/s
https://apps.apple.com/us/charts/ipad/top-paid-apps/36
Their target audience seems pretty happy with their decision.
Training these neural networks that I procreated is very fulfilling.
They already have intelligence beyond the best models from OpenAI, Anthropocene, and Google.
I definitely encourage everyone who can on here to procreate.
And since we can talk about it without engaging with the article points, and talk about the words “Butlerian Jihad” I foresee many posts coming forth, decrying the luddites of the world
On the other hand, I can't help but feel it's mental gymnastics when Krita is implementing a neutral network based linework filter [0] while very vocally being against AI. I understand the technical details, and I still fail to see the nuances here.
[0]: https://krita-artists.org/t/introducing-a-new-project-fast-l...
As major differences I'd highlight: local and offline, so drawings not sent anywhere trained on artist work with explicit consent
In Krita's case, they claim the AI isn't generative so it doesn't add detail.
Whereas the AI today is trained on stolen work and often on the inputs as well.
And about the privacy and copyright concern, what we currently have are:
Stable Diffusion: local and offline, but not copyright-clean.
Adobe Firefly: online, but copyright-clean (if we believe Adobe's claim).
So if we combine the better sides of both, it suddenly becomes okay?
[0]: https://krita-artists.org/uploads/default/original/3X/1/4/14...
I think we are in agreement, I have used more descriptive wording to just clearly indicate what I consider as a filter.
(Edit: yeah, looking at the image I can see it clearly takes some artistic liberties. Even on the dragon.)
"It’s not a generative AI. It won’t invent anything. It won’t add details, any stylistic flourish besides basic line weight, cross-hatching or anything else. It won’t fix any mistakes. It will closely follow the provided sketch. I believe it won’t even be possible for a network of this size and architecture to “borrow” any parts of the images from the training dataset.
We will not be training the model on any of the existing datasets, or stolen pictures. All artworks will come from artists fully aware what it’s going to be used for. And our particular model will work better with special training data anyway, I believe. Maybe you’d want to help out with gathering the artworks - I will be making another post about that soon.
The calculations will be 100% local and offline. It won’t send the sketch image to any server to process and return the line art. I’m not planning to implement any networking functionality, and there are no servers planned either. It will only use your own computer CPU and GPU for calculations, the same way all of the other features of Krita do. It also won’t train on your images that you make in Krita. It won’t save it anywhere either, until you save it with Krita to your own device as usual, in a Krita file."
This being said, I don't think this is the correct approach. I don't think you need a convolution network or training. You would need some very carefully designed filters with parameters exposed to the user. Granted, this won't do as much of a "good job" at it, but the artist will touch it up anyways.
(And this isn't a strictly good/bad thing to me, it's a natural byproduct of a sufficiently advanced state of technology in the future being capable of automating every last productive human activity.)
I just made an original animated feature film where I sang %75 of the roles by using an AI tool(audimee.com) to convert my voice into others- I couldn't do that before- we're now creating Portuguese and Russian language versions of the songs with a tool that has a $20 usd/month subscription! Couldn't do that before!
For creatives/artists- As long as we don't use AI to generate ideas we're good, human generated ideas are a must- bring on all the AI tools!
The whole built on theft thing- as a human film director I could rattle off endless examples just in cinema of human directors "stealing" premises, sequences, shots, styles etc from other filmmakers with no consequences- so why stop the AI now?
I see the "theft" as being democratized now- large studios/entities with large resources have always been able to legally "steal" so with these AI tools I guess we all can now?
I make original animated films, games, music, art etc etc and I feel no "threat" at all from AI-
I feel the opposite as I'm excited to see what things they will allow me to do next as a micro-studio with limited budgets but unlimited creativity.
Aesthetics are dead now imo because of generative AI as anyone can be any "style" so now it is all about ideas- original human ideas.
If you're building tools to empower artists, this is antithetic to your mission, and simply unethical.
A majority of which will go to already rich people.
Its a sad state now, and a sad state in the future for humanity, where technology enables and accelerates accumulation of wealth, aided and abetted by the very consumers it consumes.
Total wealth is a meaningless metric.
You don't see any issue with machine learning models trained on huge amounts of copyrighted and patented materials basically scraped from the internet. Yes you can make your animated film and audio but at the cost of hugely controversial and non-transparent generative models.
> Aesthetics are dead now imo because of generative AI as anyone can be any "style" so now it is all about ideas- original human ideas.
This argument kind of conflicts with itself, no? Aesthetics are inferred from ideas either inspired or original.
I feel compensated on a spiritual level for my work- I do other things for money and my art can stay "pure" in a sense-
It's said that if you "sell your soul" you are unable to ever "buy it back"- so why sell it in the first place? Just so you can try to get "rich" and attempt to buy it back later because you are soulless and miserable? Doesn't make sense to me.
Maybe art is something higher? A higher cause? I was really inspired by the Rudolf Steiner book "The arts and their mission" early in my career- worth looking into if you are in the arts.
Look at the work spotlighted by Google to promote their new Flow tool: https://x.com/GoogleLabs/status/1925596282661327073 . This is a garbage imitation of a Guy Ritchie film or a Jose Cuervo ad (maybe more the latter).
Instead of being a tool for creatives it has empowered a number of grifters to churn out more and more "content" bypassing any concern about craft and formal restrictions that help generate creative work. The work that is most often created with the help of AI is not creative, it's a bland, tasteless simulacrum of creativity.
I think the blame is on the people who consume it.
Grifters will always grift- curation is what is important to sort through and ignore the slop- maybe there will be some systems with special fingerprinting algo's to "find" original human made non slop?
Why is that the line in the sand? And if someone did find inspiration and ideas from an AI, and made something popular with it, wouldn’t it be indistinguishable from any other piece of popular content?
In the past we used to be able to look forward to the future to solve obvious limitations of technology back then. Example is how limited and expensive it was to capture photos on rolls of film. Within the past 20 years we can now take effectively unlimited photos digitally on a device that can do much more than just take photos, and that limit has been abolished forever.
It is this forever that is starting to loom on us. Most of us can't imagine a life without Facebook, smartphones, addictive feeds and the like even if we don't directly use them. It is not possible to go back to a state of life untainted by this technology. So now a fancy new technology that promises to paint your end-products for you comes out and in the span of just a few years threatens to change the whole landscape of art that has been repeated in cycles for thousands of years, forever. It is only natural that some would loudly object.
But the same wheels driving human progress that removed the limitations of the disposable camera will not slow down at the stage of generative AI either. I don't see how this would happen given our intelligence has already gotten us far in many other domains. Progress is like a wildfire that eats up dry bushes. If enough of the medium is there it will spontaneously occur and not much can be done to prevent it. Except with technology, it is not dry timber but "what ifs." "What if art doesn't have to be defined by the journey to get there, but by a satisfying end product?" "What if a computer program could replicate the motions of a paintbrush, and create art indistinguishable from a human's?" Any one of us can come up with the next "what if."
Paradigm is shifting same as first camera wad invented. Obsession with reproducing reality was abolished and shift to all kinds of *isms. Some artist (ie Mucha) used new technology for improve their creative process. Some believed, that photography stole a part of our soul that was trapped on taken picture. It repeats. Just with different technologies.
I'm honestly very interest how we, as humans, will deal with it and how paradigm evolve.
Procreate knows their target users are skilled humans, and it’s been consistently refreshing to see them align their morals and beliefs to how much AI has stolen from the creative world.
I think unless you are a creative yourself, you’ll never be able to fully grasp just how sickening it’s been to watch and see centuries of artists blood, sweat, and tears all be garbled into a slop smoothie with no credit or citation.
Any creative who enjoys AI was most likely never a creative for the right reasons to begin with.
Unless, there is some sort of "great filter" for all the AI technology, it will pretty much outdo every kind of human creativity and rush into customized highly tailored generated art.
Like you click the button and now you have 43243 new games just like one you finished couple of hours ago. Oh you are bored by having so much games? Let me drip feed you. Etc. Etc.
It's pretty much over.
You fell for it if you think this is ever going to happen.
HN doesn't have the kind of purity filter you are looking for.
I feel like we're at a similar spot today with AI.
There's a big YouTube channel that does special fx challenges that proudly proclaims "No AI" but the winner of the challenge used tons of physics and crowd simulators.
Is that not cheating?
Procreate is against gen AI on the grounded that it was unethically trained, and has become a vehicle of theft away from artists. They make a distinction between that and machine learning which is a very useful tools.
And maybe a smart strategy? If they add AI that will learn how you draw, and after couple of drawings will be able to draw for you, that may kill the product because artists will lose interest or reason to spend time with their product.
Maybe they realise that and just want to push away inevitable for as long as possible.
I wonder, they probably have same stance about AI coding, and have no need for that either.
“Sketch me a wireframe of a person running”
“Can you add a flowing cape to my character in a similar art style?”
“Add stippling for the shadows on these objects assuming the light comes from the left of the scene”
Then you don't use your imagination. Obviously one can "snap" a sketch into a car or an owl or a house or whatever, keeping the style similar.
You could use your reasoning similarly to spell checkers.
They also have a bit of a different market: their customers are people whose work has been used commercially without compensation to endanger their future livelihoods. It may be futile in the long run but I’d imagine there is a substantial market of people who don’t want to contribute to the problem or worry whether Adobe’s terms of service give them rights to screw you.
Automated pattern and design fillers? Colour palette testers?
As you say though, it could be good business sense. Adobe seems to be getting a lot of backlash from creatives at least on social media.
That mainly seems to be about Adobe doing opt-out training on people's art and data (and sneakily re-enable that option for people who've already disabled it in the past), not just because Adobe now has AI features you could use. But maybe we're stuck in different bubbles/echo chambers.
It seems that the current line drawn by artists is: the app dev can do anything with neutral network as long as it doesn't generate a whole image.
I can imagine. In fact, I wrote a scifi novel that imagines it! :)
In the story, the idle elite has painting classes with an AI teacher. They have levels of engagement they can choose from: see something and paint it, see an AI-made painting of that something and copy it, copy it over projected lines into your canvas, paint only the filling colors over AI-created lines delineating it, let the AI-teacher-robot fix the painting for you after you are done. Every student goes home happily with the same painting in the same high AI-made quality. :)
Microsoft Paint has AI these days.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/use-image-creato...
> And maybe a smart strategy?
It's a brilliant strategy, IMO. Maybe not to take over the whole industry, but to carve out a loyal niche. Are there many other top-tier creative apps that take such a clear position?
If you ask me, keep the AI in a new, separate program.
Generative AI has a distinct workflow that is unique and the UX patterns will likely be different than traditional workflows. For instance: the generate, reject-or-accept loop.
I’m wondering how many people just copy and paste from their chat agent and simply ignore the other integrations (with respect to consumer products).
We can build a bleak dystopian AI driven future where we all work in service to the machines or we can build one that pays dividends by continuing to give humans an inflated sense of their potential. The later is preferable.
Back then, the work of painters had one among many functions: to preserve people's image. When photography arrived the market for painted portraits vanished.
Painters then went to do what photography couldn't do well: colorful landscapes, elegant distortions, etc. But, above all, they explored ways of looking at reality that the photography couldn't do: impressionism, expressionism, abstract art, cubism, etc.
I wonder what will artists do now. They'll need to create an art that AI can't create. Perhaps more interactive art, like video games?
Human creativity is cheapened by AI because AI can produce work faster, equal and at many times superior to human output.
This isn’t something that can be changed. It’s reality and it’s not necessarily a good reality but it’s something you have to accept.
The procreate title, the whole marketing idea, even the article itself could have been generated by AI and we would be none the wiser.
I can use ai generated art and bullshit and say I used procreate and no one would know.
This ad reads like an ad for typewriters at the dawn of ms word. It’s just everything is happening 10x faster and it’s all much more tragic as humanity is losing much more here.
I am an author of a Desktop App [1] myself. More often than I like to admit, I find myself wondering how I can integrate AI, because that's all the rage these days and gets views, clicks, and potentially revenue.
Taking a firm stance like this and standing up for creativity is not an easy stance. Kudos to Procreate team for taking it!
The jury is still out on AI-centric workflows, but AI augmented workflows are here and won't go anywhere irrespective of what the Internet mob says.
This is why business with any financial sense wouldn't pay an artist for artwork anymore because it will be far far more expensive and take longer... Mills which didn't change with the time, according to the guy I was talking to failed and all the workers lost their jobs anyway.
The good news here is that like during the industrial revolution, soon loads of unproductive work will be automated away – coders, artists, accountants, lawyers, etc. And like during the industrial revolution this will result in huge profit increases and competitive advantages for businesses which adopt quickly. This isn't something any company should be sitting on the fence about.
While it's unfortunate people will lose their jobs we should remember that humans are still uniquely qualified for work where human interaction is valued – like service work. It's really only the inefficient knowledge work that will be automated away by AI, like how inefficient factory work was automated and outsourced out of developed economies over the last century.
I have always been garbage at the visual arts. Art classes in school were my worst class every year, I just could not get the pictures in my head down on to paper. I accepted that I just wasn't "creative". This mentality persisted through my school years and I ended up getting a business degree because it's not "creative". I was miserable. Eventually saw the light and got into web dev. I believe this is a creative pursuit, and the issue is the medium. Everyone is inherently creative and the general act of creation is one of the most fulfilling things you can do to occupy your time.
As a web dev AI allows me to be creative in my ideas and prompting, generating pictures that I would otherwise not have the ability to create myself. Before you say I'm taking the job of graphic designers, I assure you none of these uses would have ended in me spending any money or even someone else's time if AI image gen didn't exist. AI lowers the bar for people to pursue the act of creativity in a medium they otherwise struggle in.
When I say "a woman looking outside from her seat on a train" I don't want it to generate such an image for me. I want it to literally give me existing images that more or less fit the description, with full credit. If it's from a movie I'd like to know the movie's name and timestamp and the actor's name and everything.
I know the difference between referencing and plagiarism. And if I'm going to cross the line, at least I know I am the one who makes this decision and takes the legal risk. With the current generative AI I don't even know who holds accountability. Likely nobody, or worse, an unaware me.
This is why I think the copyright law is very broken. If someone made the database I described above, their pants, house and first-born would be sued off. But I'd argue it's a not just more useful, but also more ethical product than generative AIs.
One could hire a software developer to write such a program. But, in general, software developers can be untrustworthy and prone to stealing ideas for their own selfish purposes.
Before Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college, he answered a classified ad from someone in the real world^1 who wanted to create a website that could search a database of images. Nothing to do with "social media". IIRC the target market was the auto insurance industry (I could be wrong).
1. Not Winklevoss brothers. That is another story.
Zuckerberg never finished the job but he did create his own website which searched and served up images of students at Harvard. He was of course sued by this person after Facebook became popular.
Ehhhh? Yes there are examples of that, as there are for any arbitrary group of humans you could select, but [anecdotally] I've noticed the opposite... it's not uncommon to find a passionate developer that's only interested in the challenge/problem solving aspect - it's a lot less common for say.. real estate agents.
I don't really get the point you're making beyond "people be greedy sometimes" (which I do agree with, don't get me wrong).
1. With the exception of any intellectual property underlying software licenses. Microsoft wants a fair use exception for copyrighted works used by OpenAI but aat the same time it aggressively pursues copyright enforcement over its software, such as "Windows" and "Office".
Similarly, other people could use that database to check newly published work, making it easier to detect and stop obvious copyright infringement.
Problem is, the copyright system - both as a body of laws and as a spirit and mindset behind them - prevents the database from ever being created. At least in any form other than "yes / maybe?" responses from comparing perceptual hashes; go beyond that, someone comes out of the woodwork, seeking royalties. Reverse image search engines exist, but are barely helpful because of that.
Anyway;
> And if I'm going to cross the line, at least I know I am the one who makes this decision and takes the legal risk. With the current generative AI I don't even know who holds accountability. Likely nobody, or worse, an unaware me.
Ultimately, you're still the one making the decision. No one forces you to publish whatever a generative model produced in response to your prompt. It's up to you what to do with the output. You also exercise creative control - both during and after generation.
The legal situation of GenAI in general is still uncertain - but at the very least, you're still in control of whether you're referencing or plagiarising in a moral sense.
You would think we'd be there already. But search as a field has died. Hopefully temporarily but pretty dead. This is interesting because good search is supposedly how Google make their profit. And for years now they have obsessed about anything but good search. It's now a given that a google search will give you anything BUT what you want. I know: there are upstarts - are the upstarts that good? For example, is there a great image search upstart?
https://lenso.ai/en/search-by-text?desc=a+woman+looking+outs...
There is some nuance here that will be filled in by the courts and companies over time - just like other technologies that allowed creative mix-n-match.
I do agree that the current crop of "let's get all your YT videos and all your photographs to train our models and we will pay you peanuts by running ads" is objectively and morally wrong.
However, progress requires aligning the incentives and forcing some legal framework to compensate for training - not outright stop the generative AI train as that's simply not possible in this day and age.
AI may be not a theft, but it just sophisticated combinations from our wisdom. Until it can really create, the human will always win.
Genuinely curious. When you say as an artist I believe u are speaking as a professional digital designer. Or are you really producing “art”
I might not allways produce an art, but task that I'm payed for required work with aesthetic. For example when I design cover for book, AI helps with sketching multiple ideas that I of course need to edit for specific tasks. Few years ago I needed to do it manually which was more time consuming and expensive.
There is, however, field that AI would never help. Documentary photography that I do mostly. Any artificial interference that shifts captured reality contradicts this genre itself.
I will only use software that lacks AI for the profoundly simple reason that I don't need such "features". Non-artists on the other hand need AI for they're not competent (enough). At what stage of the process is irrelevant.
And competency in matters of sentient cultural expression manifest, the only one possible (as opposed to a mere simulacrum), is what defines an artist, after all; non-competency obviously doesn't.
Good for you.
> Actually I don't know any passionate artist who would create with competition in mind.
I on the other hand know many; the demosceners I grew up with, just to give one example. Competition there is part of these subcultures' very own aesthetics, i. e. (unwritten) rules.
> If that is your definition of "artists" than you are talking about content creators.
Albeit I have an aversion for the slopword "content" and avoid it to describe any artist's output, artists are, as creators (of "content" of an artistic nature) per se, i. e. per definition, "content creators". You also erected a strawman, for I only adressed competency as an attribute of definition... and not competition. And albeit the latter might help make anyone more competent as an artist, or empower an artist in becoming one in the first place, the concept doesn't define the artist as one on its own, in itself.
And with that I think we have exhausted our exchange at this point as a) I have answered your question about AI features in art packages, and b) you already have trouble understanding even the most basic of concepts in art creation, let alone art theory.
Theft here means that AI learns from our content and benefits from it when generating new content. I'm not clear on why this is theft when an artificial intelligence does it but it is not when a natural one does. These guesses are an effort to understand this:
1. It's a matter of scale, AI does it faster and cheaper, and that quantitative difference is qualitatively different, and therefore morally different.
2. When my enemies learn from me it is theft, regardless of the physiology of their intelligence, and AI is an enemy.
3. A human intelligence requires far more friction to transmit what they learn, making their learning functionally more local, and less likely to be used to supplant me. When my content is used to supplant me it becomes theft, as in copyright infringement.
4. ???When the artist gave you the work, it was under the pretense that you wouldn't train a robot to recreate those images. Humans are divine beings. Deal with it.
I wonder if any of the developers there are using AI to code?
Tired of this take. It's not virtuous nor is it based in deep principled thought, it's calculated. As are all such stances made by companies.
ChrisMarshallNY•1d ago
neepi•1d ago
ChrisMarshallNY•1d ago
The iPad/Pencil combo knocks it into a cocked hat.
The kicker is that the Cintiq is around the same price (or more), and is less ergonomic.
neepi•1d ago
jsheard•1d ago
criddell•1d ago
I can't believe it's only $13 (I think I paid $10 many years ago). It's one of those rare apps that I wish was more expensive because a $13 purchase doesn't feel sustainable.
I should probably sign up for a Procreate course. The app is so deep that I know I'm only using the most basic features. If anybody has books or courses to recommend, I'm all ears.
ChrisMarshallNY•1d ago
I remember Corel Painter. It was about $400, and did many similar things.
I think it may no longer be around.
Tomte•1d ago
svantana•1d ago
[1] https://app.sensortower.com/overview/425073498?country=US
Kichererbsen•1d ago
alienreborn•1d ago
ChrisMarshallNY•1d ago
I do suggest splurging for the more expensive Pencil Pro, though.
If you want to go the other way, the Mini works with the Pencil Pro (I have both).
spking•1d ago
https://www.creativebloq.com/buying-guides/best-ipad-for-pro...
neepi•1d ago
criddell•1d ago
I use a 2018 13" iPad Pro and I love that size because it's basically the same size as a sheet of 8.5x11 (or A4) paper. It's the perfect size for reading and marking up PDFs too.
Last year I bought and returned the M4 iPad Pro because they didn't make a Smart Keyboard Folio for it which I prefer to the more heavy duty Magic Keyboard. So I'm still using my 7 year old iPad worrying about what I'm going to do when it dies. I thought for sure somebody would make a knock off, but nobody has made anything that I think is as good as the Apple product.
For me, Procreate and GoodNotes are a killer combination that justify owning the device.
rollcat•1d ago
A close friend of mine (art college degree) has switched from oil / acrylic / watercolor to iPad - after trying it once.
criddell•1d ago
ChrisMarshallNY•1d ago
Making a screen tablet is really hard. The iPad is general-purpose enough (and does not require a stylus) to make it worth the effort (and price -they ain't cheap), but a specialized one would likely fizzle, due to a limited customer base.
intended•1d ago
rollcat•1d ago
What about the apps? I've heard really good things about Krita, but what's the killer app?
queenkjuul•1d ago
crq-yml•20h ago
What you would see in the past are "PC or Android with a tablet manufacturer's sticker on it". Wacom has a history of occasionally licensing their stuff for a laptop. And XPPen, for example, has made a few in the "Magic Drawing Pad" series now and they needed a few iterations to move away from being a generic OSI tablet to actually using their digitizer tech. These products don't excite tech enthusiasts - a fully integrated device, as opposed to screen and digitizer, comes with more concerns about all-round performance and value - and so far, the premium on them makes them compete with iPads. But there is tremendous demand for it - seemingly every "art kid" sees an iPad and Procreate as a milestone, because that combination is what the content creators they watch are using.
criddell•1h ago
Are they? The iPad is in it's 15th year now. Apple has shown exactly what needs to be done yet there isn't enough interest in the open source community to develop (or sponsor development of) a solution. I don't see much evidence of change.
> because that combination is what the content creators they watch are using
But also because it's the best hardware and software and can be relatively inexpensive, especially if you are willing to buy used.