Adobe-Our Bad, We Won’t Own Your Work or Train AI with It; Apple Launching Own Password Manager; Meta Bows ‘Communities’ on Messenger; Tesla Down, but Other EV’s Sales Are Up

A popup appeared yesterday before users could open their Adobe Creative Cloud apps. The terms of use you had to agree to seemed to indicate that Adobe was claiming rights over your work, and that they could use your intellectual product to train AI. Well, now Adobe has ‘clarified’ the terms…I would say walked them back. According to 9to5mac.com, users not only couldn’t open their apps, but couldn’t get to support or even uninstall apps without agreeing to the terms. A number of high-profile pros complained, and thus the so-called ‘clarification’ was released in a blog post. In the post came two crucial assurances from Adobe: 

* Adobe does not train Firefly Gen AI models on customer content. Firefly generative AI models are trained on a dataset of licensed content, such as Adobe Stock, and public domain content where copyright has expired. 

* Adobe will never assume ownership of a customer’s work. Adobe hosts content to enable customers to use our applications and services. Customers own their content and Adobe does not assume any ownership of customer work.

So there you have it…your work is yours, and no AI training on your work. 

In a pre-WWDC leak, Mark Gurman form Bloomberg reports that Apple will likely bow a dedicated password manager app in upcoming versions of its iOS and Mac software. The app will be called a rather pedestrian ‘Passwords.’ It will go head to head with apps like 1Password and LastPass. They are big players in the password zone, but with Apple’s enormous installed base worldwide, they are likely to pick up users in bulk quickly. 

Meta, without fanfare, has rolled out ‘Communities’ on Messenger. Techcrunch.com says The feature is designed to help organizations, schools and other private groups communicate in a more organized and structured way. The rollout comes as Meta introduced Communities on WhatsApp back in 2022. The feature lets people connect with others without needing an associated Facebook Group to do so. Up to 5,000 people can join a community through shareable invites, Meta says. You may not see it immediately, as it is being rolled out globally. 

Tesla has had a tough time this year, but other EVs are seeing good growth. Last year was a banner year, though, and will be near impossible to catch, with sales up 47% year over year in 2023. Arstechnica.com notes that so far this year, EV sales were up only 2.6% first quarter…but that is mainly because Tesla sales were down as much as 25% based on registrations. Tesla has quit breaking out sales data by region. Tesla has dropped from 80% market share in 2020 to 50% now…still nothing to sneeze at. Tesla’s global deliveries were only down 8.5%. Volkswagen isn’t doing that well, either. Meanwhile, over at Ford, the Blue Oval sold 91% more F-150 Lightenings than last year, and Mustang Mach-E sales are up 46%. BMW is up 57.8% in EV sales, and Hyundai/Kia is up 56.1%. Mercedes is up a whopping 66.9%, and Toyota an astounding 85.9%! It appears that naysayers who have been saying EVs are never going to do much in the auto sector may need to rethink things!

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.