Background and comments please on Sensei

Good questions. This is why I don't store my images in anybody's cloud. I don't wany Adobe deciding which of my pictures are the best or helping me become more like the photographer they want me to be, for whatever reason they might have. Individual growth and unique perspective is better than group homogeny. I also don't want Netflix telling me what movies I should watch. Don't let robots vote.

Maybe Adobe will assure us that no person or algorithm looks at the photos so many people are giving them. I doubt they will or can say that.

The moment I saw the Sensei demonstrations all I could think is, “Well, there go those billable hours.”

This has me thinking more about the creative aspect of our work, and the licenses that are being monetized in this digital age. As I peer into the future, I see a vision of some large company claiming that our work was not ours alone and that we had the help of an algorithm that they wrote. In this brave new world, I see the first court filing where the author of the algorithm is asking the judge to make us share our royalties for our creative efforts because their algorithm did more than 50% of the creative work. Never mind the fact that we were the one who set up the camera to a precise location to capture just one of an infinite number of perspectives on the subject, and tripped the shutter at the decisive moment.

It's a new-age problem. It would be somewhat true for the software owner to say they "made" the picture if they made all the filter and lighting decisions. Consider programs like Painnt (yes, double-N) which transform a photo into artwork. When I run the program on one of my images and a new image emerges, who made that? I pushed a button. Maybe I set some switches a little off the default, but still it is the software that generates the output. As we increase automatic photographic processing, who will own the images, especially if the original "snapshot" was given to a corporate server that did all the adjustments? And who owns the data that knows how to find Aunt Mildred in your photo collection -- can it be used to find her in someone else's collection and log her activities by date and location? The cloud seems to be a very sticky situation.

See Adobe's demonstration of how Photoshop's Content-Aware Fill may develop with machine learning - here.

But also see their Machine Leaning FAQ which includes "Can I turn off (opt out of) machine learning?"