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

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.

net00 ,

Built on a foundation of theft

Sums up all AI

net00 ,

Built on a foundation of theft

Sums up all AI

demesisx ,
@demesisx@infosec.pub avatar

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.

chiisana ,
@chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net avatar

Never eh? Well someone won’t exist under the same name/promise in decade or two.

Imgonnatrythis ,

So definitely gonna have AI baked in by next year.

RobotToaster ,

Didn’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.

MossyFeathers ,

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.

SynopsisTantilize ,

You can do that?

greybeard ,

Generate images with self hosted models, or integrate it with art programs? Because yes to both.

li10 ,

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.

brucethemoose ,

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.

MossyFeathers ,

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.

mke ,

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.

MossyFeathers ,

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.

FaceDeer ,
@FaceDeer@fedia.io avatar

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.

mke ,

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.

pycorax ,

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.

eager_eagle ,
@eager_eagle@lemmy.world avatar

CEO James Cuda

the irony

Plopp ,

I don’t trust them. They better fire him and hire a Jim Abacus.

Gork ,

The CEO should ideally have the exact same name as the company. Like Tim Apple.

Or Sam Sung.

MossyFeathers ,

Doug Bowser of Nintendo springs to mind. Also Gary Bowser, the guy they used the US courts to make an example of.

Jerkface ,

Is that what he was saying in Mario 64? “So long, Gary Bowser!”

brucethemoose ,

The more you buy, the more you save!

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