661

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.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 144 points 1 month ago
[-] Plopp@lemmy.world 47 points 1 month ago

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

[-] Gork@lemm.ee 71 points 1 month ago

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

Or Sam Sung.

[-] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago

The more you buy, the more you save!

[-] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 55 points 1 month 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.

[-] exocortex@discuss.tchncs.de 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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?

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.

[-] Allero@lemmy.today 9 points 1 month ago

This, over and over again.

Going against AI is being a luddite, not aware of the core underlying issue.

load more comments (2 replies)
[-] demesisx@infosec.pub 45 points 1 month 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.

[-] Allero@lemmy.today 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

That's heartwarming. Good luck to her! (and you)

You're a great techno-parent

[-] demesisx@infosec.pub 10 points 1 month ago

Thanks. I try my best. 😊

[-] Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 month ago

I love Procreate very much buT WHY CAN NOT I MAKE A BÉZIER CURVE OR ADD TEXT ON MY IPAD PRO AAAA

[-] Aceticon@lemmy.world 45 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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?

[-] MashedTech@lemmy.world 46 points 1 month ago

They're all run on cloud, for commercial products.

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] TheRealKuni@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago

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.

load more comments (2 replies)
[-] net00@lemm.ee 31 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Built on a foundation of theft

Sums up all AI

EDIT: meant all gen AI

[-] Mirodir@discuss.tchncs.de 24 points 1 month 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?

load more comments (2 replies)
[-] PrinzKasper@feddit.org 19 points 1 month ago

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

[-] SqueakyBeaver@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 points 1 month ago

Nintendo probably thinks it's theft lol

[-] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago

No, it sums up a very specific type of AI...

Blanket statement are dumb.

[-] BumpingFuglies@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 month 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.

load more comments (13 replies)
[-] ribhu@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month 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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] mindlight@lemm.ee 30 points 1 month ago

While a honorable move, "never" doesn't exist in a world based on quarterly financials...

[-] Blackmist@feddit.uk 28 points 1 month ago

Generative AI steals art.

Procreate's customers are artists.

Stands to reason you don't piss your customer base off.

load more comments (24 replies)
[-] chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net 12 points 1 month ago

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

[-] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 month ago

So definitely gonna have AI baked in by next year.

[-] flop_leash_973@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month 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.

[-] Corno@lemm.ee 5 points 1 month 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!

[-] RobotToaster@mander.xyz 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

load more comments (2 replies)
[-] li10@feddit.uk 5 points 1 month 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.

[-] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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/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.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
661 points (96.7% liked)

Technology

58586 readers
3893 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS