A TikToker has gone viral after calling out Adobe for its ambiguously-worded terms of service. Noah Carter (@noahglenncarter) is a TikToker with 8.9 million followers. He’s best known for his explainer videos breaking down viral and pop culture news. But on this latest scandal to hit Adobe, he didn’t mince his words.
“What Adobe is doing, it’s one of the most anti-consumer anti-creator things that I have ever seen done from a company,” he began.
He claims, “Adobe hid in their Terms of Service a clause that essentially says ‘By the way, if you pay us for our software, which is only accessible from a subscription, by the way, you don’t own the software. We have a license to freely use whatever you make on our software as we see fit. And you have no say over whether or not we do this, we’re going to do it regardless.’”
Carter says Adobe’s Terms of Service were updated in February, but that creators have just recently found that out and decided, “Hey, we don’t need to use Adobe anymore. These guys are bad.”
@noahglenncarter Adobe just got called out for their anti consumer TOS #adobe #foryou ♬ original sound – NoahGlennCarter
What’s going on with Adobe?
In Adobe’s updated Terms of Use, the company says it “may access your content through both automated and manual methods, such as for content review.” Specifically, the terms say that “solely for the purposes of operating or improving the Services and Software, you grant us [Adobe] 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.”
Adobe’s having this level of access to users’ content has caused widespread backlash, especially for creators working under NDAs, while others are worried this means Adobe may use their content to train generative AI.
As Carter points out, Adobe received “nothing but backlash” for these Terms of Use. But despite the company’s intention to update the Terms on June 18, Carter says that “the damage is already done.”
He then went on to suggest alternatives to numerous Adobe software, including Capture One, Affinity, DaVinci Resolve, and GIMP.
“Switching from Adobe is the best thing you can do in this case as the only real way to show them that you’re not going to put up with them doing stuff like this,” Carter added.
In total, the video has amassed 210,200 views as of Saturday. Carter didn’t immediately respond to the Daily Dot’s request for comment via email and TikTok comment.
Commenters were equally as distrustful, with one user accusing Adobe of trying to “trick” customers: “They’re trying to trick you don’t trust adobe there trying to train AI to take our jobs.”
What did Adobe say?
In a lengthy blog post, Adobe insisted that “our commitments to our customers have not changed.” The company stated that it will not train Firefly on customers’ content, and said that it would “never assume ownership of a customer’s work.”
The company added: “The focus of this update was to be clearer about the improvements to our moderation processes that we have in place. Given the explosion of Generative AI and our commitment to responsible innovation, we have added more human moderation to our content submissions review processes.”
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