LogInMuch like regular users, the company's employees are dissatisfied with the spyware-like TOS clauses and "poor communication".
Adobe
Last week, Photoshop and Substance 3D developer Adobe stole the headlines for all the wrong reasons, getting battered by everyone and their mother for the unpopular General Terms of Use updates, which forced users of Adobe products to provide the company with unlimited access to their projects.
For context, as per the company's new TOS, they reserve the right to employ automated and manual methods to access and view your creations, a clause many believe the company exploits to gather a large amount of data for training their AI models.
Moreover, the controversy brought attention to section 4.2 of Adobe's TOS, which states that users grant the company a royalty-free, sublicensable license to "use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, and translate" their creations, cranking the public outrage up to 11.
Apparently, the community's dissatisfaction with the company grew so intense that even Adobe's own staff started expressing unhappiness about this whole ordeal, a relatively rare occurrence in an era when many employment contracts often pressure employees to unconditionally support the company's decisions and strategies.
As reported by Business Insider, which obtained Adobe's internal Slack discussions, the company's workers appear to be siding with regular users, voicing complaints about the TOS updates and the resulting backlash, as well as Adobe's poor communication and apparent mishandling of the situation.
"If our goal is truly to prioritize our users' best interests (which, to be honest, I sometimes question), it's astonishing how poor our communication can be," wrote one Adobe employee. "The general perception is: Adobe is an evil company that will do whatever it takes to f*** its users."
"Let's avoid becoming like IBM, which seems to be surviving primarily due to its entrenched market position and legacy systems," another member of staff noted.
"Watching the misinformation spread on social media like wildfire is really disheartening. Still, a loud "F*** Adobe' and 'Cancel Adobe' rhetoric is happening within the independent creator community that needs to be addressed."
The report also indicates that staff have been instructed to avoid directly addressing the current TOS, but rather to refer concerned users to Adobe's recent blog post, which promises to clarify the controversial points and update the disputed clauses by June 18, yet fails to specify how the Terms of Use will be revised, leaving many users still unhappy.
"At Adobe, there is no ambiguity in our stance, our commitment to our customers, and innovating responsibly in this space," reads the blog post. "We've never trained generative AI on customer content, taken ownership of a customer's work, or allowed access to customer content beyond legal requirements. Nor were we considering any of those practices as part of the recent Terms of Use update. That said, we agree that evolving our Terms of Use to reflect our commitments to our community is the right thing to do."
At the moment, it is impossible to say for sure what TOS updates the company has in store and how the situation will develop moving forward. You can share your predictions down in the comments below.
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