Ansel Adams Estate Calls Out Adobe for Selling AI-Generated Art Using Photographer’s Name

In an unusually public conflagration between an artist’s estate and a tech giant, the Ansel Adams Trust hit back at Adobe for selling AI-generated images using the famed photographer’s name.

Adams, a member of the famed Group f/64, is best known for his images of the American West, whose vast forests and mountains he photographed in sleek black and white. On its stock photography website Adobe Stock, the company was selling pictures produced using generative AI that recalled Adams’s work, albeit with noticeable differences.

In one picture that has since been deleted from Adobe Stock, a cloud rolls into a valley, cascading above a serene river—seemingly a reference to actual works that Adams shot in the ’30s.

But unlike Adams’s photography, which is rich in detail, this image appears clearly digital, with darkened mountains and flat-looking trees. That image, made available under the title “Nature’s Symphony: Ansel Adams-Style Photography – AI-Generated,” could be bought under extended license for $79.99.

According to Adobe Stock’s terms of use, users are not allowed to upload AI-generated pictures “created using prompts containing other artist names, or created using prompts otherwise intended to copy another artist.”

“You are officially on our last nerve with this behavior,” the Ansel Adams Trust wrote on Threads on Friday, receiving more than 2,800 likes on the post.

“Thank you for flagging as this goes against our Generative AI content policy,” Adobe wrote back the next day. “We’re glad our team was able to remove the content.”

But the debate did not end there. In reply, the trust wrote, “Thanks @adobe but we’ve been in touch directly multiple times beginning in Aug 2023. Assuming you want to be taken seriously re: your purported commitment to ethical, responsible AI, while demonstrating respect for the creative community, we invite you to become proactive about complaints like ours, & to stop putting the onus on individual artists/artists’ estates to continuously police our IP on your platform, on your terms. It’s past time to stop wasting resources that don’t belong to you.”

I won’t say “it can’t happen here.”

But the concerns over AGI are largely a diversion to the real risks that “in the wild” Generative AI present.

There are tons of people who are using this technology. The vast majority of them haven’t a clue how it works - they just ask it to plan a party or come up with a poem or a good guacamole recipe. Despite not knowing the underlying math, their experience with it helps tear down the idolatry. They see the stupid results, they get a strong sense for the pros and cons, and realize GenAI is fun and useful but can’t replace anyone except an entry-level staffer (and even THAT is a trade made with trepidation).

There are boatloads of other people who won’t touch this stuff, but who are fearful of it becoming skynet. The fear is legit, in the sense that these algorithms are fallible. But experience with the actual Things That They Fear would go a long way to fleshing out the technology and their fears.

What IS something that people should watch/know/explore/investigate, is the ethics/morality/political leanings of the team building any GenAI or machine learning model. There core of most of these models are so deep/in the weeds that it’s easy to gloss over them. But if a statistician/model developer is really evil, they can twist the core to make the model profess that liberty is an evil concept, and abortion to be a magnificent civil right.

Flushing this out in the open isn’t hard - about 10 minutes of prompting can usually do the trick - but it DOES require vigilance. I suspect, much like platforms such as HuggingFace with a sort of leader board, websites will “score” models on the basis of bias.

There is a vast network of hypesters (generally called “tech bros” or tech brothers) who are like Russian and Chinese bots. They use la gauge that would fill up a buzzword bingo card in a minute - “game changer”, “next level”, “broke the internet’ and related nonsense. In my experience, they are empty suits but they can dazzle the masses. Their cousins are the doomsters, who see HAL and the Terminator in a stupid chat bot.

Everyone on FR, whether we like it or not, embraces technology -this IS an online bulletin board. We need to examine GenAI as we would scrutinize Trump, DeSantis, or any politician. After that discernment process, a healthy understanding of what this technology can and can’t do will be sharpened.

The risk of Artificial General Intelligence isn’t that hardware and software and data will combine to equal human cognition. It won’t. The risk is that someone SAYS they got a bot that can replace a person “in toto” and the public believes them.

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