Opinion: Photographers, it's time to boycott Adobe
By: Jon Stapley (Amateur Photographer)
Has everyone noticed a shift in the language praising the advent of artificial intelligence? Not long ago artificial intelligence was being touted as a tool available to scientists, engineers, and experts to expand human knowledge and usher in a new future. But now the big tech companies have staked their commercial futures on selling AI to mass-market consumers. The tech companies are now telling us that anyone with an imagination can achieve amazing results without an investment in developing needed skills or working to master a craft.
What's the point of a Photoshop that doesn't need me? The new tools available in Photoshop can create an image out of thin air. The AI only needs a few words from someone to do its thing. So, what's the point of using Photoshop now? The experience isn't very different than placing an order with a human designer. At present AI is still cheaper to encourage mass consumption. But that's likely to change as skilled humans become obsolete and disappear from the marketplace.
Is Photoshop a model for the future of AI? The for-profit business model will require making skilled craftspeople obsolete. Human progress has sustained itself by challenging human capability, developing new skills, developing new tools to do what couldn't be done before. Will AI become the final tool? Is Photoshop now a harbinger for the end of human progress?
Seems rather amazing that the future of civilization may depend upon luddites.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
If you're already out, you don't need to read further. Job well done. This article is for all the photographers who are still signed up to Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, who are still paying the £9.98 per month for the Photography Plan. I believe it is time to stop - that we can't ignore or indulge this company's behaviour any longer. It's time for a serious, co-ordinated, sustained photographer boycott of Adobe. Pick one of the best Photoshop alternatives, and don't look back.
Adobe's generative AI push has been much-publicised and much-criticised in recent years. The company is constantly updating and boasting about its Adobe Sensei and Adobe Firefly tools, which integrate generative AI technology comprehensively across the company's suite of programs. With Adobe Firefly in Photoshop, you can use Generative Fill to expand an image beyond its borders, or use Generate Image to make something up wholesale. A new world of possibilities, unleash your creativity, blah, blah, etc, etc.
If you're a photographer, your initial reaction to all this may have been understandable confusion. You enjoy taking pictures. You may even earn something approaching a living by taking pictures and selling them. What would you gain from getting a computer to hallucinate a picture for you? However, as Adobe released more and more ads with messages like 'Skip the photoshoot', it began to feel like this tech wasn't being marketed towards photographers. It began to feel a lot like this tech was being marketed towards photographers' clients.
I’m on the Adobe press list, and honestly it’s this stuff non-stop. Photo credit: Adobe
The world we're generating
Like many of you reading this, I am a purely amateur photographer - I take pictures for personal enjoyment, not profit (which is a very handy stance to have when nobody wants to buy your pictures anyway, but I digress). I make my money from writing, sometimes about photography, sometimes about other things. For many years, if I needed more cash to give to Kodak, I'd do a little copywriting for small businesses. Unglamorous stuff - it might be writing the 'About' page for a plumbing company's website, finessing some brochure copy for an auction house, or whatever else.
The reason I bring this up is because those jobs are gone, completely gone, and I know why they are gone. So when someone tells me that ChatGPT and its ilk are tools to 'support writers', I think that person is at best misguided, at worst being shamelessly disingenuous. I've interviewed a lot of photographers about how they developed their careers, and dozens of them have talked about supporting themselves in the early years by doing the kinds of here-and-there jobs that are going to be completely swallowed when businesses all have access to a big red button that says 'Generate'.
Photo credit: Adobe
Because who cares if the generated image looks stiff and awkward? Who cares if the people in the image have legs that are too short and dead eyes that aren't quite in the right place? Who cares if an image of the English pastoral countryside features roads that go nowhere and an African bird that went extinct in the 1990s? It was free! Well, it wasn't free exactly; you do have to pay £9.98 a month for the software package. Still, it's so much cheaper than hiring someone every time. Can you believe we used to pay someone a hundred quid to snap a photo lol?
Creatives in all disciplines are starting to notice. The Adobe MAX conference took place in October, and designers who attended were more than a little bewildered by how relentlessly generative AI was being pushed on them. Why would a professional designer want a tool that automatically makes something sloppier and uglier than something they'd make themselves? Once again, the answer is that they wouldn't. Their clients would.
Filmmakers, video editors and animators, meanwhile, woke up the other day to the news that this year's Coca-Cola Christmas ad was made using generative AI. Of course, this claim is a bit of sleight of hand, because there would have been a huge amount of human effort involved in making the AI-generated imagery look consistent and polished and not like nauseating garbage. But that is still a promise of a deeply unedifying future - where the best a creative can hope for is a job polishing the computer's turds. What joy. What a world we're building.
The only thing we can do
Adobe, Microsoft, Google and all the rest of the companies that have pivoted hard into this stuff - they aren't going to stop. In May 2024, the American Society of Media Photographers wrote a well-meaning but colossally ineffective open letter to Adobe in response to the 'Skip the photoshoot' ads, asking the company to stop throwing photographers under the bus, to support the community of creatives who made it what it is. 'Do better Adobe,' was the signoff, and of course, in the six months since, Adobe has not shown any interest in doing better. The ASMP may as well have written a letter asking their neighbour's dog to stop barking. The dog might have at least been curious enough to sniff it.
I cancelled my Adobe Photography Plan in late 2023. The final straw for me was when AI-generated images of the war in Gaza were found being sold on Adobe Stock. They were labelled, but in a way that was easy to miss, and several of the images had been bought and used by publications where the staff were probably not aware that they were fake. Once the story broke, Adobe removed the images, but that was when I knew I couldn't do it anymore. So I cancelled - I ate the early cancellation fee, a disgustingly predatory practice we've all just become inured to - and I did not look back.
A selection of AI-generated images. Photo credit: Adobe
(As an aside, if your response to all this is something along the lines of 'Um, and you're just realising this now?' then save it. You were already told in the first line that you didn't need to read any further. This article is for all those who are still using Adobe software, despite everything, whether it's because it's easiest, because they're used to it, or because they understandably just haven't paid much attention to what the company is doing.)
It's time to give it up. I honestly think it's the only thing left to do, because they won't stop. Open letters from the American Society of Media Photographers won't make them stop. Direct call-outs from the Ansel Adams estate won't make them stop. We can all read and share another eye-rolling article on Petapixel about how Adobe are throwing photographers under the bus yet again, but the only thing that will effect any course change at all is if the executives start seeing the numbers go down. Given the eye-watering expense of generative AI, it might not take as much as you'd think.
Boycott Adobe. Stop giving them your money. Use something else - Affinity Photo is a brilliant photo editing tool that you can buy and keep without a subscription. GIMP is a complicated but perfectly capable photo editor that is completely free and open-source. If Adobe is going to rip the livelihoods away from photographers, then the very, very least you can do is stop bankrolling them while they do it.
The views expressed in this column are not necessarily those of Amateur Photographer magazine or Kelsey Media Limited. If you have an opinion you'd like to share on this topic, or any other photography related subject, email: ap.ed@kelsey.co.uk
Jon Stapley
Jon is a freelance journalist who has been writing features and reviews for Amateur Photographer for more than a decade. His writing also appears in Digital Camera World, Black + White Photography magazine, Photomonitor and many more. He's an avid film photographer, despite the expense, and has contributed a few features to AP on how to shoot film on the cheap. See more at jonstapley.com.
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Big tech is selling the idea that anyone wanting to produce something of the same caliber as Picasso or Pasteur only need subscribe to their proprietary AI engine. But the for-profit business model means replacing craftspeople with AI won't be any cheaper.
Yes, it is now possible to replace a logo designer or advertising illustrator or professional photographer with AI enhanced Photoshop. But that short term gain won't sustain a business for long.
Pretty much a box of sour grapes. The only argument here is the level of sophistication - busloads of skilled machinists have been put out by CNCs, the bread bag factory is rife with robots, even pilots and drivers are on the block. Amateurs and part-timers are thrilled to fill in for a few bucks - anybody with a camera will do for free what stringers did to news pros.
It's evolution; painful and ugly as it is.
You just have to look for the subtle clues.
The toothpaste is out of the tube. Eventually society will be forced to provide universal basic income, since there will be far fewer jobs requiring a human. The greed that is driving this AI bus will have the unintended consequences of ushering in a deeper form of socialism than we already experience.
The greed driving the AI bus is largely over promising and under delivering. The current version of AI is less a job killer and more a job assistant. It may save some of the largest companies some money, but it costs small businesses to adopt.
Think of where this technology was ten years ago versus where it is today. It would be foolish to guess where it will be ten years from now, especially when you consider that current AI will be much of the brainpower behind future technological advancements. In a decade there will probably be technological creations that we couldn’t even speculate on now. It’s going to eventually bumble its way into singularity if given enough time and energy, because it’s got nowhere to go but up. AI made this from the image above in about 60 seconds.
Or it won't, and there will be even more suffering, squalor and crime.
Maybe. People have changed a lot over the last decade. A lot of Americans probably wouldn’t care if their neighbors lost their homes and wound up on the streets - as long as they were secure themselves. It’s more dog eat dog now. They’ll change their tune when their communities whither away.
Gee, I wonder who is responsible for that.
I don’t know, but I bet he’s hiding around here somewhere.
I used to use adobe, but the computer I'm using now won't open it. Just as well. I do have access to paint and PhotoScape X so I'm not without editing assistance. Robots using AI will rule the world one day, and I'm glad I won't be around to see it.