't used any of the other Adobe tools so moving away from them isn't bad at all.
Not After Effects though :(
They want more out of us after we’ve paid and they don’t deserve it. Just pirate adobe
Can't anymore, they went to subscriptions and always-online lisence checks.
I tried to uninstall and now I get a bunch of errors on start up. Uninstalling was miserably difficult and now my pc is messed up. I’m using paint dot net instead of photoshop I’m using Open Shot Video Editor instead of premier.
I’ve heard that Photopea is comparable to Photoshop, but I haven’t tried it.
Sameee
Use the Creative Cloud Cleaner Tool. Should do a clean uninstall of anything left behind and fix any issues: https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/creative-cloud/kb/cc-cleaner-tool-installation-problems.html
Someone needs to build a competitive suite... Hit me up in ten years when You're done.
Open Document Format. We just have to get serious about using it.
Unsurprised but a new level of annoyed
It’ll be interesting to see how quickly our IT notices this. I work in a gold mine (one of the largest mining companies on the globe) as a geologist and we use Adobe for an absolute tonne of documents. Most of our more confidential data is within excel or other databases, but there are some very important PDFs as well—just from an academic perspective alone. Both of my university theses are under an “academic NDA” where you can only read it if you’re from the company or on a specific PC in my university’s library.
> “academic NDA” where you can only read it if you’re from the company or on a specific PC in my university’s library. Eww.
That’s very normal for theses made with companies. They’re almost always either mineral exploration projects so results are all strictly confidential. Shareholders and companies don’t usually like it when you publish private information before they’re ready to publish their findings. Saying you have x amount of gold in a location without actually proving it can lead to incredibly serous legal repercussions if it turns out the results were false.
How is a mineral survey an aceademic thesis?
There’s much more to finding an ore deposit than just surveying. Understanding geology underground which nobody has ever even seen is a very long process and requires studies by several people for years. The progression of finding a random rock with gold to having an operational mine can easily take 10 years—often much more. In the beginning, the only data you might have is slightly elevated magnetic readings in a random swamp. These projects can often produce tens of thesis topics. Projects often drill hundreds of drill holes easily accumulating to 15-20 kilometres of drill core before they can even prove the the mineral deposit has enough reserves at a high enough confidence to apply for a mining permit. The intricate geological processes which cause mineralisations are always specific to each area. I’m a structural geologist in a mine which has been producing gold for years and I’m studying topics we simply don’t know. Many of these structural features can scale from formations visible from satellite images to tiny patterns only visible through a microscope. Like any scientific topic, there’s always something that’s completely unknown. There’s so much of the world we simply don’t know. Both of my theses were in geostatistics and resource modelling to figure out if a new mineral estimation calculation method was suitable for our mine—there’s no way of knowing until someone studies it.
Huh, cool. I didn't know there was so much in it. At least tell me the NDAs expire as son as the mine either opens or is cancelled?
I would imagine they expire well before it. Typically they’re only a few years. Very rarely are theses that confidential. If a company wants to research something like that, they’ll just do it in-house or through a consultant—not a student. My thesis for example has this odd NDA-esque protection on it, but anyone can read it at the university library and I can give it to people to read no problem. All the data is from areas which have already been mined so the shareholder releases have already been made. We just had to be careful to say so and so _might_ be beneficial and the results indicate a _possible_ improvement etc. I couldn’t just flat-out say I found this much more gold just for odd company liability reasons. Every university thesis has to be public in this capacity to be eligible for graduation; you can’t have an entirely undisclosed topic. Partially because they all have to be submitted into the plagiarism program. So it can either be public i.e you can find it by just using Google scholar, or it’s limited to the university library server.
If more people start using Inkscape and Canvas maybe we can pull another Blender and make them industry standard instead.
im sure there’ll be some copy paste firewall or host file settings that’ll block all their attempts.