iPad Illustration App Procreate Condemns Generative AI

[Vulkan]

I don't blame them. Everything is being dumbed down so anyone can call themself an "artist" or "content creator."

I applaud them for making that stand, its good to see someone not going with the masses... However, creativity comes in all sorts of forms, and even promptgramming requires knowledge and creativity to create things. I remember not being able to draw for ****, with a pencil, but dominating digital design and 3D work.

Photographers said the same thing about Adobe Photoshop 1.0 when it first came out... so lets not mock who uses what for creativity just because you dont understand what can be done with it.

 

[wonderings]

Finally a salient argument with good points! So how does Protease factor into your equation here? Is it just a digital brush, or is it an merely an "artificial" shortcut used by artists less talented with an analog brush, easel, and paint? Is Protease different from Generative AI in kind or merely in degree?

I have never used Procreate, I am in the graphics industry and use Adobe CC daily and it is how I make my living. Protease is just a tool akin to a brush but digital. Digital art is not my cup of tea personally, but I can still appreciate the mastery of learning an application and what that then lets you create. I used to peruse a forum called CGI talk (gone now), it was CGI created art and character models, nothing I would hang on my wall, but some incredible stuff there. Some were pros in various industries like video games and animation. I do prefer the physical when it comes to art, not something you can share and send around. There is only one original painting, the rest are copies. With digital there is nothing like that, it is infinite and in some ways that devalues it to me. When there is only 1 we put more value on things. No art collector is going to be buying a digital file that sell in his art gallery when that file could be all over the internet with ease. Only seeing Procreate through their website they do appear to rely on the skill of the designer for everything, just tools to make things that would have been way more complicated before.

 

[wonderings]

A trio of art made by a monkey was sold for 25000USD. So… Art is just about anything.🤷🏼

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/c...old-thousands-will-solo-show-december-1671976

I would take art made by a monkey over AI any day of the week. At least there is something behind it, a story, though nothing all that compelling to me be it a monkey or a painting elephant. This does bring about a bigger question, can art really be just anything? A documentary I really like by Sir Roger Scrutin entitled "Why Beauty Matters" is worth a watch. BBC pulled it and owns the rights to it but will not distribute it for some reason.

 

[Stella]

This is not Generative AI.

Oh you’re correct - creating material. Such as pictures.

Lost the distinction between that and regular AI ( ChatGPT et al )

 

[victorvictoria]

I have never used Procreate, I am in the graphics industry and use Adobe CC daily and it is how I make my living. Protease is just a tool akin to a brush but digital. Digital art is not my cup of tea personally, but I can still appreciate the mastery of learning an application and what that then lets you create. I used to peruse a forum called CGI talk (gone now), it was CGI created art and character models, nothing I would hang on my wall, but some incredible stuff there. Some were pros in various industries like video games and animation. I do prefer the physical when it comes to art, not something you can share and send around. There is only one original painting, the rest are copies. With digital there is nothing like that, it is infinite and in some ways that devalues it to me. When there is only 1 we put more value on things. No art collector is going to be buying a digital file that sell in his art gallery when that file could be all over the internet with ease. Only seeing Procreate through their website they do appear to rely on the skill of the designer for everything, just tools to make things that would have been way more complicated before.

Fair enough, but couple cognitive dissonances. When you state that 1) You are in the graphics industry and use Adobe CC daily, and 2) Digital art is not your cup of tea. I can only interpret that to mean that your job is not your cup of tea. I can concur. I worked in the graphics industry too, on the printing side, and used Adobe's big three (Indesign, Photoshop and Illustrator) daily. Mostly to correct submissions from clients' graphic "artists" to actually make them possible to print! However, I didn't love what I was doing, and the deadline pressures of the printing trade finally got to me and I had to sell the biz. But Apple found value in my 20 years of experience, and put me to work. That was my cup of tea, and the best 12 years of my 50+ year employment history!

So if your job doesn't move you, I say move on.

As for the notion that having only one original copy makes an artwork more valuable, true enough. From a strictly dollars and cents viewpoint. When I was in college, there was at least one MC Escher print in every dorm room and apartment. Did that make them less valuable than the original print? I'd argue that they were MORE valuable, in the sense that anyone could have something they admired and had meaning for them, no matter that none of us could ever afford an original Escher drawing! If those prints didn't exist, we'd never have even heard of him, much less seen any of his work. Money is not the only measure of value.

 

[applepotato666]

I wonder if that is why companies like Procreate and Serif Affinity are staying away from AI at the moment. It is a one time cash influx and in order to offer generative AI features they either need to be buying it from another company on a monthly basis or host and run it all themselves which would be expensive, especially with no monthly revenue coming in.

100%. It’s a stance largely taken due to the business model. They’d get major backlash from investors if they didn’t hop on it and charge extra under a subscription model.

 

[Tdude96]

Serious questions from someone wanting to have a better understanding.

How has it been stolen?

Was it uploaded to the web and data mined in some sort of way?

Was it stolen directly off someone's device without their knowledge?

How much of the art being generated is actually reproducing the original referenced artwork?

I know this is mostly a conversation about AI generated art, but what about AI generated text? If I ask ChatGPT to create a list of the Top 10 things forum members love about Apple and use MacRumors public forum as a source, are you saying that it will steal from an article (whether it be MacRumors or somewhere else) rather than reference the public comments of forum members and formulate a list of its own? Because my understanding of Generative AI is that it is looking at multiple sources and formulating its own response based on public data. Wouldn't it be doing the same with generative art?

If the generative AI is trained on stolen art, and/or is reproducing stolen art, then I agree that is wrong and shouldn't be supported.

The word "stolen" is doing a lot of heavy lifting work when people use it as a pejorative against generative AI.

Many of the first generative AI models were trained using publicly viewable online data that was available for anyone with Internet access to look at and learn from. In the case of images and video, some models also included stock data, as well as purpose-made training data. Many newer models are trained with contributed data instead, often large private (not publicly available) libraries, such as the talk of Apple wanting large organizations like the NYT to allow archive access for text model training.

"How much of the art being generated is actually reproducing the original referenced artwork?"
On the surface, no way to tell, but delving in I'd suggest effectively zero. I suppose with careful prompting it might be possible to get close to some artwork that was originally used for training. But reproducing even a small piece of data a model was trained on is virtually impossible. The exception for some models being certain pieces of control data that were used basically for training QC, but there aren't a lot of those, and such reconstructions aren't perfect. There seems to be some idea that generative AI somehow stores a vast library of all the data it was exposed to during training, just compressed really really really extra small so vast collections of photos, video and text can fit inside a few GB of storage, and the AI kind of shakes it all up and spits something derivative out that's just a jumble of pre-existing work patched together into a somewhat coherent whole. Training datasets can be hundreds of terabytes in size. A quick search shows a popular one is around 340 TB of data. While one of the most popular generative AI image models is around 8 GB. That's some exceptional (impossible) compression if that training data is hanging out somewhere in the model.

 

[Virinprew]

This sentiment right here is just baffling (you're not the only one making it in this thread)

Why must anyone learn to take advantage? Why must anyone that has already dedicated their labor toward art take advantage of a tool that is not pushed by artists but by executives in the tech industry trying to sell a product?

This is the push back of gen AI - that people are trying to replace the labor of art with a factory line style of output - and rightfully so.

I’m not disregarding the labor that artist has exerted over the years. I’m saying that it’s one more tool you can use. It is here now. It exists. And people will use it.
Heck, it’s already dominating in the coding world. Everyone uses it. I use it to help me work or I will get left behind. So deal with it.

 

[Virinprew]

Like all the companies flat out stealing to train their AI models?
That kind of "taking advantage"?

As if you haven’t learnt by looking at examples yourselves. Can you stop everyone from using it? The playing field has changed whether you like it or not.
It’s not ideal but everything is not ideal.

 

[knowsuchpeace]

The pro-genAI people in this thread genuinely do not understand what people use Procreate for. It's a straightforward one-time purchase illustration app. There isn't any room for generative AI slop in the app. There is no financial incentive for the Procreate team to add a monthly payment to their app in order to finance a feature that users of their app are not asking for.

It's great to have high-minded visions of genAI art somehow getting good enough to use someday in the distant future, but this is an illustration app that is loved by artists. Adding genAI art slop to Procreate would be more bizarre than this stand against genAI art.

 

[rovex]

Graphical art aside, I find the use of CNC machines to carve classical marble sculptures really paints a depressing picture for the few out there who have the ability to carve the human form.

 

[Abazigal]

It’s common sense to not include a feature that would only alienate your user base. I fail to see the controversy over this.

 

[wonderings]

Graphical art aside, I find the use of CNC machines to carve classical marble sculptures really paints a depressing picture for the few out there who have the ability to carve the human form.

As things become mass produced the price and value goes down. I am sure if you took the same statue that was CNC'd and another the same size but was hand made, the hand made one would go for much more money. People do appreciate the hand made element to things.

 

[ninethirty]

And it's very understandable for people to be negative about generative AI

Very soon, your entire life is going to revolve around and be supported by generative AI. As always, this forum will be dragged, kicking and streaming, in the future they so desperately hate.

 

[dylanwho]

Very soon, your entire life is going to revolve around and be supported by generative AI. As always, this forum will be dragged, kicking and streaming, in the future they so desperately hate.

I am pretty sure people just don't want their art, music, and films being GenAI.

 

[ninethirty]

I am pretty sure people just don't want their art, music, and films being GenAI.

Those people are as free as anyone else to ignore any art created by GenAI.

 

[dylanwho]

Those people are as free as anyone else to ignore any art created by GenAI.

So we will be "dragged kicking and screaming in(to) the future," yet we are free to ignore it. Interesting, when both takes are side by side. I just went onto haveibeentrained.com to remove some more of my own work, but too late, it's already in the LAION 5 dataset without my consent or compensation.

The difference between ML and GenAI is vast as it applies to the arts. My point being that AI as shorthand is at best unhelpful, and when people are voicing concerns about AI they're almost always talking about GenAI and not pattern recognition in medical imaging; and the people referring to military applications will usually mention it.

 

[ninethirty]

So we will be "dragged kicking and screaming in(to) the future," yet we are free to ignore it. Interesting, when both takes are side by side. I just went onto haveibeentrained.com to remove some more of my own work, but too late, it's already in the LAION 5 dataset without my consent or compensation.

The difference between ML and GenAI is vast as it applies to the arts. My point being that AI as shorthand is at best unhelpful, and when people are voicing concerns about AI they're almost always talking about GenAI and not pattern recognition in medical imaging; and the people referring to military applications will usually mention it.

You're free to ignore it as best you can, sure, but the world is going to run on it, and you'll be viewed as a luddite.

 

[dylanwho]

You're free to ignore it as best you can, sure, but the world is going to run on it, and you'll be viewed as a luddite.

People who love plagiarism delivery services (*who will use them only if they're free!) didn't already have and will suddenly form an opinion about artists?

Oh no.