The Bouncer Has Moved Into Your Cloud Storage

How Adobe's catch-all clauses delete your art.

👊 Manifesto Bit

Two weeks ago I wrote about money men deciding what art is ‘allowed’, then about the Online Safety Act squinting at us from the curtains. This week it’s the cloud. Same story, new chokepoint. Tweets say Adobe is freezing artists for NSFW files saved to Creative Cloud. The bouncer has moved from the gallery door to your hard drive. Cool.

✏️ Main Story

Savvy (@MadamSavvy) brought this to my attention and points to Adobe’s rules that call out ‘harmful’, ‘obscene’, ‘lewd’, and that old favourite ‘otherwise objectionable’. She gives a clean example you can picture, a blood-spattered superhero still, widow on the ground, torn bodysuit, pure promo brief, and yet under those words it could be flagged on vibe alone. "Most don’t read rules but it is time we do… This is all such goofball behavior that needs to stop." An earlier post from Zenko (@zkurishi) adds heat from Japan, saying artists who uploaded NSFW illustrations found accounts frozen and appeals refused. One artist even shared an Adobe email about their account being deleted. You know that dream where the floor opens and you fall. That.

Now, what does Adobe actually say? When you strip out the panic and read the small print like a bored solicitor at a village fete Adobe says it will not train its generative models on your Creative Cloud files. Clear wording since June 2024. If you submit work to Adobe Stock you play by Stock rules, but your private CC library is not feeding Firefly. That promise sits beside another, less cuddly one. Adobe runs automated checks on cloud content to keep illegal or abusive stuff off its servers. If a machine or a person flags something, a human can look. That is not the same as strangers snooping through your boudoir shoot, but a robot is cataloguing the touched up holiday snaps of your wife.

Source: Pexels

Adult work is allowed in private storage. Their own policy pages say explicit sexual content can live there, and when features support it you can wall things off behind a mature tag. Put explicit work on Adobe’s public surfaces without the tag and they will slap a warning on it or take it down. That is moderation, not moral panic, though the line is as crisp as a soggy napkin.

There is also the quiet setting nobody loves to talk about. By default Adobe may analyse your cloud files with machine learning to improve features like background removal. That is separate from generative AI training, and you can switch it off in your account. It should be opt-in, but here we are.

And the bit that feels like censorship even when nothing is deleted. Generative Fill and the other shiny tricks are moderated. Prompts and outputs are screened to block pornography and explicit nudity. Which is why the tool sometimes refuses to touch a swimsuit photo from your own camera roll. That is policy friction masquerading as a bug.

So, are the tweets right that Adobe is rifling through private clouds and nuking legal NSFW by default. I can’t find solid evidence of a blanket purge. I can find broad, baggy words that give Adobe room to act if a filter trips, a content-analysis default most users never change, and AI features that are very twitchy around sex. Stir those together and you get fear, screenshots of emails, and a tidy narrative that travels fast.

If you want the bigger picture, this sits neatly beside my last two pieces. Payment processors decide what can be sold, lawmakers push platforms to over-police, and now the creative pipeline itself carries a content filter. The chokepoint is always wherever artists have to stand in line.

What I would do, keep local backups of anything spicy or under NDA, actually just keep local backups of everything. If your work lives in mature territory, consider a self-hosted archive for the masters and use CC for working files only. If you share publicly on Adobe surfaces, use the mature-content settings they provide. Turn off content analysis if you do not want your files used to tune features. None of this is romantic. All of it is boring. Boring kills creativity.

What Adobe should do, if they want the trust back. Tighten the language. "Lewd" can mean Botticelli on a bad day. Put a clear appeals path in the product, not buried in a policy page. If adult art is allowed in private storage, say it at the moment of upload, not three links deep.

Until then, treat the cloud like a shop window. Useful. Convenient. Fine for display. Keep the good stuff in the back.

📌 Cool Stuff

This Week's Punk Picks:

Sadly too busy to find anything to recommend. Go spin up Malcolm in the Middle or King of the Hill again.

Until next time: Stay Small, Stay Sustainable, Make Art.
- ReadGraves