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.
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.
They’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.
Well, 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 profits 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.
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.