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c0lo [soylentnews.org] writes:

Adobe

June 8 - Adobe users are furious about the company's terms of service change to help it train AI [techradar.com]

Adobe is facing backlash over recent updates to its Terms of Service for the company's generative AI products.

The revised terms, affecting over 20 million global users of Adobe’s Creative Cloud Suite, include language that some users interpret as allowing Adobe to access, view or listen to their content, including sensitive content such as information protected by non-disclosure agreements.

Updates to the Terms of Service have also sparked concern among creative users, with some alleging that Adobe is surveilling their work and potentially using it to train AI models.

Section 2.2 states that Adobe may use techniques such as machine learning to analyze user content to improve its services and software.

Instagram/Meta

Meta to use Instagram and Facebook posts from as far back as 2007 to train artificial intelligence tools [abc.net.au]

In short: Meta is about to start using social activity on Facebook and Instagram accounts to train its AI tools, and in Australia, users won't be able to opt out.

Data from as far back as 2007 will be used, including posts, photos and messages to Meta's AI chatbot.

What's next? The policy comes into effect on June 26.

[break here]

Adobe Lands in the Soup for Implying Users’ Content Might Be Used To Train AI, Backtracks [themarysue.com]

Photoshop software developer Adobe has landed in hot water again, this time for their latest Terms of Services update, which vaguely hints at the company using users’ data to train its AI models.

The initial updated TOS from Adobe stated:

You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free sublicensable, license, to use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, and translate the content.

The policy change was met with strong reactions from both the consumers of Adobe’s products and their employees, who believe that the organization effectively wants to take autonomy away from the customers and effectively steal their content. To be fair to the users, the murky language used by the tech giant does indicate that they are likely to use consumers’ data to train Firefly, their generative AI model.

Another talking point was that the clients using Adobe software to create projects under NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) would have no choice but to find an alternative, due to the lack of data privacy. As users of the software company’s products let their discontent known on social media, Adobe came up with a blog post to clarify their stand on the matter. As things stand, Adobe has confirmed that they don’t train Firefly with users’ content, but that’s of little comfort when it’s not written into the terms of service.

I just cancelled my Adobe licence after many years as a customer.

The new terms give Adobe "worldwide royalty-free licence to reproduce, display, distribute" or do whatever they want with any content I produce using their software.

This is beyond insane. No creator in their right mind can accept this .

You pay a huge monthly subscription and they want to own your content and your entire business as well.

Going to have to learn some new tools.

— Sasha Yanshin (@sashayanshin) June 7, 2024 [x.com]

Instagram/Meta
Meta will use your social media posts to train its AI. Europe gets an opt out [theregister.com]

What's German for 'thank goodness for actually useful privacy regulations'?

Meta will start training its AI models using everyone's social media posts though European Union users can opt out, a luxury the rest of the world won't enjoy.

The move, which the Facebook parent detailed in an announcement today, is ostensibly to bring its machine-learning systems to Europe.

Meta has so far not included its European userbase in its AI training data, presumably to avoid legal conflict with the continent's privacy regulations. Now it's pushing ahead with that despite complaints.

"To properly serve our European communities, the models that power AI at Meta need to be trained on relevant information that reflects the diverse languages, geography and cultural references of the people in Europe who will use them," the social media titan said.
...
Meta also says it has sent billions of notifications to European users since May 22 to give them a chance to decline before the AI training rules kick in worldwide on June 26. The Instagram goliath says any user can decline, no questions asked, and that their posts won't be used to train AI models now or ever.

This is substantially different from the rest of the world, where opting out just isn't a choice. Granted, it's already too late to opt out for training data used for Meta's LLaMa 3, but even training for future models is mandatory for Facebook and Instagram users outside of the EU. Perhaps users outside of Europe will be able to choose to opt out in the future, but for now it's a feature exclusive to the EU.

Cara App, an Anti-AI and Instagram Alternative, Explodes in Popularity [petapixel.com]

Cara, an Instagram-like app that has banned AI images from its platform has exploded in popularity going from 40,000 users to 700,000 in just a single week.

Photographer Jingna Zhang founded Cara at the start of 2023 to be a safe space for creatives to share and publish their art, find work, and avoid generative AI scraping. Its creation stemmed from the rise of AI-generated art and lack of protection offered by many social media platforms, which have, in some cases, quietly used its user content without permission or compensation to train AI models.

However, as more people have become aware of Meta’s AI training policies — Mark Zuckerberg has said he has the right to use people’s public post to train AI tools with — there has been a backlash against Instagram with Cara being one of the beneficiaries.

...

In an Instagram post back in March, Zhang decried her name being used over 20,000 times as a prompt in the AI image generator Midjourney.

“Words can’t describe how dehumanizing it is to see my name used 20,000 plus times in Midjourney,” she wrote. “My life’s work and who I am—reduced to meaningless fodder for a commercial image slot machine.”

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