Training our Replacements

A new Change Log comic about AI and thoughts on Instagram and Adobe.

We sure do live in interesting times, right? Some might call it the dumbest timeline. I try to be a bit more positive than that, but it’s definitely tough sometimes.

AI is a thing that’s not going away. Some of you love it because it’s fun to play with. Some of you hate it because… terminator.

From an artist’s perspective, I guess I fall into the ‘con’ camp, but I’m still a realist. I mean, look, people said the same things about cameras back in the early 20th century. Art is dead! Why would anyone hire an artist when you can just take a photograph?

With the advancement of AI tech and the images you can create with it, some people who make their living as an illustrator are, rightfully so, concerned.

For me, I do make money as an illustrator, although it’s not my whole income. But my perspective is that people who would use AI to create illustrations were never going to hire me anyway. It’s similar to the argument about people who pirate movies or digital comics. I’m not really concerned about it because if someone is going to steal my comics, the chances they were ever going to pay for them are basically zero.

But illustrations created by AI are a bit different. If it were just robots creating stiff looking art, I wouldn’t care. Let’s compete, John Henry style, and see if the machines come out on top.

No, my problem is that AI doesn’t just create artwork on it’s own, it has to ‘learn’ and take bits of images that it finds and stitches all of that ‘learning’ together to make artwork. So without real human artists to show it how to make an illustration, it’s got nothing.

So when I saw the reason why so many artists are jumping ship from Instagram, it made me take a step back to think about this. Meta (parent company of Facebook and Instagram) apparently bragged in a meeting how great their AI model is because it’s trained by millions of images that are publicly posted to their platforms. I guess it’s in the terms of service now that they are allowed to use your images. You can theoretically opt-out, but from what I’ve seen, the process amounts to you making a request to opt-out and they subsequently tell you that there’s no proof that your specific images were used in their models, so they won’t do anything for you.

That’s enough. I’m done. If you follow me on Instagram, you may have noticed that I haven’t been posting there. I’m going to get around to deleting all of my existing posts soon (they obviously don’t make that easy) and maybe even my entire account, I haven’t decided if there’s any value in keeping it yet. For me, this wasn’t a difficult decision. Instagram doesn’t value the type of things I post any more, in their quest to become TikTok. But for some people, this is a huge deal and a good chunk of their business can come from Instagram. I feel for those people but we live in a fast moving industry where you really need to diversify what you’re doing and not put all of your eggs in the basket of one tech company’s platform.

There was a similar issue with Adobe recently. This one hits a bit harder from me because I’ve been using Fresco a ton lately, and I’ve really grown to like it a lot.

Adobe recently updated their own terms of service with some language that made some already worried creative people lose their minds. To paraphrase, Adobe says they reserve the rights to access and use your files if they want to. I think a lot of people missed a potentially important line, though, because they specifically say they can access your content “solely for the purpose of operating or improving the services and software”. Now, I understand that this is just vague enough that it could mean that they might steal your artwork, but as with most ‘controversial’ issues, let’s think about this logically. They provide software for their users to create artwork. If they start stealing and claiming your artwork as their own, the natural consequence is that you’re either going to sue them or at the very least stop paying for their software. Neither of those are in their interest.

The one argument that I’ve heard that is in their interest would be to use your artwork to train their AI models for their own AI service called Firefly. For what it’s worth, they did clarify that they do not do this and only train their AI using licensed content or public domain content where the copyright has expired.

I’m still up in the air about how I feel about Adobe because all of this did open my eyes to some shady dealings that they’re doing to artists in regard to their AI offerings. They have a stock image service for which artists could provide images and earn a royalty when their images were used. This is the ‘licensed content’ that they mentioned and to get permission to do this, they basically just changed the terms of service for all of those artists providing them content. Super shady.

So in the end, I might decide to move back over to Procreate or Clip Studio Paint but I do think that some of the outrage Adobe’s recent changes to their ToS is overblown. That doesn’t mean that what they’ve been doing for a while isn’t worth another look.

As artists in this digital world, it’s important that we stay informed on what’s actually going on and what we should be pissed off at instead of reading some guy’s twitter account and deciding to join the outrage mob.

That’s my take on it anyway. Feel free to let me know if I’m wrong or if I missed any aspect of this.

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Political Nomad

Hey by the way, did you know I launched a new political comic strip called Political Nomad?

Well, now you know. You can check it out now and subscribe for free to get the newest edition this (and every) Thursday.

Thanks for reading and have a great week!

-Brad