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<\/figure>\n Adobe used to be known as the company that made Acrobat and PhotoShop. Addobe is increasingly becoming known, however, as one of the great digital grifters of the modern age.<\/p>\n From its shonky subscription models to making people pay for certain colours in PhotoShop<\/span> (big shout out to Pantone there as well), the company is, like so many others in these tumultuous times, more concerned with growing its bottom line at any cost than it is in taking a moment to consider the needs of its users, or the consequences of its actions.<\/p>\n I\u2019m bringing this up today because, less than a week after forcing people to check they weren\u2019t reading an Onion <\/em>story when learning about the colours thing<\/span>, the company has announced that it is embracing AI art, which is not only an enormous grift, but also a serious threat to the livelihoods of artists around the world, big and small. <\/p>\n I\u2019ve made my feelings about AI very clear on this website already\u2014I wrote this feature back in August interviewing a range of video game and entertainment industry artists<\/span>\u2014and think it sucks not just because it\u2019s a threat to artists, but to art<\/em>. While people\u2019s jobs are of course important, we\u2019re not just talking about cotton gins here, and how this is in many ways a labour v capital breakdown<\/a><\/span>; we\u2019re talking about a process that is encroaching on a fundamentally human pastime and creative pursuit.<\/p>\n Machines don\u2019t make art. They\u2019re machines! They\u2019re just making an approximated casserole out of human art that has been fed into it, in the vast amount of cases without credit or compensation. As Dan Sheehan says in his fantastic piece Art In The Age Of Optimization<\/em><\/span>, AI art isn\u2019t about art, it\u2019s merely \u201ca technology that clearly exists to remove the human element from the process of artistic expression\u201d.<\/p>\n G\/O Media may get a commission<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Anyway! Last week Adobe dropped an announcement<\/span> saying that AI-generated art was going to be made available as part of the company\u2019s vast library of stock images, going so far as to say the field is \u201camplifying human creativity\u201d. The company boldly says, repeatedly, stuff like they have \u201cdeeply considered these questions and implemented a new submission policy that we believe will ensure our content uses AI technology responsibly by creators and customers alike\u201d, and that \u201cgenerative AI is a major leap forward for creators, leveraging machine learning\u2019s incredible power to ideate faster by developing imagery using words, sketches, and gestures\u201d.<\/p>\n Creators? Fuck off! These people aren\u2019t creating anything! They\u2019re punching words into a computer that has been fed actual <\/em>art! And even if Adobe can, as they\u2019re claiming, only release images that have been \u201cproperly built, used, and disclosed\u201d, it still sucks! Gah! Attempting to make good on one <\/em>of AI art\u2019s issues\u2014art theft\u2014doesn\u2019t absolve it from its others, like the fact nothing to do with these images or their creation has anything to do with art!<\/p>\n Reaction among artists has of course been as wildly negative as any other AI art announcement over the past six months, with some criticising the company while others resort to more traditional cries: namely, that artists simply pirate PhotoShop instead of giving this company another cent.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n