The Riskiest Investment You Can Make
How Adobe dominate artists.
Hi,
A few weeks ago I shared my thoughts on the over-proliferation of AI in everything, using Adobe Acrobat AI as a case-study. This is a continuation of that thought, so read that previous piece if you want all the context behind this thinking.
If we're noticing AI appearing in everything then the natural question to ask is: why? Why are we being force-fed AI tools in Photoshop, Google search, Instagram Messages and even PDFs in Acrobat?
The precise answer depends on who you ask. In many cases, companies may be implementing AI tools because they see others doing it and they want to be seen as being “on the cutting edge" of tech (though, in reality, they're far too late for that). Some may more reasonably (and cynically) see AI as a simple buzzword that they can use in marketing to improve their SEO and grow their customer base. For companies like OpenAI it's obvious - they sell AI tools so of course they think it should be in everything. That's just good for business!
But, to broaden the scope of our case-study from before, what about our old punching-bag Adobe? Why would a company that sells software for working on visual art want to develop, test, implement and promote a tool that eliminates a lot of the work people do with their tools? Is that not like DeWalt selling pre-built shelves or KitchenAid selling pre-mixed bread dough?
It's about money. It's always about money.
The answer is obviously profit. They think they can make money doing it. That's the only reason.
If you talk to customers of Adobe’s who navigated the transition from one-time licensing fees to the subscription model Adobe uses today, there’s a strong feeling that this wasn’t a change for the better (from the customer’s perspective). Adobe’s comparatively minuscule competitor, Serif, are constantly brought up as a better alternative to Adobe because they sell their Affinity suite as a one-time purchase. Adobe is publicly traded, with their value going up significantly in the years following the implementation of this controversial subscription model. This tells us that their value to shareholders is evidently not related to their value to artists.
What this means is that all of Adobe’s words about empowering creators or enabling creativity should come with a giant asterisk pointing you to this statement:
...as long as it's profitable.
Maybe that’s obvious to you, but it needs to be said out loud more often. Adobe1 does not care about art or creative people. Full stop. I’ll say it again: Adobe does not care about artists at all. And why would they? It’s not their job.
Why did we let this happen?
For Adobe, a massive force driving their profit and growth came from their monopolization of creative professional tools. Since the 1980s, Adobe have been absorbing competitors in their field (Adobe didn’t even create Photoshop, arguably the software they’re most identified with) to the point that they’ve actually been blocked from continuing to roll up tools like Figma into their suite of creative software.2 But the damage has already been done. If you're an artist who wants to make a living doing creative work of any kind (illustration, animation, motion graphics, photography, film editing, visual effects, graphic design, marketing... anything) you will likely reach a point where you feel like you need to use an Adobe product to do your work.
The “need” is in quotes because the reality is that you never need Adobe products to make anything. They’re just one way to make art.
However, the reality is also that you likely do need Adobe products to make any money with your creative work. In addition to Adobe’s consolidation of creative tools, hundreds of different industries that have grown around digital art have all collectively contributed to building up Adobe products as the standard toolset for creative work. It’s gotten to the point that now, outside of some niches like working in 3D modeling, game design or music production, most creative jobs specifically call out a need to know and work efficiently with Adobe products by name. To opt-out of Adobe products is to cut yourself off from the communities, workflows, pipelines, job opportunities and resources that rely on their programs and proprietary file formats.
Once Adobe found themselves in this position, they had an advantage. People were invested in Adobe - not in their company's shares but in their products. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of artist's livelihoods depended on having access to these tools, because if they didn't have Photoshop or Illustrator or After Effects, all their work - archival and prospective - would become lost to them.
That's a lot of power for one company to have over so many people.
The now infamous introduction of Adobe Creative Cloud, the subscription model used to access Adobe products, is an exercising of that power. Suddenly, all the artists and companies that relied on Adobe’s Creative Suite were put in the position where, no matter what they did, the only way to maintain access to the tools of their trade was to pay Adobe perpetually for the rest of their lives (or the rest of their careers - whichever ended first). The decision between paying $50 a month to keep your job and main tool of self-expression versus investing dozens or even hundreds of hours into learning new tools that the rest of your industry doesn't use... isn't much of a decision at all. People bought in.
What's this have to do with AI?
The key here is that Adobe could pull off the Creative Cloud pivot to a subscription model not because people wanted it, but because of that investment people had in the company's tools. But that investment didn't happen overnight.
Adobe rolled out Creative Cloud in 2013. By that time I had been learning and working with my dad's license of their software since I was a kid - at least 13 years, but realistically more (much of my early childhood masterpieces, still hanging on my grandparent's walls, were created in Photoshop sometime between 1999 and 2004). I realize now that I was being molded into an Adobe-based artist from childhood.
I was only 19 in 2013, when Creative Cloud launched. There was plenty of time for me to learn new tools if I had wanted. Imagine if you already had a career built using these tools at that time. A professional in their 40s or 50s might have been using Photoshop for most of their career, likely already navigating a pivot from analogue to digital art. The prospect of switching platforms after decades would have been unimaginable at that point.
Another Revolutionary Tool for Shareholders to Profit From
When Adobe promote AI in Photoshop as a cool, fun beta tool for you to play with, they're hoping you give it a shot. Eventually, they hope you work it into your process and grow to rely on it for your work. If you buy into Creative Cloud for learning photo manipulation, the AI tools might feel like a shortcut to achieving a level of quality you would otherwise need years of practice (and even education) to develop on your own. Amazing!
And the hooks sink deeper in. The switching cost of leaving becomes greater and greater.
The only power we have over a company like Adobe is the power to leave them - to abandon their products for something else3. In an idealized capitalist framework, you don't need to vote to regulate compaines because you can vote with your dollar. But we don't live in the idealized version of capitalism. Deepening monopoly power means we're all isolated more and more from choice, and forced to stay with the few companies that remain.
Adobe's strategic advantage in 2013 that pushed their stock value from $37 a share to $370 a share just ten years later wasn't that they made the best products. It was that the cost of leaving them was just too high. We couldn't leave, and so we stayed and they got more powerful.
![A screenshot of an Adobe pop-up, offering for you to "try [their] new generative AI features." Text is overlaid on top of the screenshot, reading: "Try new generative AI features. Try new generative AI features. Try them. C'mon, just try. Try it out! Why not? You don't want to be left behind, do you? Try, use, rely, subscribe"](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdf85fabd-f3a3-4db7-8a86-e8faca12f6d2_1920x1080.jpeg "A screenshot of an Adobe pop-up, offering for you to \"try [their] new generative AI features.\" Text is overlaid on top of the screenshot, reading: \"Try new generative AI features. Try new generative AI features. Try them. C'mon, just try. Try it out! Why not? You don't want to be left behind, do you? Try, use, rely, subscribe\"")
Doubling-Down on Trapping You
For Adobe, these AI tools are a doubling-down on the same strategy used with the subscription model and monopolization. They want more power over you, and so they want the cost of leaving them to increase.
Learned skills that you develop outside of products (artistic skills like having a sense for colour, learning design fundamentals or the principles of animation) give you agency. They help you bring your ideas wherever you want to express them.
Advanced, proprietary product features make you dependent on products. They take your agency away. They give it to the owners of the tools.
When Adobe pops up another banner on a program asking you to try out using a new AI tool, think about what they're offering you. If you think about the implications, it might make you worry.
But don't just worry about the ethics of copyright violation used to train generative AI tools.
Don't just worry about the immense energy costs associated with mass use of machine learning.
Don't just worry about how using AI tools will homogenize culture over time.
Don't just worry about data collection, privacy violation and how using AI tools contributes back to training the tools on your ideas and personal information...
...worry about those things, but also worry about the dependency you may be building on a company that cares more about their stock value than they ever have about artists.
When we invest in companies like this – invest in learning and using and relying on their tools – we're essentially entering into a career-long relationship with them. Before you dig further in, ask yourself if that's a relationship you'd really like to keep investing in. Ask yourself if that's a relationship you even want to be in. Because one day, you might wake up and realize you can't afford to leave them even if you want to.
Have a wonderful week!
Love,
Simon 🐒
The artwork used in this piece is Big Fish Eat Little Fish by Pieter van der Heyden, ca. 1525-1596 - Source
The screenshots used in this piece were taken directly from pop-ups on the Adobe Photoshop home screen.
Note that I'm always referring to Adobe as a company - I'm sure plenty of nice people work there and I don't blame workers for the misdoings of corporations.
The Adobe/Figma deal marked an attempt at a staggeringly huge consolidation of power in creative software tools. It wasn't formally blocked, though. Adobe instead abandoned the deal due to mounting pressure from regulators. There's a messy story related to this attempted merger that doesn't fit neatly into this piece, though, that I want to at least mention here because it's so absurd. The merger with Figma would have made Adobe's prototyping design tool, XD, redundant and so Adobe started sunsetting XD before the merger was finalized. After dropping out of the deal, it seems like Adobe had done too much work shutting down XD (firing people), and the program is officially no longer being actively developed by Adobe. In effect, just the attempt to consolidate caused an actual reduction of options for consumers in the space, with Adobe killing a tool many people relied on for no reason, showing no willingness to eat any cost on behalf of their customers. The funniest thing is that, in their support material for XD being in maintenance mode Adobe has the gall to say Adobe has a long history of putting customers first, before saying they'll give you plenty of notice before they kill XD altogether. Imagine if corporations were held accountable for these kinds of lies.
This is putting aside the power societally we have to elect governments that regulate monopolistic corporations and their products - something that feels more like a fairytale than a government mandate.