Popular iPad design app Procreate is coming out against generative AI, and has vowed never to introduce generative AI features into its products. The company said on its website that although machine learning is a “compelling technology with a lot of merit,” the current path that generative AI is on is wrong for its platform.
Procreate goes on to say that it’s not chasing a technology that is a threat to human creativity, even though this may make the company “seem at risk of being left behind.”
Procreate CEO James Cuda released an even stronger statement against the technology in a video posted to X on Monday.
CEO James Cuda
the irony
I don’t trust them. They better fire him and hire a Jim Abacus.
The CEO should ideally have the exact same name as the company. Like Tim Apple.
Or Sam Sung.
Doug Bowser of Nintendo springs to mind. Also Gary Bowser, the guy they used the US courts to make an example of.
Built on a foundation of theft
Sums up all AI
Does it? I worked on training a classifier and a generative model on freely available galaxy images taken by Hubble and labelled in a citizen science approach. Where’s the theft?
Hard to say. Training models is generative; training a model from scratch is costly. Your input may not infringe copyright but the input before or after may have.
Can you explain how you came to that conclusion?
The way I understand it, generative AI training is more like a single person analyzing art at impossibly fast speeds, then using said art as inspiration to create new art at impossibly fast speeds.
The art isn’t being made btw so much as being copy and pasted in a way that might convince you it was new.
Since the AI cannot create a new style or genre on its own, without source material that already exists to train it, and that source material is often scraped up off of databases, often against the will and intent of the original creators, it is seen as theft.
Especially if the artists were in no way compensated.
To add to your excellent comment:
It does not ask if it can copy the art nor does it attribute its generated art with: “this art was inspired by …”
I can understand why creators unhappy with this situation.
No, it sums up a very specific type of AI…
Blanket statement are dumb.
I assume you mean all generative AI? Because I don’t think AI that autonomously learns to play Super Mario is theft https://youtu.be/qv6UVOQ0F44
Nope. Stop with the luddite lies please
While a honorable move, “never” doesn’t exist in a world based on quarterly financials…
Procreate is amazing. I bought it for my neurodivergent daughter and used it as a non-destructive coloring book.
I’d grab a line drawing of a character that she wanted to color from a google image search, add it to the background layer, lock the background so she can’t accidentally move or erase it, then have her color on the layer above it using the multiply so the black lines can’t be painted over. She got the point where she prefers to have the colorized version alongside the black and white so she can grab the colors from the original and do fun stuff like mimic its shading and copy paste in elements that might have been too difficult for her to render. Honestly, she barely speaks but on that program, she’s better than most adults already even at age 8. Her work looks utterly perfect and she knows a lot of advanced blending and cloning stuff that traditional media artists don’t usually know.
Generative AI steals art.
Procreate’s customers are artists.
Stands to reason you don’t piss your customer base off.
Generative AI steals art.
No it doesn’t. Drop that repeated lie please
You are right, generally, generative AI pirates art and the rest of the content on the internet.
That is at least borderline more correct, but it’s still wrong. It learns using a neural network much like, but much simpler than, the one in your head
It doesn’t “learn” anything, its a database with linear algebra. Using anthropomorphic adjectives only helps to entrench this useless and wasteful technology to regular people.
Trying to redefine the word “learn” won;t help your cause either. Stop being a luddite and realise that it is neither useless not wasteful
Everyone loves increased work load and wow that’s a lot of power to… do what exactly.
You don’t need to resort to name calling, you could make a compelling argument instead…
I’m calling you a luddite because you’re being a luddite. AI is just a new medium, that’s all it is, you’re just scared of new technology just like how idiots were scared of photography a hundred and some years ago. You do not have an argument that holds any water because they were all made against photography, and many of them against pre-mixed paints before that!
Also I’m done arguing with anti-ai luddites because you are about as intractable as trump cultists. I’ll respond to a level or two of comments in good faith because someone else might see your nonsense and believe it but this deep it’s most likely you and me, and you’re not gonna be convinced of anything.
Stop being a luddite
How about “it’s complicated”? It certainly doesn’t steal art and it certainly does lower the need for humans to create art.
Is it really not true? How many companies have been training their models using art straight out of the Internet while completely disregarding their creative licences or asking anyone for permission? How many times haven’t people got a result from a GenAI model that broke IP rights, or looked extremely similar to an already existing piece of art, and would probably get people sued? And how many of these models have been made available for commercial purposes?
The only logical conclusion is that GenAI steals art because it has been constantly “fed” with stolen art.
It does not steal art. It does not store copies of art, it does not deprive anyone of their pictures, it does not remix other people’s pictures, it does not recreate other people’s pictures unless very very specifically directed to do so (and that’'s on the human not he AI), and even then it usually gets things “wrong”. If you don’t completely redefine theft then it does not steal art
Why do you think it ingests all its content from. Problem isn’t the AI itself it’s the companies that operated but it’s not inaccurate to conflate the two things.
I think you’ll be in a little disingenuous.
I like how you completely dodge his argument with this. If training data isn’t considered transformative, then it’s copyright infringement, like piracy.
Ironically, I think AI may prove to be most useful in video games.
Not to outright replace writers, but so they instead focus on feeding backstory to AI so it essentially becomes the characters they’ve created.
I just think it’s going to be inevitable and the only possible option for a game where the player truly chooses the story.
I just can’t be interested in multiple choice games where you know that your choice doesn’t matter. If a character dies from option a, then option b, c, and d kill them as well.
Realising that as a kid instantly ruined telltale games for me, but I think AI used in the right way could solve that problem, to at least some degree.
Never eh? Well someone won’t exist under the same name/promise in decade or two.
No doubt his decision was helped by the fact that you can’t really fit full image generation AI on iPads - for example Stable Diffusion needs at the very least 6GB of GPU memory to work.
That said, since what they sell is a design app, I applaud him for siding with the interests of at least some of his users.
PS: Is it just me that finds it funny that the guy’s last name is “Cuda” and CUDA is the Nvidia technology for running computing on their GPUs and hence widelly used for this kind of AI?
They’re all run on cloud, for commercial products.
you can’t really fit full image generation AI on iPads - for example Stable Diffusion needs at the very least 6GB of GPU memory to work.
You can currently run Stable Diffusion and Flux on iPads and iPhones with the Draw Things app. Including LoRAs and TIs and ControlNet and a whole bunch of other options I’m too green to understand.
Technically the app even runs on relatively old devices, though I imagine only at lower resolutions and probably takes ages.
But in my limited experience it works quite well on an iPad Pro and an iPhone 13 Pro.
I want to be more creative with SD. Do you have any recommendations similar to https://github.com/intel/openvino-ai-plugins-gimp
I mean, ok, it’s not like anyone using Procreate is going to use AI generation in it anyway…
That stance will change if they ever get acquired. Might even get the chance to see James Cuda try and walk back this stance in a few years.
a technology that is a threat to human creativity
Perhaps the most stupid take on this subject I have seen. Nothing will stop humans creating, definitely not a new creative medium! That’s all it is, by the way, a new medium, like photography a hundred and some years ago, or digital painting more recently. Most of the same arguments were made against pre mixed paints - Turner was dragged for using them, for example!
It is problematic though. People start relying on content generation more and more and stop learning how to do it properly. Once they start relying on AI shit, that’s when capitalism does its thing and locks you into monthly subscription costs. Just look at what Adobe is doing. They create a dependency and then start changing their business model. Cloud this and cloud that is the same kind of problem.
Plus, ai generated content often looks alike. You kind of take away signature looks of creators.
I’m not entirely against AI generated content. A friend of mine hates social media but his small business relies on it. Most of his posts are ai generated just so he doesn’t have to deal with that cancer.
The “they stop learning how to do it properly” is as old as time itself!
How many of today’s Illlustrator artists know how to blend oil colours and layer them on cloth? How many software developers could build what they do in pure assembler?
We stand on the shoulders of giants, have been since the Stone Age. Specialisation and advancement has meant we don’t need to start from first principle. You could argue that is what “progress” is; being able to get a little bit further because your parents got a little bit further because their parents got a little bit further.
That argument goes together with the whole money trap thing though. That’s my main problem. And people still blend colors digitally. Devs still program themselves and merely use ai as a starting point. They’d never trust ai generated code blindly. Entering a prompt to have something generated or using an ai brush just isn’t really the same as actually creating something. It’s literally letting a (cloud of) computer (s) create your art for you.
Edit: dumbing down the internet and computers has lead to a colossal amount of imbeciles who aren’t able to do anything beyond scrolling on their phones. This is a huge problem as they’re being exploited by companies and politicians in a very efficient manner. All because people forgot how to use and troubleshoot a computer.
I’m super concerned about what the future holds for humanity and I worry that AI will leave millions and millions without an income and further concentrate wealth towards the few.
That said this is clearly a “we can’t compete, let’s make a press release to say ‘this is all wrong and we choose not to compete’”-statement.
Built on a foundation of theft
Sums up all AI
That’s a very reactionary take, IMO.
There’s plenty of AI out there that’s not built on theft. You can train them solely on your own data if you want them to. There’s open source models out there trained only on data they were expressly given consent to use.
You can get machine learning algorithms to learn how to play basic games completely on their own, etc.
As with everything the problem is not AI technology the problem is capitalism.
End capitalism and suddenly being able to share and openly use everyone’s work for free becomes a beautiful thing.
What are the realistic and proven to work alternatives
This, over and over again.
Going against AI is being a luddite, not aware of the core underlying issue.
I agree, but as long as we still have capitalism I support measures that at least slow down the destructiveness of capitalism. AI is like a new powertool in capitalism’s arsenal to dismantle our humanity. Sure we can use it for cool things as well. But right now it’s used mostly to automate stuff that makes us human - art, music and so on. Not useful stuff like loading the dishwasher for me. More like writing a letter for me to invite my friends to my birthday. Very cool. But maybe the work I put in doing this myself is making my friends feel appreciated?
Edit: It’s also nice to at least have an app that takes this maximalist approach. Then people can choose. If they’re half-assing it there will be more and more ai-features creeping in over time. One compromise after the next until it’s like all the other apps. It’s also important to have such a maximalist stand in order to gauge the scale in a way.
