Thursday, October 17, 2024

Adobe puts a price on art

Hi, it's Brody Ford from the Adobe MAX conference in Miami. Adobe thinks it has found a cure for AI job anxiety: cash. But first...Three thi

Adobe thinks it has found a cure for AI job anxiety: cash. But first...

Three things you need to know today:

• US lawmakers want to crack down on Huawei suppliers
• Apple is losing its top HR executive after less than two years
• ASML is being questioned by Dutch authorities after the early release of its earnings report

AI bonuses 

Generative artificial intelligence is built by gobbling up mass amounts of photos, videos and text. The people who take the photos, create the videos and write the text generally hope to get paid directly for their work, and aren't always thrilled when their work ends up in training datasets.

Some companies seem to have accepted creator outrage as a cost of doing business. Others, like software maker Adobe Inc., can't risk alienating their core bases of customers and contributors.

For those whose work is used to build its generative AI, Adobe has been handing out cash bonuses. Photographers, illustrators and videographers who contribute to Adobe Stock, its marketplace of images from which it harvests training data, saw a second annual AI-earmarked payment hitting their accounts in recent weeks. 

Payouts ranged from barely enough to cover breakfast to a few thousand dollars for major video contributors, according to posts on industry forums. Sums were based on whose work was most useful in building the model and on the success of the stock business broadly, Adobe Chief Strategy Officer Scott Belsky said in an interview.

Much of the stock content comes from a small share of professional contributors for whom totals are "actually pretty significant," Belsky said. He compared it to the way Taylor Swift probably dominates streaming revenue on a service such as Spotify.

It's all part of a difficult balancing act for Adobe in rapidly developing AI features without creative professionals feeling like their skills are becoming useless or their jobs are at risk.

At its annual product conference this week, Adobe announced free AI training coursesadditional tools for artists to credential their work, and argued job opportunities in the industry are increasing. The company calls its steps in developing AI features for apps like Photoshop, which have been used billions of times, "the most creator-friendly approach in the industry."

Other major media marketplaces also have cut contributors in on some AI revenue. Shutterstock Inc. has licensed its library for AI training to firms like OpenAI and Meta Platforms Inc. Getty Images Holdings Inc. has struck a deal to help provide training data for Canva Inc., an emerging startup rival of Adobe. 

Getty is seen as a leader in protecting artists' rights and is comfortable in the value it offers creators, said Chief Product Officer Grant Farhall. He pointed toward the company's ongoing copyright infringement lawsuit against startup Stability AI, which manages Stable Diffusion, a popular AI image-generation tool. Shutterstock declined to comment.

Adobe's Belsky said feedback he receives "suggests that we're paying better" than the other marketplaces to creators.

Still, not all Adobe contributors are thrilled. You can't opt-out of having submissions to Adobe Stock used for AI training, and some wonder about the long-term viability of the career as an increasing number of images can be created via prompting an AI tool. Today, there are more than 152 million pieces of AI-generated content on Adobe Stock, amounting to 28% of the total library.

As creators shared their payouts online, one photographer who has been on the forum for nearly a decade said he wasn't sure how to feel. "It's still disappointing, because I am training my competition."

The big story

Chinese carmaker BYD is winning the global race for electric vehicles while the US government is doing everything it can to keep it off its market. The carmaker's efforts included a secret partnership with Apple that is said to have helped develop BYD's long-range Blade batteries.

One to watch

Get fully charged

US prosecutors indicted two Sudanese nationals for a series of cyberattacks against US agencies, companies, airports and hospitals.

Instacart hired a Uber engineering executive as chief techology officer.

Amazon is rolling out the first Kindle reader capable of displaying colors.

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