The confusion and anger surrounding an update to Adobe’s terms of use last week caused Adobe to reexamine its language and communications in general. In addition to a blog post late last week, Adobe published another blog post today announcing plans for direct customer communications and updated terms of use.
“We recently introduced a re-acceptance of our terms of use, which has raised concerns about what these terms are and what they mean to our customers. This has caused us to think about the language we use in our Terms, and the opportunity we have to be clearer and address community concerns,” Adobe said in a new blog post written by Scott Belsky and Dana Rao. Belsky is Adobe’s Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President of Design and Emerging Products, while Rao is the company’s Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Chief Trust Officer.
Adobe says it plans to talk to customers before implementing changes to its terms of use by June 18. Customers can expect significant clarification on content ownership, training generative AI models, usage licensing, and content moderation.
“At Adobe, there is no ambiguity in our position, our commitment to our customers and responsible innovation in this space,” Belsky and Rao wrote. “We have never trained generative AI on customer content, taken ownership of a customer’s work, or allowed access to customer content beyond legal requirements.”
The duo continues, saying that despite the confusion surrounding the language in a terms of use update pop-up last week, the company never intended to change the position outlined above.
However, the company says that continuing to review the terms of use is “the right thing to do.” Revisions to the terms of use will focus on many key areas, especially those that currently concern users most, including how Adobe trains generative AI models, handles user content, and moderates content.
“We don’t train generative AI on customer content,” Adobe says. While Adobe has explained that Firefly is trained using a dataset of licensed, permissioned, and public domain content, it remains a major concern for Adobe app users that the company could use their content to target Firefly to train.
Adobe says that while user data is used to help improve some machine learning features – and not generative AI tools like Firefly – users can always opt out. Although opting out may limit access to specific development programs and product improvement features, it is an available choice to all users.
There are significant concerns about the language in the Terms of Use regarding licensing. While these licenses sound scary, Adobe emphasizes that its licenses do not grant or transfer ownership of content to Adobe.
However, that’s not clear when reading the current terms of use, so the company strives to provide easy-to-understand examples of licenses required to use certain software features. Complex legal language is challenging to parse and contextualize, so Adobe hopes – and must – do a better job to ensure that the terms of use are easy to understand in all cases and that users understand what rights Adobe claims to provide specific services to deliver.
There was also confusion over content moderation. Like all content hosting platforms, Creative Cloud includes automatic scanning to check for specific illegal and harmful material. As the automated system flags content, a human will review it. However, this only applies to content stored on Adobe’s content servers. If someone saves content locally, it will never be scanned by Adobe.
Adobe admits that it should have modernized and clarified its terms of use sooner. It also failed to adequately respond to how customer concerns have changed with the advent of generative AI.
“In a world where customers are concerned about how their data is used and how generative AI models are trained, it is the responsibility of companies that host customer data and content to not only make their policies publicly known, but also in their legally binding terms and conditions. Usage,” Adobe explains. “Our updated terms of use, which we will publish next week, will be more precise, will be limited to only the activities we know we need to do now and in the near future, and will use clearer language and examples to help customers understand what they mean and why we have them.”
On the broader issue of trust and how Adobe has lost it, the company says: “We recognize that trust must be earned. We’re grateful for your feedback, will be reaching out to many customers in our community this week to discuss our approach and these changes, and are committed to being a trusted partner for creators in the era ahead. We will work tirelessly to make this happen.”
When it comes to software that artists and creators use to create meaningful content or, in many cases, to make a living, there is little room for ambiguity about content ownership, how generative AI is built and trained, and data security.
Image credits: Adobe