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
The CEO should ideally have the exact same name as the company. Like Tim Apple.
Or Sam Sung.
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.
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.
I 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.
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?
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
Honestly most of what I’ve learned about how to use SD comes from seeing what other people have done and trying to tweak or adjust to get a feel for the tool and its various models. Spend some time on a site like CivitAI to both see what can be done and to find models. I’m very much a noob and cannot produce results nearly as impressive as a good chunk of what I find on there.
The most important thing I’ve learned is how much generative AI, especially SD, is just a tool. And people with more creativity and a better understanding of the tool use it better, just like every other tool.
I do like the idea of using it in GIMP as an answer to Adobe’s Firefly.
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.
That’s heartwarming. Good luck to her! (and you)
You’re a great techno-parent
Built on a foundation of theft
Sums up all AI
EDIT: meant all gen 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.
I trained the generative models all from scratch. Pretrained models are not that helpful when it’s important to accurately capture very domain specific features.
One of the classifiers I tried was based on zoobot with a custom head. Assuming the publications around zoobot are truthful, it was trained exclusively on similar data from a multitude of different sky surveys.
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
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.
This is absolutely wrong about how something like SD generates outputs. Relationships between atomic parts of an image are encoded into the model from across all training inputs. There is no copying and pasting. Now whether you think extracting these relationships from images you can otherwise access constitutes some sort of theft is one thing, but characterizing generative models as copying and pasting scraped image pieces is just utterly incorrect.
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.
Amusingly, every argument against ai art was made against photography over a hundred years ago, and I bet you own a camera - possibly even on the device you wrote your stupid comment on!
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.
