Shared content creation with Adobe.

Designers beware.

Adobe quietly updated its Terms of Service in June 2024, and buried inside that update was a phrase that stopped designers, photographers, and artists in their tracks: “shared content creation.” It sounds harmless. It isn’t.¹

The updated terms granted Adobe the right to “access, view, or listen to your Content through both automated and manual methods” — including machine learning — for purposes Adobe gets to define.² The backlash was immediate and fierce. Professionals who store entire careers’ worth of work inside Creative Cloud applications had every reason to be alarmed.³

What does “shared content creation” actually mean?

Adobe’s terms essentially claim a broad license over anything you store in its cloud. The specific language, found in Section 2.2 of Adobe’s General Terms of Use, states that Adobe’s automated systems may “analyze your Content and Creative Cloud Customer Fonts using techniques such as machine learning in order to improve our Services and Software and the user experience.”⁴ Adobe says this is just to keep the lights on — to sync your files, run features like Remove Background or Liquid Mode, and operate the service. But that’s a lot of legal real estate to carve out for keeping the lights on.⁵

The troubling part isn’t just what Adobe says it does. It’s that the legal language gives Adobe the ability to do far more than it admits — and you agreed to it the moment you clicked Accept.

Is Adobe training Firefly on your work?

Adobe says no — and to be fair, there’s no evidence it is. Adobe claims Firefly was built on licensed Adobe Stock images and public domain content.⁶ But that claim came with an asterisk: it turned out that roughly 5% of Firefly’s training data included images generated by competing AI tools like Midjourney, which were submitted to Adobe Stock before AI-generated content was explicitly prohibited there.⁷ So even Adobe’s “ethical AI” model wasn’t as clean as advertised.

Adobe has since said it will not train generative AI on subscribers’ private creative work — unless you submit that work to Adobe Stock. Stock contributors, by accepting the contributor agreement, gave Adobe the green light to use their images for AI training. If you’ve ever uploaded to Stock, your work may already be inside Firefly.⁸

What about Behance?

Behance is Adobe’s public portfolio platform, home to millions of designers, illustrators, and photographers. Because Behance is public by nature, the protections that apply to private Creative Cloud files don’t automatically extend to it. Adobe’s own terms state that content posted on “public-facing platforms like Behance” is subject to review for intellectual property and safety issues — under different and broader rules than private cloud files.⁹

Adobe has launched Content Credentials, a tool that lets you attach an opt-out signal to your work to tell AI companies you don’t consent to scraping.¹⁰ It’s currently in public beta and is supported by Adobe Firefly and Spawning. It’s a good idea — but it’s entirely voluntary, and most AI companies aren’t legally required to honor it. Posting your portfolio publicly on Behance while hoping AI companies play nice isn’t a privacy strategy.¹¹

Your files on Adobe’s cloud servers

Every file you save to Creative Cloud, every PDF you run through Document Cloud, every photo in Lightroom’s cloud library — Adobe can access it. The company acknowledges this directly: cloud content may be automatically scanned for illegal material, and it may be processed for analytics and service improvement.¹² Adobe stores its data on Amazon Web Services servers in North America, EMEA, and Japan.

Adobe says employees don’t browse your files for fun, and there’s no reason to doubt that. But “we can access your files” and “we won’t access your files” are very different promises. One is in the legal terms. The other is just a statement.

And while we’re on the subject of Adobe’s trustworthiness…

In June 2024 — the same month as the ToS controversy — the FTC filed a federal lawsuit against Adobe and two of its executives for hiding a steep early termination fee in its subscription plans. Adobe pre-selected its “Annual, Paid Monthly” plan by default, which locked users into a year-long commitment. If you tried to cancel after a two-week grace period, you owed Adobe up to 50% of your remaining annual fees. The FTC alleged Adobe intentionally buried this in fine print and made cancellation as difficult as possible.¹³ June 2024 was not a good month to be an Adobe customer.

So what can you do?

Adobe’s tools are genuinely excellent, and for many designers there’s no realistic alternative. But you can be smarter about how you use them. Keep sensitive client work off Adobe’s cloud — save locally or to an encrypted drive. If you use Behance, watermark everything and set up Content Credentials with your name and a connected account.¹⁴ Read the Stock contributor agreement carefully before uploading anything. And any time Adobe asks you to accept updated terms, actually read them before clicking through.

Adobe isn’t uniquely evil. But it is a large corporation with a business model that has every incentive to extract value from the massive creative ecosystem it hosts. “Shared content creation” is a polished way of describing something much simpler: you make the work, and Adobe gets a say in what happens to it.

Read Adobe’s Privacy Policy