Adobe Adobye

When I was a kid, I thought I would be a famous writer or archaeologist. But I soon discovered that I had zero aptitude for writing and even less for the academic. 

So for a decade I did little else but read.

I read classical, modern, and postmodern literature. I read scientific tomes and papers, Russian doorstops, Victorian melodramas, and ghost stories. I’ve read all of the Sherlock Holmes stories twice.

Oh and newspapers, magazines and the backs of shampoo bottles. 

What is sodium laureth sulfate anyway? It seems to be in everything. 

After I’d read everything, I started to write. Which is when, my dear reader, I wrote my ten Sunday Times bestsellers and became the most famous author in the world. OK, I wrote about 26 unread and unpublished short stories. They were terrible and I deleted the lot one bonfire night, by tossing their hard drive into the flames. Nobody can say that I don’t have a penchant for the dramatic. 

So I settled for writing a bit of comedy and some shockingly tedious blogs. This one is another doozy.

The reason I’ve popped my head up above the parapet again is Adobe. 

For several year now I have paid a huge amount of money each month to Adobe for their Creative Cloud software. This includes Lightroom and Photoshop for my photographic processing (I shoot RAW), Adobe Audition for my podcast recording and editing, and Premiere Pro and After Effects for my rare forays into video production.

In all that time, I felt that I was getting a pretty good deal and had very few complaints about their software. 

Then a few months ago the adverts began on Facebook. 

Why not use AI to help mask parts of your photos for editing?

Well that’s saved me a bit of time, thank you. 

Why not add objects and people to your photos by just typing a prompt into this box? 

Erm, no thanks. 

Then today.

Here’s a photo of a plate. Now you can tell AI to put whatever food you want on that plate and use it to publish a cookbook.  

You utter utter bastards! 

Firstly, there are people out there who make a living taking photos of food for cookbooks. They take photographs of the actual food that the actual friggin author prepared. Real friggin food. They are talented artists in their own right. 

Secondly, you are conning people into buying a cookbook with fake images. 

What will people say? They cooked something that looks nothing like the picture.  They’re going to complain and ask for their money back. At least I hope they will.

 I was absolutely bloody livid.

Artists use Adobe’s software. Photographers, illustrators, musicians, actors, sound producers, visual artists, film makers & special effects people. To name but a few.

What Adobe have done is give them a right old kick in the nuts and none nuts. They have, in all essence, told them that their work is worthless.

Adobe, like so many companies are betting the farm on AI. They think that freeing the human race from the burdens of creativity will give us all more time to work ourselves to death for some shareholders.

So I canceled my subscription. The bastards even tried to take a cancellation fee and failed. They can go whistle for that, but they’d need to write a tune first.