Procreate takes a stand against generative AI, vows to never incorporate the tech into its products | TechCrunch

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/19/procreate-takes-a-stand-against-generative-ai-vows-to-never-incorporate-the-tech-into-its-products/

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.

source

Comments

Sort:hotnew top

eager_eagle@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

CEO James Cuda

the irony

source
- Plopp@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I don’t trust them. They better fire him and hire a Jim Abacus.
  
  source
  - Gork@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The CEO should ideally have the exact same name as the company. Like Tim Apple.
    
    Or Sam Sung.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
- brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The more you buy, the more you save!
  
  source
net00@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Built on a foundation of theft

Sums up all AI

source
- Mirodir@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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?
  
  source
- PrinzKasper@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I assume you mean all generative AI? Because I don’t think AI that autonomously learns to play Super Mario is theft youtu.be/qv6UVOQ0F44
  
  source
- BumpingFuglies@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
  source
  - Clasm@ttrpg.network ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
  - gap_betweenus@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    With this logic photography is a painting, painted at an impossible high speed - but for some reasons we make a difference between something humans make and machines make.
    
    source
- ribhu@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
  source
- douglasg14b@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  No, it sums up a very specific type of AI…
  
  Blanket statement are dumb.
  
  source
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

source
- exocortex@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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?
  
  source
- Allero@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  This, over and over again.
  
  Going against AI is being a luddite, not aware of the core underlying issue.
  
  source
- Emmie@lemmings.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  What are the realistic and proven alternatives
  
  source
demesisx@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

source
- Allero@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  That’s heartwarming. Good luck to her! (and you)
  
  source
mindlight@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
While a honorable move, “never” doesn’t exist in a world based on quarterly financials…

source
MossyFeathers@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

source
- pycorax@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
  source
chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Never eh? Well someone won’t exist under the same name/promise in decade or two.

source
li10@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

source
- MossyFeathers@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Honestly, I think that…
  
  AI is going to revolutionize the game industry.
  
  AI is going to kill the game industry as it currently exists.
  
  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.
  
  Generative AI is going to result in a hell of a lot of layoffs and will likely ruin people’s lives.
  
  Generative AI will eventually open the door to small groups of devs being able to compete with AAA releases on all metrics.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  source
  - mke@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I’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.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
- brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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 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.
  
  source
flop_leash_973@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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.

source
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
So definitely gonna have AI baked in by next year.

source
Blaster_M@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I mean, ok, it’s not like anyone using Procreate is going to use AI generation in it anyway…

source
RobotToaster@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Didn’t krita say the same thing at one time?

source
- MossyFeathers@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I 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.
  
  source
- SynopsisTantilize@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  You can do that?
  
  source
  - greybeard@lemmy.one ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Generate images with self hosted models, or integrate it with art programs? Because yes to both.
    
    source
Corno@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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!

source
net00@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Built on a foundation of theft

Sums up all AI

source
- TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
  source