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Designed by Australian agency Savage Interactive, the digital illustration app Procreate was launched in 2011 to embrace one new wave of tech change: pill computing, particularly, the Apple iPad. However now its CEO James Cuda is vehemently rejecting one other huge technological shift: generative AI.
“I really fucking hate generative AI,” Cuda mentioned in a video launched on the official Procreate account on the social community X final evening. “I don’t like what’s happening in the industry and I don’t like what it’s doing to artists. We’re not going to be introducing any generative AI into our products.”
Cuda additional defined his stance: “Our products are always designed and developed with the idea that a human will be creating something…we believe we’re on the right path supporting human creativity.”
As well as, Procreate posted a brand new webpage at Procreate.com/ai that additional outlines its commitments to not utilizing gen AI for its merchandise and states:
“Generative AI is ripping the humanity out of issues. Constructed on a basis of theft, the expertise is steering us towards a barren future. We predict machine studying is a compelling expertise with a whole lot of benefit, however the path generative AI is on is mistaken for us.
We’re right here for the people. We’re not chasing a expertise that could be a ethical risk to our biggest jewel: human creativity. On this technological rush, this may make us an exception or appear susceptible to being left behind. However we see this highway much less travelled because the extra thrilling and fruitful one for our neighborhood.“
The newest salvo in escalating confrontation between gen AI proponents and detractors
The anti-gen AI place has already been applauded by some artists on X and different social platforms, who, like Cuda, view the tech or lots of the main software program purposes that leverage it — resembling on-line picture era providers from the likes of Midjourney, OpenAI, Magnific, Stability AI, even X itself by way of Grok 2 — as having exploited or stolen from artists by scraping their works to coach fashions on them with out permission, compensation, or consent.
Procreate’s statements could align it with some gen-AI important artists, however it’s for my part, a bit of odd and inconsistent of a stand to take for a model that readily embraced different disruptive tech — resembling touchscreens and styluses and pixels — that additionally competes with extra conventional artwork strategies (e.g. portray or drawing on paper).
As well as, the concept that by rejecting gen AI, Procreate is supporting “human creativity” is a bit of little bit of a straw man argument to me, since people additionally nonetheless have to enter the prompts and modify them — generally many instances — to create photos with gen AI purposes as nicely. Even within the case of gen AI software program, people are nonetheless driving it.
It actually seems to be a calculated and savvy advertising transfer on Procreate’s half to grab the area left behind by different rival illustration and creation software program resembling Canva and Adobe Artistic Cloud, each of which have rushed to introduce a flurry of gen AI options to the criticism of some customers.
Procreate’s statements mark the newest and starkest instance of how the rhetorical battle traces are being drawn round gen AI — with some defending and embracing the tech whereas others accuse it of being ethically, morally, and even legally unsound because of the sources and processes used to acquire its coaching information.
Awaiting authorized rulings to make clear legality of knowledge scraping and coaching
Only a week in the past, some artists have been celebrating as a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit towards Midjourney, Runway, and Stability AI was allowed to maneuver ahead towards discovery.
The choose has but to rule decisively within the case whether or not gen AI firms’ mass scraping and use of artworks on-line — together with, possible many copyrighted artworks — constitutes infringement. This even if Google and different firms beforehand scraped the online en masse for search indices and databases used for industrial merchandise, with out a lot pushback from the identical group of artists and creators.
In the end, it’s clear that even because the gen AI age wares on, there are a lot of maintain outs and people immune to embracing what they view as exploitative and morally compromised new tech — they usually’re not afraid of calling it out as such.
