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.
Built on a foundation of theft
Sums up all AI
EDIT: meant all gen AI
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.
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.
While, yes it is not copy and paste in the literal sense, it does still have the capacity to outright copy the style of an artist’s work that was used to train it.
If teaching another artist’s work is already frowned upon when trying to pass the trace off as one’s own work, then there’s little difference when a computer does it more convincingly.
Maybe a bit off tangent here, since I’m not even sure if this is strictly possible, but if a generative system was only trained off of, say, only Picasso’s work, would you be able to pass the outputs off as Picasso pieces? Or would they be considered the work of the person writing a prompt or built the AI? What if the artist wasn’t Picasso but someone still alive, would they get a cut of the profits?
The outputs would be considered no one’s outputs as no copyright is afforded to AI general content.
That feels like it’s rather besides the point, innit? You’ve got AI companies showing off AI art and saying “look at what this model can do,” you’ve got entire communities on Lemmy and Reddit dedicated to posting AI art, and they’re all going “look at what I made with this AI, I’m so good at prompt engineering” as though they did all the work, and the millions of hours spent actually creating the art used to train the model gets no mention at all, much less any compensation or permission for their works to be used in the training. Sure does seem like people are passing AI art off as their own, even if they’re not claiming copyright.
I’m not sure how it could be besides the point, though it may not be entirely dispositive. I take ownership to be a question of who has a controlling and exclusionary right to something–in this case thats copyright. Copyright allows you to license these things and extract money for their use. If there is no copyright, there is no secure monetization (something companies using AI generated materials absolutely keep high in mind). The question was “who would own it” and I think it’s pretty clear cut who would own it. No one.
Built on a foundation of theft
Sums up all AI
Generative AI steals art.
Procreate’s customers are artists.
Stands to reason you don’t piss your customer base off.
Generative AI steals art.
No it doesn’t. Drop that repeated lie please
Lmao keep telling yourself that
Sure. I’ll keep telling others that too because I’m right
You are right, generally, generative AI pirates art and the rest of the content on the internet.
That is at least borderline more correct, but it’s still wrong. It learns using a neural network much like, but much simpler than, the one in your head
It doesn’t “learn” anything, its a database with linear algebra. Using anthropomorphic adjectives only helps to entrench this useless and wasteful technology to regular people.
Trying to redefine the word “learn” won;t help your cause either. Stop being a luddite and realise that it is neither useless not wasteful
Everyone loves increased work load and wow that’s a lot of power to… do what exactly.
You don’t need to resort to name calling, you could make a compelling argument instead…
I’m calling you a luddite because you’re being a luddite. AI is just a new medium, that’s all it is, you’re just scared of new technology just like how idiots were scared of photography a hundred and some years ago. You do not have an argument that holds any water because they were all made against photography, and many of them against pre-mixed paints before that!
Also I’m done arguing with anti-ai luddites because you are about as intractable as trump cultists. I’ll respond to a level or two of comments in good faith because someone else might see your nonsense and believe it but this deep it’s most likely you and me, and you’re not gonna be convinced of anything.
Stop being a luddite
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
Thanks. I try my best. 😊
