literally what are they doing. it's like if you were working for the glass house realtor and handing out bags full of extremely throwable stones during tours. they realized everyone was Mad Online At Them sometime within the last hour and have started trying to delete things.
don't buy a fucking wacom, for god's sake, save your money and get an xp-pen or a huion. wacom isn't the only game in town anymore and they aren't worth their absurd pricetags.
they dragged their feet on it, and they won't actually fully admit to what happened, but wacom says they blame this on a third party.
it's come up that Huion, Gaomon, and XP-Pen have all been spotted doing some AI-adjacent shit too. I can't read Chinese and I was unsure of the exact context of these images so i did some digging and emailing.
XP-Pen and Huion claim similar third-party-did-something-weird issues and they've cut off the people responsible. I also emailed Gaomon customer service and got a response back from a customer service rep:
"Please rest assured that Gaomon does not support AI.
I have already reported the issues you mentioned to the company, please don't worry~"
so we'll see if they put out some kind of statement or something idk lol
obviously, Corporations Are Not Our Friends, and you shouldn't take them at their word or stan them or assume they won't eventually turn on you. i personally won't give wacom any grace because fuck them, their prices have always been exorbitant and you can't even trust their shit to be sturdy anymore. and honestly, the the AI stink on this shit was so powerful. wacom has the least excuses to be cheaping out and fucking up this way, imo.
stock image sites (esp. Adobe Stock) are absolutely clogged with AI sludge right now. i think we'll see this sequence of events and excuses repeated with various companies, and i don't think it'll be a lie every time. i think this is going to be a very stupid year, but please don't succumb to doomerism over it. don't despair, rage! cancel subscriptions, demand refunds on recent purchases, send angry emails, generate bad press. we bullied a hell of a lot of corporations away from crypto and NFTs and i think we can bully them away from AI too.
(and yeah. i know. groan, sigh, etc. i'm tired too, i'm putting soft-grips on my torches and pitchforks, i'm trying not to expend too much of my energy thinking or talking about this outside of productive yelling)
