Updating Adobe’s Terms of Use

We recently rolled out a re-acceptance of our Terms of Use which has led to concerns about what these terms are and what they mean to our customers. This has caused us to reflect on the language we use in our Terms, and the opportunity we have to be clearer and address the concerns raised by the community.

Over the next few days, we will speak to our customers with a plan to roll out updated changes by June 18, 2024.

At Adobe, there is no ambiguity in our stance, our commitment to our customers, and innovating responsibly in this space. 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.

Read on for some of the key areas that we will make abundantly clear when we update our Terms of Use next week.

Areas of clarification within our Terms of Use:

• You own your content. Your content is yours and will never be used to train any generative AI tool. We will make it clear in the license grant section that any license granted to Adobe to operate its services will not supersede your ownership rights.
• We don’t train generative AI on customer content. We are adding this statement to our Terms of Use to reassure people that is a legal obligation on Adobe. Adobe Firefly is only trained on a dataset of licensed content with permission, such as Adobe Stock, and public domain content where copyright has expired.
• You have a choice to not participate in our product improvement program. We may use usage data and content characteristics to improve your product experience and develop features like masking and background removal among others through techniques including machine learning (NOT generative AI). You always have the option of opting out of our desktop product improvement programs.
• The licenses we require to operate and improve our products on your behalf should be narrowly tailored to the activities needed. The licenses required to operate our products on your behalf use the standard statutory copyright rights but will now include plain English examples of what they mean and why they are required. We will also separate out and further limit the licenses required to improve our products and emphasize the opt-out option. We will reiterate that, in no case do these license grants transfer ownership of your content to Adobe.
• Adobe does not scan content stored locally on your computer in any way. For content that you upload to our servers — like all content-hosting platforms — Adobe automatically scans content you upload to our services to ensure we are not hosting any child sexual abuse material (CSAM). If our automated system flags an issue, we will conduct a human review to investigate. The only other instances where a human will review your content is upon your request (per a support request) if it is posted to a public facing site, or to otherwise comply with the law.

Finally, we’d like to share what we’ve learned from speaking with many of our customers over the last few days.

• First, we should have modernized our Terms of Use sooner. As technology evolves, we must evolve the legal language that evolves our policies and practices not just in our daily operations, but also in ways that proactively narrow and explain our legal requirements in easy-to-understand language.

• Second, as a platform that hosts content for creators, we have an opportunity to create Terms of Use that reflect the modern-day challenges that creators face.

In a world where customers are anxious about how their data is used, and how generative AI models are trained, it is the responsibility of companies that host customer data and content to declare their policies not just publicly, but in their legally binding Terms of Use.

Our updated Terms of Use, which we will be releasing next week, will be more precise, will be limited to only the activities we know we need to do now and in the immediate future, and uses more plain language and examples to help customers understand what they mean and why we have them.

Beyond our Terms of Use, we are committed to continue innovating ways to protect our customers in this new era, like advancing efforts like Content Credentials (attribution for creators, provenance of content, and enables the addition of “do not train” tags for images shared online) and the FAIR legislation that protects content creators from impersonation.

We recognize that trust must be earned. We are grateful for your feedback, will be connecting with many customers in our community this week to discuss our approach and these changes, and are determined to be a trusted partner for creators in the era ahead. We will work tirelessly to make it so.