Procreate takes a stand against generative AI, vows to never incorporate the tech into its products | TechCrunch
Procreate takes a stand against generative AI, vows to never incorporate the tech into its products | TechCrunch
Popular iPad design app Procreate is saying no to generative AI, and has vowed to never introduce generative AI features into its product.
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.
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.
55I 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.
14This, over and over again.
Going against AI is being a luddite, not aware of the core underlying issue.
9I sort of agree. But…
… In a world of adequate distribution and a form of universal income, we should all relish automation.
That doesn’t preclude capitalism (investing for profit, the use of currency, interest rates etc), however, just needs a state with guts and capability to force redistribution.
3What are the realistic and proven to work alternatives
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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?
45They're all run on cloud, for commercial products.
46Good point, I had forgotten that :/
2
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.
10I want to be more creative with SD. Do you have any recommendations similar to https://github.com/intel/openvino-ai-plugins-gimp
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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.
45That's heartwarming. Good luck to her! (and you)
You're a great techno-parent
7Thanks. I try my best. 😊
10
I love Procreate very much buT WHY CAN NOT I MAKE A BÉZIER CURVE OR ADD TEXT ON MY IPAD PRO AAAA
4
Built on a foundation of theft
Sums up all AI
EDIT: meant all gen AI
31Does 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?
24I 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
19Nintendo probably thinks it's theft lol
11
No, it sums up a very specific type of AI...
Blanket statement are dumb.
11Can 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.
9The 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.
2
That's a blanket statement. While I understand the sentiment, what about the thousands of "AIs" trained on private, proprietary data for personal or private use by organizations that own the said data. It's the not the technology but the lack of regulation and misaligned incentives.
6Nope. Stop with the luddite lies please
-10
While a honorable move, "never" doesn't exist in a world based on quarterly financials...
30Generative AI steals art.
Procreate's customers are artists.
Stands to reason you don't piss your customer base off.
28Generative AI steals art.
No it doesn't. Drop that repeated lie please
-21Is 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.
10
Wow, I'm actually kinda impressed. I'm not sure I'm 100% behind their stance, but it's better than companies that blindly chase profits.
Tbh I think generative AI can be used creatively and artistically, but knowing how to use generative AI doesn't automatically make you creative or artistic. It's like making someone paint a picture for you. Just making someone paint a picture for you doesn't make you an artist, but an artist could say something by making someone paint for them. To put it another way, the AI element has to be more than just a means to an end; it has to justify itself somehow.
"But normal artists don't have to justify themselves!"
You're right! That's because it's assumed that the amount of time, effort and practice that is required to create art "manually" leads to the artist thinking deeply about their artwork before and during its creation; and 99% of the time, that's completely true (the other 1% is "eye candy" like Kinkade; which is what AI is 99% of the time). Most people don't understand this because they have never truly attempted to make "art", however artists obsess over the details. You think that red truck in the bottom corner was "just there"? No, the artist probably put it there for a reason. Hell, the truck being red likely has a reason behind it. Maybe the artist wanted to say something about red trucks, or maybe the truck just looked better in red. Either way, that was a decision the artist was required to make.
That said, AI can do some really cool stuff that would take humans years to reproduce, or would be extremely tedious and mind-numbing. A good example I recently came across is using AI to split music into stems or even into individual instruments. This makes it a lot easier for DJs, musicians and producers to get clean samples. It also makes it significantly easier for people to make custom tracks for Fuser (that's how I found out about it).
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't think they should write-off AI entirely, but instead try and think of areas where AI would help artists. Maybe you use it to allow people to rescale their artwork without potentially having to redraw blurry lines. Maybe it's AI that's designed to separate photographs into individual pieces for the purpose of collages. Maybe it's an AI designed to interpolate animation frames better than human-written algorithms. AI can do a lot of stuff other than just making eye candy.
That said, I think rejecting generative AI entirely is better than blindly chasing the money, so good on you.
21They're chasing profit too, though. "Taking a stand" means they're advertising, trying to differentiate themselves from their competitors and draw in people who hold anti-AI views.
That will last until that segment of users becomes too small to be worth trying to base their business on.
14Well, sounds great. I almost wish more companies would advertise to that market, really.
It's like... I know you're lying, and I know you probably don't actually care, but some of your competitors couldn't even be bothered to do this much. Those companies thought shitting on things I care about to maximize profit was the better strategy. I'll take that into consideration in my future decisions.
And if the situation changes, if they turn around and go full in on generative AI, we'll just have to consider that too. That's life.
Of course, I believe using alternatives that are more resistant to these kinds of market trends (community built software, perhaps?) would be ideal, but it's not always an option.
9
They specifically called out generative AI though. Stuff like separating photographs to individual pieces doesn't require generative AI specifically. Machine learning models that fall into the general umbrella of AI already exist for object segmentation.
5
Never eh? Well someone won’t exist under the same name/promise in decade or two.
12That 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.
7So definitely gonna have AI baked in by next year.
7Didn't krita say the same thing at one time?
It's currently one of the best programs to generate AI art using self hosted models.
5I think that's kinda comparing apples to oranges. Krita is FOSS, and FOSS developers can be just as affected by community pressure as proprietary developers; possibly moreso. I dunno the circumstances around Krita's decision to walk back and include AI, but I speculate it may have come from community pressure. Procreate isn't FOSS so the community has a much harder time forcing their hand (the community can't exactly fork the code and push everyone to migrate to a pro-AI version of Procreate). The other side of this, however, is that as proprietary developers, they feel more pressure from money.
My prediction is that they'll stick to this as long as it's profitable. If they break away from it then it's either because the CEO was replaced with a more profit-hungry CEO, they're no longer profitable and they believe adding AI would fix that, or they believe they've found a use for AI that wouldn't sacrifice creativity.
4You can do that?
2Generate images with self hosted models, or integrate it with art programs? Because yes to both.
4
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.
5Honestly, I think that...
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AI is going to revolutionize the game industry.
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AI is going to kill the game industry as it currently exists.
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Generative AI will lead to a lot of real-time effects and mechanics that are currently impossible, like endless quests that don't feel hollow, realistic procedural generation that can convincingly create everything from random clutter to entire galaxies, true photorealistic graphics (look up gaussian splatting, it's pretty cool), convincing real-time art filters (imagine a 3d game that looks like an animated Van Gogh painting), and so on.
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Generative AI is going to result in a hell of a lot of layoffs and will likely ruin people's lives.
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Generative AI will eventually open the door to small groups of devs being able to compete with AAA releases on all metrics.
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Generative AI will make studios with thousands of employees obsolete. This is a double-edged sword. Fewer employees means fewer ideas; but on the other side, you get a more accurate vision of what the director originally intended. Fewer employees also will also mean that you will likely have to be a genuinely creative person to get ahead, instead of someone who knows how to use Maya or Photoshop but is otherwise creatively bankrupt. Your contribution matters far more in a studio of <50 than it does in a studio of >5,000; as such, your creative skill will matter more.
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A lot of people will have to be retrained because they will no longer be creative enough to make a living off of making games.
Tbh, I think game development is one of the few places that generative AI will actually have a significant benefit; however I also think it will completely scramble the industry once it starts being widely adopted, and it'll be a long time before the dust settles.
8I've no idea where you're getting these predictions from. I think some of them are fundamentally flawed, if not outright incorrect, and don't reflect real life trends of generative AI development and applications.
Gonna finish this comment in a few, please wait. Edit: there we go.
One by one, somewhat sorted from "Ok, I see it," to "What the hell?"
Wall of text
Generative AI is going to result in a hell of a lot of layoffs and will likely ruin people’s lives.
It's arguably already ruining many artists' lives, yeah. I haven't seen any confirmed mass layoffs in the game industry due to AI just yet. Some articles claimed that Rayark, developer of Deemo and Cytus, fired many of its artists, but they later denied this.
AI is going to revolutionize the game industry.
Maybe. If you're talking AI in general, it's already been doing so for a long time. Generative AI? Not more so than most other industries, and that's less than you'd expect.
AI is going to kill the game industry as it currently exists
I doubt such dramatic statements will turn true in time, unless you're very generous with how openly they can be interpreted.
Generative AI will lead to a lot of real-time effects and mechanics that are currently impossible, like endless quests that don’t feel hollow, realistic procedural generation that can convincingly create everything from random clutter to entire galaxies, true photorealistic graphics (look up gaussian splatting, it’s pretty cool), convincing real-time art filters (imagine a 3d game that looks like an animated Van Gogh painting), and so on.
There's a bit to unpack, here.
- With better hardware and more efficient models, I can see more generative AI being used for effects and mechanics, but I don't think we're seeing revolutionary uses anytime soon.
- While time could change this, model generation doesn't seem too promising compared to just paying good 3D artists. That said, they don't need to be perfect, good enough models would already be game (ha ha) changing.
- Endless quests that don't feel hollow... might be entirely beyond current generative AI technologies. Depends on what you mean by hollow.
Generative AI will eventually open the door to small groups of devs being able to compete with AAA releases on all metrics.
That's quite the bold statement. On some aspects, I'd be willing to hear you out, but on all metrics? That's no longer a problem of mere technology or scale, it's a matter of how many resources each one has available. Some gaps cannot be bridged, even by miraculous tech. For example, indies do not have the budget to license expensive actors (e.g. Call of Duty, Cyberpunk 2077), brands (e.g. racing games), and so on. GenAI will not change this. Hell, GenAI will certainly not pay for global advertising.
Generative AI will make studios with thousands of employees obsolete. This is a double-edged sword. Fewer employees means fewer ideas; but on the other side, you get a more accurate vision of what the director originally intended. Fewer employees also will also mean that you will likely have to be a genuinely creative person to get ahead, instead of someone who knows how to use Maya or Photoshop but is otherwise creatively bankrupt. Your contribution matters far more in a studio of <50 than it does in a studio of >5,000; as such, your creative skill will matter more.
Whoa, whoa, slow down, please.
Generative AI will make studios with thousands of employees obsolete.
Generative AI is failing to deliver significant gains to most industries. This article does a wonderful job of showing that GenAI is actually quite limited in its applications, and its benefits much smaller than a lot of people think. More importantly, it highlights how the market itself is widely starting to grasp this.
Fewer employees means fewer ideas; but on the other side, you get a more accurate vision of what the director originally intended.
Game development can't be simplified like this! Famously, the designers and artists for genre-defining game Dark Souls were given a lot of freedom in production at the request of director Hidetaka Miyazaki himself. Regardless of what you think of the results, including the diversity of other's visions... was the director's vision!
Fewer employees also will also mean that you will likely have to be a genuinely creative person to get ahead, instead of someone who knows how to use Maya or Photoshop but is otherwise creatively bankrupt. Your contribution matters far more in a studio of <50 than it does in a studio of >5,000; as such, your creative skill will matter more.
Again, that's assuming a lot and simplifying too much. I know companies that reduced their employee count, where what happened instead is that those capable of playing office politics remained, while workers who just diligently did their part got the boot. I'm not saying that's what always happens! But none of us can accurately predict exactly how large organizations will behave solely based on employee count.
A lot of people will have to be retrained because they will no longer be creative enough to make a living off of making games.
I admit, this is just a nitpick, but I don't like the way this is phrased. Designers still have their wisdom, artists are still creative, workers remain skilled. If hiring them is no longer advantageous due to financial incentives to adopt AI, that's not their fault for being insufficiently creative.
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Yeah, ultimately a lof of devs are trying to make "story generators" relying on the user's imagination to fill in the blanks, hence rimworld is so popular.
There's a business/technical model where "local" llms would kinda work for this too, if you set it up like the Kobold Horde. So the dev hosts a few GPU instances for GPUs that can't handle the local LLM, but users with beefy PCs also generate responses for other users (optionally, with a low priority) in a self hosted horde.
5Something like using a LLM to make actually unique side quests in a Skyrim-esque game could be interesting.
The side quest/bounty quest shit in something like Starfield was fucking awful because it was like, 5 of the same damn things. Something capable of making at least unique sounding quests would be a shockingly good use of the tech.
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Very good news for artists. AI image generation is founded upon art theft, and art theft is something that artists are not fond of, so it's really nice to see the developer being open about his respect to the artists who use the app!
5I mean, ok, it's not like anyone using Procreate is going to use AI generation in it anyway...
3a 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!
-4It 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.
8The “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.
6It is problematic just like the current IP laws are non congruent with AI generation.
But The cat's out of the bag nothing's going to stop it from happening.
We're going to need to figure out how to make it work
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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.
-7Built on a foundation of theft
Sums up all AI
-10That'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.
5