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Procreate's anti-AI pledge attracts praise from digital creatives

136 points by TheCleric 2y ago

CuriousCosmic 2y ago
Good. If your customers vehemently don't want the feature in your product (with the exception of maybe security/privacy features), don't add it. If you still really want to make that feature, make it a plugin or application that is completely separate so that people who want it can use and people who don't can pretend it does not exist and never even have to look at it or think about it.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Jetbrains was sort of close to doing this. But ofc it had to be in your face when you update to a version supporting it, and prodding you to opt in. May have worked if it wasn't a paid add-on.
  - dagmx 2y ago
    Jetbrains have two forms of LLM integration. One is local and free, the other is cloud and paid for. Both are opt in.
marban 2y ago
Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41291082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41291082
- metadat 2y ago
  No discussion == no dupe. It sucks for the losing submitter, but them's the breaks. In this case it's a little odd, are both links exactly the same?
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    timing is everything when posting. 9PM EST isnt the best time to post either, but it's better than 10AM when people are just arriving at work (or heading to work the further west you go).
jaimex2 2y ago
It's not like it was ever going to even if it wanted. Smart marketing move.
- Groxx 2y ago
  iOS allows AI generators in the app store, and Procreate is a very successful and actively developed app. They absolutely could. They are choosing not to.
  - vsuperpower2021 2y ago
    You'd think it would too since apple openly advertises how good the newer hardware is at AI. No idea where the above user got the idea that they had no ability to do that.
    - jaimex2 2y ago
      Apple can advertise whatever they like. Not that it'll change any iSheep minds but it takes around 30 seconds to generate an image on the best iOS hardware and blows through battery. So they would have to do an online implementation like every other shitty AI app.
      - Groxx 2y ago
        And... how exactly would that prevent them from doing so?
        jaimex2 2y ago
        Other than being a crap experience Apple would likely reject the app update under the app responsiveness, performance and resource usage guidelines.
        Groxx 2y ago
        Uh huh. Just like all the other apps doing exactly that, many of which have many more installs than Procreate. I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that Apple doesn't allow this. There's overwhelming evidence that they do.
parentheses 2y ago
This is a very fuzzy line. When does math become "AI"? Is anti-aliasing AI? Is line smoothing AI? Which filters are/aren't AI? This is a PR stunt to differentiate against AI heavy art tools.
- aaomidi 2y ago
  Tbh I’d say it’s pretty obvious what people consider GPTs.
  - wmf 2y ago
    I hate to be that guy but GANs and diffusion models aren't generative pretrained transformers (GPTs). The rule I use is that a system that was trained on input data is AI and algorithms that aren't trained are not AI.
- eastbound 2y ago
  > When does math become "AI"? When it uses your data to suggest other people — I think that’s what people are afraid of.
- b800h 2y ago
  In this case, when it's backed by a data set based on other people's work.
- camillomiller 2y ago
  They explicitly say they love machine learning and deep learning. This is against gen AI and stealing people’s work
ronsor 2y ago
People aren't looking at this from a business perspective. Right now a decent subset of artists hate AI, so it makes sense to try and target that market if it's large enough. If artists suddenly started loving AI tomorrow, this pledge would be out the window. It's just business and marketing - nothing more, nothing less.
- kshmir 2y ago
  Is that wrong?
  - ronsor 2y ago
    I find it slightly annoying and dishonest to present it as a moral position, but overall it's nothing that other businesses haven't already been doing. It's just not a big deal.
    - camillomiller 2y ago
      But it IS a moral question. As it is IMMORAL to just go and steal content to train AI and then let the lawyers to take csre of it later
      - ronsor 2y ago
        AI is not "stealing content" and it is not immoral. This is literally the same line from record companies and Hollywood during the 80s and 90s, and they were rightfully mocked then. It is baffling how so many people are just repeating it now.
        bugglebeetle 2y ago
        Yes, illustrators are notorious IP rentiers like the Hollywood studios and the RIAA. It’s the tech billionaires that are the victims of their vile, unjust monopoly tactics. These are coherent thoughts that demonstrate why it’s a good idea to argue from analogies.
oefrha 2y ago
> The announcement has already attracted widespread praise from creatives online I love how the evidence for this is three tweets from Internet randos. I’m sure I can also find three tweets condemning this from “creatives online” in no time at all; if not I’ll just post it myself. Why do we need these useless “‘many’ twitter users liked blah” news, again? Just tell me “blah happened” and stop there.
- deely3 2y ago
  30k likes, 2k comments is not an evidence?
- BuyMyBitcoins 2y ago
  “Widespread” is quite the weasel word. I have no idea what criteria the author used to justify using it.
  - vouaobrasil 2y ago
    > “Widespread” is quite the weasel word. I have no idea what criteria the author used to justify using it. Well, there's a huge backlash against generative AI amongst creatives. At least amongst many pro photographers and illustrators. Check the Krita forum also. It may not be formally documented but many people hate generative AI. I am a pro photographer and hate it immensely. Many people I know of hate AI as well. I work for one of the largest independent photography sites on the net (Photography Life) and all of us dislike AI and have even put "AI-free" in our logo. Many of us want AI to die.
    - squigz 2y ago
      This is pretty funny to hear coming from a photographer, considering photography had a very similar reaction from other "creatives"
      - vouaobrasil 2y ago
        Analogy is one of the poorest forms of reasoning.
seydor 2y ago
That's people's passive aggressive way to tell you "we want more from AI"
renewiltord 2y ago
My wife’s a graphic designer and now creative director. She uses Dall-E for all sorts of stuff. Our wedding, interior design, logo for our other company, fixing up our photographs. Her work as an illustrator has been on the front of the NYSE, and on Muni buses, and up here in our home. So, sure, there are lots of people who hate diffusion models but there are lots of people who enjoy working with them too. Online spaces attract the hate, but I have to say that the tools are good!
minkles 2y ago
I am definitely behind this. Generative AI changed the market. It's impossible to find someone decent now among the generative AI users who churn out stuff which is absolutely objectively shite. I've got a small network of people who I know who don't use it fortunately and they are being screwed as well because they can't compete even though their work is at least two orders of magnitude better quality. The worst bit is the generative AI users push the same perspective which is unique and bespoke service from individual designers. You don't know it's generative AI until the paid for samples turn up. It's a disaster. A race to the bottom. Factory farmed content.
chrisMyzel 2y ago
(This will lead nowhere..) but hearing someone claim theft, which is a well defined term, usually involving physically taking something from someone is so much of a statement like confused billionaires claiming a "woke mind virus". Have we left the ability behind to make informed discussions?
112233 2y ago
Interesting to contrast this with the attitude many photographers have to Topaz Labs. That thing makes out of whole cloth 90% of image data, and the model doing it is trained on who knows what, yet the result is "I sharpened my photos in post using topaz". Similar with using gen AI inpainting for object removal. It's all "post" for many photographers. Yet for artists using gen ai for background, detailing or something similar is a dark side.
ckw 2y ago
These people are so sure they occupy the moral high ground, but they do not. If the trend continues it will be possible for anyone to materialize their artistic vision with great fidelity. I’m sure there are countless people who would have contributed culturally significant works in the past but for a lack of time or money or peculiar talents requisite for the physical production of such works. At the core of most objections to generative art is some combination of mercantile fear, distress at sunk costs, or the loss of one’s specialness. While all are understandable, a righteous person would weigh their own loss against society’s gain, and finding the balance so lopsidedly in favor of society, make of themselves a sacrifice.
- jurip 2y ago
  Right now, viewing the AI slop slowly filling the web, it's hard to see the gain, though. It's possible things will improve, but it's just as possible that guiding the tools will take skills most people will never master, just as they never mastered the non-automated drawing tools.
- manuellabor 2y ago
  >it will be possible for anyone to materialize their artistic vision with great fidelity This has already been possible for such a long time, and with the advent of internet the amount of free and easily accessible learning resources has grown massively. All you need to do is put in the effort to learn. As for money, pen and paper is less expensive than most computer hardware, i think. It's weird how in most fields not having 'talent' (whatever that is even supposed to mean) is not considered a valid excuse for not going through the effort of learning but for some reason when it comes to art, it gets a pass.
  - klabb3 2y ago
    > It's weird how in most fields not having 'talent' (whatever that is even supposed to mean) is not considered a valid excuse for not going through the effort of learning but for some reason when it comes to art, it gets a pass. Oh but you don’t understand the grand conspiracy of the privileged artist class who use their talent they were unfairly born with to gatekeep access to art and drive up prices on their labor. AI companies who ingest their works as part of their supply chain are simply democratizing it so the rest of us can enjoy it. For a small fee of course, to redistribute artists' obscene wealth into the hands of the struggling AI corporations (public services are not free). And the vision can become real, where people with excellent visual taste but no birth talent, can finally attach a cyberpunk-robot-holding-the-earth concept art into their LLM generated blog posts.
Havoc 2y ago
That’s going to be incredibly painful to walk back. I don’t think such a hard stance is wise given the general trend. Some level AI tech is actually useful even if you don’t go all in
- wmf 2y ago
  Nah, they can just call it something like Protelligence once they decide to introduce it.
bulbosaur123 2y ago
Ah, looks like they're taking the whole "organic code" angle. Looks like a new meta on the menu, boys.
yowzadave 2y ago
The band Queen had a prominent note, "No Synthesizers!", on the sleeve of all of their albums from Queen II through A Day At The Races. Presumably it was good branding to emphasize that they were an authentic rock band. By the 80's, however, the initial synthesizer backlash had worn off, and the technology had improved to the point that they were a universal piece of studio equipment...and one that Queen used heavily in their later albums. It seems likely that acceptance of AI technology will follow a similar pattern.
- free_bip 2y ago
  What makes you think that AI art generators getting "better" (for whatever definition of better you see fit) will make them less unpopular? They're not unpopular because they give poor quality output.
  - Ukv 2y ago
    > for whatever definition of better you see fit IMO the important sense of "better" will be good integrations - making various ML-based tools convenient and common to use as part of a workflow. We're all biased towards morally justifying what we're already doing. Those against AI still tend to use tools like Google Translate (trained on translators' work, partially displacing their jobs) and when asked will often give reasons why it's different and other AI tools are worse; ultimately I think that's ad-hoc rationale downstream from the fact they were already using Google Translate (because it's useful and baked into their browser) rather than it being reasoning that they actually used to determine whether to use Google Translate and which would need addressing for other ML tools to become accepted. If someone starts using, say initially, ML-based background removal and upscaling as part of their workflow (because it's demonstrably useful and easily accessible in their editor), I think they'd equally start justifying that.
  - blargey 2y ago
    Calling current AI output “quality” belies a limited understanding of the requirements people have of generated images. The technology in its current state just has no practical relevance outside of a narrow slice of the most low-requirement image needs. Stock photos for blog thumbnails, Kinkade-ian “whatever the tasteless client wants to pay for” slop (minus any claim to distinct style), plus a certain class of fungible Photoshop tasks (change the color, remove the object, and some subset of photobashing). It lacks the consistency and fine-grained control to support works where the primary goals include artistic expression - you cannot express what you cannot specify. Or worse, prompters don’t even realize how many artistic decisions they’ve delegated to noise. The same limitations also prevent it from being competitive in the most labor-intensive image-making fields where any assistance would be appreciated, like comic panels or videogame sprite sheets. Any attempt to leverage it for such tasks requires too much hand-holding, compromise, and retouching to provide a real alternative to human labor.

136 points by TheCleric 2y ago

Good. If your customers vehemently don't want the feature in your product (with the exception of maybe security/privacy features), don't add it. If you still really want to make that feature, make it a plugin or application that is completely separate so that people who want it can use and people who don't can pretend it does not exist and never even have to look at it or think about it.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
Jetbrains was sort of close to doing this. But ofc it had to be in your face when you update to a version supporting it, and prodding you to opt in. May have worked if it wasn't a paid add-on.
- dagmx 2y ago
  Jetbrains have two forms of LLM integration. One is local and free, the other is cloud and paid for. Both are opt in.

marban 2y ago

Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41291082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41291082

metadat 2y ago
No discussion == no dupe. It sucks for the losing submitter, but them's the breaks. In this case it's a little odd, are both links exactly the same?
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  timing is everything when posting. 9PM EST isnt the best time to post either, but it's better than 10AM when people are just arriving at work (or heading to work the further west you go).

jaimex2 2y ago

It's not like it was ever going to even if it wanted. Smart marketing move.

Groxx 2y ago
iOS allows AI generators in the app store, and Procreate is a very successful and actively developed app. They absolutely could. They are choosing not to.
- vsuperpower2021 2y ago
  You'd think it would too since apple openly advertises how good the newer hardware is at AI. No idea where the above user got the idea that they had no ability to do that.
  - jaimex2 2y ago
    Apple can advertise whatever they like. Not that it'll change any iSheep minds but it takes around 30 seconds to generate an image on the best iOS hardware and blows through battery. So they would have to do an online implementation like every other shitty AI app.
    - Groxx 2y ago
      And... how exactly would that prevent them from doing so?
      - jaimex2 2y ago
        Other than being a crap experience Apple would likely reject the app update under the app responsiveness, performance and resource usage guidelines.
        Groxx 2y ago
        Uh huh. Just like all the other apps doing exactly that, many of which have many more installs than Procreate. I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that Apple doesn't allow this. There's overwhelming evidence that they do.

parentheses 2y ago

This is a very fuzzy line. When does math become "AI"? Is anti-aliasing AI? Is line smoothing AI? Which filters are/aren't AI? This is a PR stunt to differentiate against AI heavy art tools.

aaomidi 2y ago
Tbh I’d say it’s pretty obvious what people consider GPTs.
- wmf 2y ago
  I hate to be that guy but GANs and diffusion models aren't generative pretrained transformers (GPTs). The rule I use is that a system that was trained on input data is AI and algorithms that aren't trained are not AI.
eastbound 2y ago
> When does math become "AI"? When it uses your data to suggest other people — I think that’s what people are afraid of.
b800h 2y ago
In this case, when it's backed by a data set based on other people's work.
camillomiller 2y ago
They explicitly say they love machine learning and deep learning. This is against gen AI and stealing people’s work

ronsor 2y ago

People aren't looking at this from a business perspective. Right now a decent subset of artists hate AI, so it makes sense to try and target that market if it's large enough. If artists suddenly started loving AI tomorrow, this pledge would be out the window. It's just business and marketing - nothing more, nothing less.

kshmir 2y ago
Is that wrong?
- ronsor 2y ago
  I find it slightly annoying and dishonest to present it as a moral position, but overall it's nothing that other businesses haven't already been doing. It's just not a big deal.
  - camillomiller 2y ago
    But it IS a moral question. As it is IMMORAL to just go and steal content to train AI and then let the lawyers to take csre of it later
    - ronsor 2y ago
      AI is not "stealing content" and it is not immoral. This is literally the same line from record companies and Hollywood during the 80s and 90s, and they were rightfully mocked then. It is baffling how so many people are just repeating it now.
      - bugglebeetle 2y ago
        Yes, illustrators are notorious IP rentiers like the Hollywood studios and the RIAA. It’s the tech billionaires that are the victims of their vile, unjust monopoly tactics. These are coherent thoughts that demonstrate why it’s a good idea to argue from analogies.

oefrha 2y ago

> The announcement has already attracted widespread praise from creatives online I love how the evidence for this is three tweets from Internet randos. I’m sure I can also find three tweets condemning this from “creatives online” in no time at all; if not I’ll just post it myself. Why do we need these useless “‘many’ twitter users liked blah” news, again? Just tell me “blah happened” and stop there.

deely3 2y ago
30k likes, 2k comments is not an evidence?
BuyMyBitcoins 2y ago
“Widespread” is quite the weasel word. I have no idea what criteria the author used to justify using it.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  > “Widespread” is quite the weasel word. I have no idea what criteria the author used to justify using it. Well, there's a huge backlash against generative AI amongst creatives. At least amongst many pro photographers and illustrators. Check the Krita forum also. It may not be formally documented but many people hate generative AI. I am a pro photographer and hate it immensely. Many people I know of hate AI as well. I work for one of the largest independent photography sites on the net (Photography Life) and all of us dislike AI and have even put "AI-free" in our logo. Many of us want AI to die.
  - squigz 2y ago
    This is pretty funny to hear coming from a photographer, considering photography had a very similar reaction from other "creatives"
    - vouaobrasil 2y ago
      Analogy is one of the poorest forms of reasoning.

seydor 2y ago

That's people's passive aggressive way to tell you "we want more from AI"

renewiltord 2y ago

My wife’s a graphic designer and now creative director. She uses Dall-E for all sorts of stuff. Our wedding, interior design, logo for our other company, fixing up our photographs. Her work as an illustrator has been on the front of the NYSE, and on Muni buses, and up here in our home. So, sure, there are lots of people who hate diffusion models but there are lots of people who enjoy working with them too. Online spaces attract the hate, but I have to say that the tools are good!

minkles 2y ago

I am definitely behind this. Generative AI changed the market. It's impossible to find someone decent now among the generative AI users who churn out stuff which is absolutely objectively shite. I've got a small network of people who I know who don't use it fortunately and they are being screwed as well because they can't compete even though their work is at least two orders of magnitude better quality. The worst bit is the generative AI users push the same perspective which is unique and bespoke service from individual designers. You don't know it's generative AI until the paid for samples turn up. It's a disaster. A race to the bottom. Factory farmed content.

chrisMyzel 2y ago

(This will lead nowhere..) but hearing someone claim theft, which is a well defined term, usually involving physically taking something from someone is so much of a statement like confused billionaires claiming a "woke mind virus". Have we left the ability behind to make informed discussions?

112233 2y ago

Interesting to contrast this with the attitude many photographers have to Topaz Labs. That thing makes out of whole cloth 90% of image data, and the model doing it is trained on who knows what, yet the result is "I sharpened my photos in post using topaz". Similar with using gen AI inpainting for object removal. It's all "post" for many photographers. Yet for artists using gen ai for background, detailing or something similar is a dark side.

ckw 2y ago

These people are so sure they occupy the moral high ground, but they do not. If the trend continues it will be possible for anyone to materialize their artistic vision with great fidelity. I’m sure there are countless people who would have contributed culturally significant works in the past but for a lack of time or money or peculiar talents requisite for the physical production of such works. At the core of most objections to generative art is some combination of mercantile fear, distress at sunk costs, or the loss of one’s specialness. While all are understandable, a righteous person would weigh their own loss against society’s gain, and finding the balance so lopsidedly in favor of society, make of themselves a sacrifice.

jurip 2y ago
Right now, viewing the AI slop slowly filling the web, it's hard to see the gain, though. It's possible things will improve, but it's just as possible that guiding the tools will take skills most people will never master, just as they never mastered the non-automated drawing tools.
manuellabor 2y ago
>it will be possible for anyone to materialize their artistic vision with great fidelity This has already been possible for such a long time, and with the advent of internet the amount of free and easily accessible learning resources has grown massively. All you need to do is put in the effort to learn. As for money, pen and paper is less expensive than most computer hardware, i think. It's weird how in most fields not having 'talent' (whatever that is even supposed to mean) is not considered a valid excuse for not going through the effort of learning but for some reason when it comes to art, it gets a pass.
- klabb3 2y ago
  > It's weird how in most fields not having 'talent' (whatever that is even supposed to mean) is not considered a valid excuse for not going through the effort of learning but for some reason when it comes to art, it gets a pass. Oh but you don’t understand the grand conspiracy of the privileged artist class who use their talent they were unfairly born with to gatekeep access to art and drive up prices on their labor. AI companies who ingest their works as part of their supply chain are simply democratizing it so the rest of us can enjoy it. For a small fee of course, to redistribute artists' obscene wealth into the hands of the struggling AI corporations (public services are not free). And the vision can become real, where people with excellent visual taste but no birth talent, can finally attach a cyberpunk-robot-holding-the-earth concept art into their LLM generated blog posts.

Havoc 2y ago

That’s going to be incredibly painful to walk back. I don’t think such a hard stance is wise given the general trend. Some level AI tech is actually useful even if you don’t go all in

wmf 2y ago
Nah, they can just call it something like Protelligence once they decide to introduce it.

bulbosaur123 2y ago

Ah, looks like they're taking the whole "organic code" angle. Looks like a new meta on the menu, boys.

yowzadave 2y ago

The band Queen had a prominent note, "No Synthesizers!", on the sleeve of all of their albums from Queen II through A Day At The Races. Presumably it was good branding to emphasize that they were an authentic rock band. By the 80's, however, the initial synthesizer backlash had worn off, and the technology had improved to the point that they were a universal piece of studio equipment...and one that Queen used heavily in their later albums. It seems likely that acceptance of AI technology will follow a similar pattern.

free_bip 2y ago
What makes you think that AI art generators getting "better" (for whatever definition of better you see fit) will make them less unpopular? They're not unpopular because they give poor quality output.
- Ukv 2y ago
  > for whatever definition of better you see fit IMO the important sense of "better" will be good integrations - making various ML-based tools convenient and common to use as part of a workflow. We're all biased towards morally justifying what we're already doing. Those against AI still tend to use tools like Google Translate (trained on translators' work, partially displacing their jobs) and when asked will often give reasons why it's different and other AI tools are worse; ultimately I think that's ad-hoc rationale downstream from the fact they were already using Google Translate (because it's useful and baked into their browser) rather than it being reasoning that they actually used to determine whether to use Google Translate and which would need addressing for other ML tools to become accepted. If someone starts using, say initially, ML-based background removal and upscaling as part of their workflow (because it's demonstrably useful and easily accessible in their editor), I think they'd equally start justifying that.
- blargey 2y ago
  Calling current AI output “quality” belies a limited understanding of the requirements people have of generated images. The technology in its current state just has no practical relevance outside of a narrow slice of the most low-requirement image needs. Stock photos for blog thumbnails, Kinkade-ian “whatever the tasteless client wants to pay for” slop (minus any claim to distinct style), plus a certain class of fungible Photoshop tasks (change the color, remove the object, and some subset of photobashing). It lacks the consistency and fine-grained control to support works where the primary goals include artistic expression - you cannot express what you cannot specify. Or worse, prompters don’t even realize how many artistic decisions they’ve delegated to noise. The same limitations also prevent it from being competitive in the most labor-intensive image-making fields where any assistance would be appreciated, like comic panels or videogame sprite sheets. Any attempt to leverage it for such tasks requires too much hand-holding, compromise, and retouching to provide a real alternative to human labor.