Presumably they mean gig economy aka artists are vastly undervalued.
For instance. It's not that AI is replacing artists. It's that people think you don't need to pay a license for generated images, even when they were clearly and provably stolen from copyright material. The bar was just lowered. If "AI" is used to remove the watermark from Shutterstock people think that's legal now.
So WHEN gig economy workers get picked up by a company. Yes they pay for a software license as a "tax" on going pro. But from personal experience. A vast amount of art and content is made by people from developing economies on Fiver or whatever. Many of those licenses are stolen.
And now everyone thinks you don't need to pay artists anymore. So nobody will generate licenses.
Adobe was basically right. They're just going at it in the maximally enshittified manner.
No, this is not what I meant at all. I meant the independent artists that work without being attached to a firm or anything. The number of small owner/operator type places in the graphics/marketing type of world is apparently a much more common thing than the readers of this forum are familiar.
