Nudity and other issues which appear to violate Adobe Generative AI Guidelines [merged thread]

"it seems you might be confusing »AI-based image generation« and »art"

And it seems that you are confusing your definition of art with free speech and expression. First, not every use of AI image generation is to generate a final result. I often use it to generate specific elements to be used in something larger. This might be an element in a collage, an element in a larger image, or, most usually, a replacement element for a photo, whether it is an eye, a part of the background, or the pendant on a neclace. If there are a bunch of distracting trucks in the background of a portrait that you would otherwise consider "art," would using AI to get rid of them instead of using clone and stamp reduce "art" status of the portrait?

Adobe will analize my image to determine if it is "offensive" before allowing me to generate things for the image. This is bad in itself, but even in application it just plain gets wrong what it is looking at. There are countless issues where people in bathing suits, especially if it is a flesh colored bathing suit, are tagged as nudity and Adobe AI tools are not allowed to be used on them.

The Adobe censorship issue goes way beyond creating images from scratch and using them as your final product. It will not let actual artists to take pictures of nudes to use AI to expand their background. I could not use AI tools in a pro-breast feeding pamphlet. If I want to make an anti-violence work I can be restricted not only by the content of the image but I cannot use the prompt "gun" or "blood" because Adobe assumes that any use of guns or blood in images is going to be used to promote or glorify violence or self harm.

As far as "art" goes, not all speech and communication needs to be art. I cannot use Adobe to generate blood for an informational PDF outlining a surgical procedure. In instances such as this it does not matter if the imagry is original, what matters is the information being conveyed. Much of graphic design is not intended to be art, it is intended to convey a message, and graphic designers are being disuaded from using Adobe AI in their projects.

Everyone is worried about AI taking away jobs from graphic designers, but Adobe is actively limiting the tools graphic designers can use to keep up with AI.

They are just wrong on this issue on every level except possibly intent. They do not want to get sued and they do not want to be associated with illegal or "offensive" images. Finding a way to limit illegal images is understandable, but "offensive" is subjective and directly conflicts with the morality of the vast majority of it's users. First, art is often going to be offensive, speech is often going to be offensive, and even accurate information is going to often be offensive. If Adobe wants to make sure that it is never associated with anything offensive than it needs to get out of the art, imaging, and graphic design business and go into something that is not, by its nature, going to sometimes be offensive.... like rescuing puppies.

"I get around it in Photoshop itself. It is fairly easily tricked. As long as it can't see a feminine-looking person in the photo, it'll let you do background removal, canvas extend etc."

The problem is that what Photoshop does, and what AI was supposed to do, is speed up workflow. There are ways to get around it. It will not let you use "Satan" (but it will let you use Jesus and Buddha, which to me seems like religious censorship as well), but you can tinker around for 30 minutes experimenting with prompts and make a red skinned demon with horns, a tail, and cloven hooves carrying a pitchfork.

The problem is three-fold. First, it is not speeding up my workflow, it is slowing it down. Second, there are countless examples of what Americans legally and philosophically consider protected speech, and art is a form of speech, where "Satan" is a desirable image. Political cartoons regularly use the image to make commentary on things perceived as "evil", whether they are saying the thing is being, literally, demonized, or if they are saying the thing really is very bad. Cartoonists often use Photoshop, but the tools they can use now are limited, and political art or illustrated commentary on everything from drug use and incarcaration to violence, war, school shootings, and nuclear proliferation.

What they are doing is not going to solve or reduce the problems they are targeting. Pornographers are not going to make less pornography and people exploiting children are not going to exploit fewer children. At the same time, if Adobe cut out the censorship it would not increase the exploitation of children, violence, or pornography. There are too many alternatives out there that are much cheaper and designed for what they want. Child pornography creators are not banging their heads against the wall saying "Adobe won't let me do this and it is completely destroying my workflow." There are tons of legitimate artists that are saying exactly that however.

Even from a moral standpoint, preventing people from creating art and imagry that informs the public about horrible things and helps put  those horrible things into a language people across the world can relate to is at least as harmful, and likely more so, than not preventing your product from being used to create images of horrible things, or horrible things themselves (like child pornography). There is also the problem that people from many countries, the US (Where Adobe is based) one of the primary among them, consider the restriction of speech and expression to be much, much more offensive than virtually everything they are banning, with the exception of child pornography. There is a much greater backlash from people trying to prevent the censoring of nude images than there is from people trying to ban nude images, but Adobe is pandering to the minority group of largely religious fanatics that view any depiction of the human form as a sin while completely ignoring the majority group that prioritizes freedom of expression. When you look at the actual users of Adobe products the number of people offended by things such as nudity is going to drop to almost nothing while the number of people offended by censorship is going to vastly increase. In trying to be politically correct and inoffensive they are directly offending a large proportion of their users on both political and moral grounds. Telling an artist what is and is not OK to create is often as offensive to them as an image of Muhammad is to most Muslims, and certainly more offensive than an image of Satan is to the vast majority of Christians. Christians themselves create art featuring Satan.

This whole thing is just misguided politically correct insanity that cannot address the problems they are trying to limit while creating serious problems for their actual customers. It just proves that Adobe is not run by people that relate to its users, it is run by businessmen and lawyers that are completely out of touch with their customers. In the end, this is only going to hurt them. I personally feel dirty using a tool that promotes artistic censorship, and am seriously looking into what alternatives I can use that are not morally repugnant to me.

In Europe ...

We do not
have the same aversion to nudity that exists in the USA.

Here, we don't even have a law
preventing work with images of banknotes 

Well, that is only partly true. If at all.

As well as in the USA we have huge problems with bullying and using images of nude bodies for that purpose.

And of course there are laws against forgery, I mean, come on ...

Please do not deny the obvious.

"You can see as many nudes in art as you want, both male and female, just by
walking around the squares of Italy." - mostly males ... :O)

@QINGCHARLES the stains on the shirt probably look like blood to an artificial intellegence. 

Photoshop informed me this file is too explicit and violates their moral and ethical guidelines and Generative AI cannot be used to expand the background so I can crop it slightly wider. Am I a deviant? That's essentially what Adobe is saying.

I realize that American corporations are being ordered to excise all women's rights and to adopt a more "Judeo-Christian" focus. Do we know if Adobe is part of this anti-inclusivity movement to crush the rights of minorities and perhaps only allow images of men of specific ethnicities to be edited with their products?

"Adobe is widely used in educational and business settings. They've made a choice to prevent misuse/abuse and train on licensed models to prevent liability."

Adobe is also used by artists and for artistic expression. Adobe needs to find a way to address these problems while also not restricting the artistic expression of their customers. They could include these restrictions for the Education Edition only, for instance.

Under their guidelines Birth of Venus, David, (Heck, the list of unsuitable Michaelangelo, DaVinci, and Botacelli paintings would be too numerous to write), Garden of Earthly Delights, Mother and Child, Lady Godiva, Explosion For Sale, a majority of anti-war art, a huge number of Adam and Eve portrayals, and countless works by artists such as Picasso, Manet, and Degas. Numerous outcries have been raised when schools take material that they deem offensive out of their libraries, but it is OK for Adobe to extend the ban on offensive material to millions of adult artists? They are not limiting a certain type of offensive or illegal material, such as child pornography, they are creating blanket restrictions on the words used to describe art. The Adobe restrictions are the most severe restrictions on material I have ever witnessed in the US, including things that were long ago abandoned, such as the Comics Code and the Hays Code, which were much more forgiving in the 1950s and 1930s than the Adobe restrictions are. They are a private company, and they can ban whatever they want, but their primary paying customers are adults that use the programs for artistic expression in one way or another, whether it is illustration, graphic design, video editing and creation, photography, etc. There are other companies that are doing it better, cheaper, and without the restrictions.

I love Photoshop. I use Photoshop for thousands of hours every year and it is an integral part of my workflow. They are dedicating tons of resources into trying to get ontop of the Generative AI market, yet they are making decisions about it that are bad for business and frankly offensive while still being behind in things like being able to follow prompts, generate appropriate content based on the prompts, and the overall quality of the results and features available for working with existing images. They are even falling down on the customer service. When you have offended customers, or unhappy customers in general, you do not answer their grievances by pointing back to the "terms of use" that the user has a grievance with to begin with.

I have praised and defended the AI in Photoshop for use in streamlining the workflow countless times in the past, but I feel that I cannot do that in good conscience for a company that is behaving so blatantly offensively. They are censoring what users can use in the art they create in Photoshop. They have the right to do it, but it is still horribly offensive. Religious groups (or any groups) have the right to hate whoever they want to hate, but it is still offensive and does not need to be tollerated by other people who disagree with them. To me, censorship of other peoples work, even if it is created using your product, is much more offensive than a nude body, blood, or violence are when used for expression. Winsor & Newton may as well be having people fill out questionaires to determine if what you are going to paint is acceptable enough to them for you to be allowed to use their paint.

Adults do not need supervision, only children.

I'm actually seeing even more examples where I get violations that I shouldn't be getting. As in, more so than in the beginning. This suggests, possibly, that the programmers might be doing some tweaking to see what sticks, based on examples being submitted. Let's hope. More often than not, I can make things work by changing the shape of my selection in the meantime. 

3 years later and the complaints are growing. Please forward our latest complaints as well. Also, the "correct answer" that is auto chosen for this thread is not the correct answer. As you can see by the thread, many of the replys have far more likes and comments debunking the "correct answer". The terms of service that is mentioned in it are not being violated as many are saying here and have provided reference photos as proof.