Adobe is not having a good, very bad year

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the news that Adobe is being sued by the US government over its allegedly complicated cancellation process is that it doesn’t seem surprising at all. Adobe has been plagued by controversy in 2024, particularly around its AI policies – and this latest lawsuit is just the latest in its public image problems in 2024.

The Federal Trade Commission has filed a complaint claiming that the complicated cancellation process for Creative Cloud subscriptions presents so many obstacles that users are essentially “trapped in year-long subscriptions.”

The filing follows another major controversy for Adobe. This month, the company was forced to reverse the wording of its terms and conditions. After users received a notification explaining that the terms had been updated to include clarification that the company can access user content “via manual and automated methods,” many speculated that this meant that Adobe could access anything we created – and potentially use it to train its AI. . The ensuing backlash was so violent that Adobe was prompted to “reflect on the language we use in our Terms and the opportunity we have to be clearer and address concerns raised by the community.”

And then there are the concerns of artists themselves when it comes to AI. Several digital artists and illustrators have gone so far as to accuse the company of copyright infringement. Several artists have observed that commercially available AI-generated images appear in Adobe Stock search results when their name is used as a prompt, even though they did not create the art. And in some cases, the AI art appears to at least partially imitate the artist’s style.