If you tilted your ears in a certain direction on Monday, you could detect a huge cheer from the creative class across social media platforms and various Discord servers. That’s because the Federal Trade Commission sued software company Adobe and two of its executives for “deceiving consumers” by all but coercing them “into one-year subscriptions through hidden early termination fees and hurdles numerous cancellations”.
“Adobe has had it coming for years,” said New York journalist Nolan Hicks. “I don’t know a single person rooting for Adobe on this,” video essayist Scott Niswander tweeted. A viral meme called for the agency to “rip the whore.” Long suggestions for alternative design software were circulated. A rally in Adobe stock, fueled by a promising earnings report, which then went down and down; investors may have recalled that when the FTC began its investigation last year, executives disclosed in a quarterly disclosure that they could suffer “significant monetary costs or penalties” as a result. When the lawsuit was finally settled, Adobe released a statement claiming it has a “simple cancellation process” and “will contest the FTC’s claims in court.”
The tensions that erupted after the FTC’s announcement had been building for months. In September, Adobe announced price increases for its subscription services (eg, the annual costs of all applications increased from $599.88 to $659.88). This was put forward as necessary to cover expensive AI integration – a move that left many users upset, in light of how often subscription costs had risen steadily over the years.
Earlier this month, frequent users of Adobe’s most iconic programs (Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat Reader) also noticed that the company made some potentially disturbing updates to its terms of service that guaranteed the services’ right “to use, reproduce, publicly display, 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 stated that the offerings of Its annual AI conference may soon include applications from OpenAI and Runway, along with Bloomberg reporting that Adobe’s supposedly copyright-friendly and “creator-friendly” AI tool was trained in part for synthetic production by other AI projects like Midjourney, it was natural for artists and subscribers to wonder if Adobe was raiding their wallets to train more AI, as my colleague Scott Nover pointed out.
The company quickly responded to the backlash by writing that it would clarify its new terms by mid-June, noting that “we do not train AI generating customer content.” Yet so does Adobe itself EMPLOYEE expressed their displeasure with the update terms and attempted a PR cleanup, with one employee noting on Slack that there was a serious image problem: “A loud ‘F Adobe’ and ‘Cancel Adobe’ rhetoric going on within the freelance community creators that should be addressed to you.” Those opponents, whose messages were leaked to Business Insider, also “noted that Adobe has faced similar controversy in the past over allegations of early termination fees and deploying ‘dark models’ to trick users into signed a 12-month contract”. (A prescient message, that one, given that the FTC’s complaint calls out both practices.)
As these controversies erupted in public, Kyle T. Webster, a former senior designer for Adobe, wrote an essay about why he had recently left the company: “As Adobe’s business changed, I found myself disconnected, discouraged and sometimes even desperate.” It’s not a stretch to assume that his public stances against generative AI might have something to do with it.
Adobe at least followed through on its promise to provide a terms of service update mid-month, underscoring Tuesday that it would not be training AI on user creations and that the expanded library access is intended to help the corporation discover its illegal images as child sexual abuse material. So far, none of this seems to have quelled any of the aforementioned “Cancel Adobe” slogans.
For many of those naysayers, their concerns about Adobe go back a long way—about 12 years ago, when the company shifted its software business model from sales to subscriptions. Despite initial complaints, this shift in strategy netted big and steady profits for the Photoshop creator, and continued to increase rates over time — even as consumers grumbled about the complex costs on Adobe’s community forums. The digital creators shared lists of alternative image editing apps and put together detailed guides explaining how one can opt out of Creative Cloud if they wish. But the sheer breadth of Adobe’s offerings — and the often-noticed charges it imposed to dissuade subscribers from canceling — left many feeling like they were locked in. This only meant more subscriptions for Adobe, which accounted for a large portion of its revenue.
However, something may have started to unravel last year, as Adobe joined the AI gold rush. The software juggernaut, perhaps recognizing its artistic customer base, said in early 2023 it would oversee an “ethical” AI regime, one that compensated designers who contributed works to Adobe’s image database Stock was copyright free and would only train his Firefly program. on stock entries and commercially licensed works. However, creators who had contributed images to Stock in the pre-AI era weren’t 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 attacker? None of these users were able to get any help or file any proper complaints with the company thanks to obstacles stemming from Adobe’s customer service process involving AI. (From the FTC’s complaint: “In many cases, subscribers who have requested to cancel through Adobe customer service believe they have successfully canceled, but continue to be charged.”)
So it’s no surprise that many Adobe customers eventually turned to the federal government. In its filing, the FTC notes that subscribers have filed “frequent complaints” with the Better Business Bureau about Adobe’s expensive and confusing subscription services, as well as the cumbersome process required to cancel or modify them. Further, the agency emphasizes that above KNEW regarding these complaints and failed to act appropriately to assist Adobe customers.
Adobe isn’t likely to back down from AI, especially since it offers options within Acrobat for you to “talk” to your PDFs, and since ongoing subscriptions continue to bring some nice pocket change. But with revelations that its blood subscription model may be the result of customer lock-in 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 netizens cheer a government crackdown – well, suffice it to say that the corporation can’t escape the sentiments of “F Adobe” anytime soon soon.