You may want to cancel your Adobe subscription after seeing this


If you tilted your ears in a certain direction on Monday, you could hear the resounding cheers of the creative class across social media platforms and various Discord servers. Indeed, the Federal Trade Commission sued the software company Adobe and two of its executives for “deceiving consumers” by forcing them “into one-year subscriptions through hidden early termination fees and numerous obstacles to cancellation.

“Adobe has been doing this for years,” said New York journalist Nolan Hicks. “I don’t know anyone who supports Adobe on this,” tweeted video essayist Scott Niswander. A viral meme urged the agency to “tear this bitch apart.” Long-standing suggestions for alternative design software have made the rounds. A rally in Adobe shares, fueled by a promising earnings report, subsequently fizzled and stabilized; Investors may remember that when the FTC launched its investigation last year, executives disclosed in a quarterly filing that they could incur “significant monetary costs or penalties” as a result. When the lawsuit finally concluded, Adobe issued a statement saying it had a “simple reversal process” and would “refute the FTC’s claims in court.”

The tensions that exploded after the FTC’s announcement had been building for months. Last September, Adobe announced price increases for its subscription services (for example, annual all-app costs increasing from $599.88 to $659.88). This was presented as necessary to cover for its costly artificial intelligence integration – a move that upset many users, given how often subscription costs had consistently increased over the years.

Earlier this month, frequent users of Adobe’s most iconic programs (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat Reader) also noticed that the company had made potentially disturbing updates to the terms of service that enshrined the right services “to use, reproduce, display publicly”. , distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, and translate user-generated creations uploaded to Creative Cloud (the virtual suite where all of the aforementioned applications are hosted). Adobe also proclaimed that its year-old AI offerings could soon integrate applications from OpenAI and Runway. Along with Bloomberg’s report that Adobe’s supposedly copyright-friendly and “creator-friendly” AI tool Firefly was trained in part on synthetic results from other tools of AI like Midjourney, it was natural for artists and subscribers to wonder if Adobe was stealing their wallets for practice. more AI, as my colleague Scott Nover noted.

The company quickly responded to the backlash by writing that it would clarify its new terms by mid-June, mentioning that “we do not train generative AI on customer content.” However, even Adobe’s employees expressed displeasure with the term updates and attempted PR cleanup, with one employee pointing out on Slack that there was a serious image problem: “Strong ‘F Adobe’ and ‘Cancel Adobe’ rhetoric » is happening within the independent creator community that needs to be addressed. These dissidents, whose messages were leaked to Business Insider, also “pointed out that Adobe has faced similar controversies in the past over allegations of charging early termination fees and deploying “dark templates.” » to encourage users to sign a 12-month contract. (A prescient message, this one, given that the FTC complaint highlights both practices.)

As these controversies erupted in public, Kyle T. Webster, a former senior designer at Adobe, wrote an essay explaining why he had recently left the company: “As Adobe’s business evolved, I felt disconnected, discouraged and sometimes even discouraged. It’s not a stretch to assume that his public stances against generative AI may have had something to do with this.

Adobe at least kept its commitment to provide a terms of service update mid-month, emphasizing Tuesday that no, it would not train AI on user creations and that expanded access to the library is intended to help the company detect illegal errors. images such as child sexual abuse material. So far, none of this seems to have quelled the “Cancel Adobe” slogans mentioned above.

For many of these naysayers, their concerns with Adobe date back to about 12 years ago, when the company changed its software business model from sales to subscriptions. Despite initial complaints, this change in strategy generated large and consistent profits for the Photoshop creator, and prices continued to rise over time, even as consumers complained about compounding costs on Adobe’s community forums. . Digital creators have shared lists of alternative image-editing apps and put together elaborate guides on how to ditch Creative Cloud if they wanted to. But the breadth of Adobe’s offerings — and the frequently discussed constraints it imposed to dissuade subscribers from canceling — left many people feeling like they were locked in. This only meant more subscriptions for Adobe, which accounted for an outsized share of its revenue.

Something may have started to break last year, as Adobe joined the AI ​​gold rush. The software giant, perhaps recognizing its artistic following, said in early 2023 it would oversee an “ethical” AI regime, one that would pay designers who contributed works to its image database Adobe Stock not protected by copyright, and would only form its Firefly program. on stock entries and commercially licensed works. Despite this, creators who had provided images to Stock in the pre-AI era were not happy that their works were suddenly available for AI training. Others found that Stock included AI-generated images in its corpus, despite Adobe’s claims to the contrary.

The real kicker? None of these users were able to get help or file a proper complaint with the company due to obstacles resulting from Adobe’s AI-enabled customer service process. (From the FTC complaint: “In many cases, subscribers who have requested a cancellation through Adobe customer service think they have successfully canceled but continue to be billed.”)

So it’s no surprise that many Adobe customers eventually turned to the federal government. In its filing, the FTC notes that subscribers have submitted “frequent complaints” to the Better Business Bureau about Adobe’s expensive and confusing subscription services, as well as the cumbersome process required to cancel or change them. Additionally, the agency states that superiors knew regarding these grievances and failed to act appropriately to assist Adobe customers.

Adobe probably won’t shy away from AI, especially since it offers options in Acrobat to let you “chat” with your PDFs, and persistent subscriptions continue to bring in nice pocket change. But with revelations that its vital subscription model may be the result of consumer entrapment rather than genuine engagement, it may not have been as transparent (or truthful) in its terms of service as previously claimed, and tens of thousands of Internet users applauded a government. crackdown – well, suffice to say the company can’t escape the ‘F Adobe’ sentiments at any point Soon.





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