Procreate's anti-AI pledge attracts praise from digital creatives
theverge.com
theverge.com
If artists suddenly started loving AI tomorrow, this pledge would be out the window. It's just business and marketing - nothing more, nothing less.
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.
I am still more than willing to have a civil debate around the argument itself.
Why is it stealing to analyze images? I would be more convinced if AI used a fixed database during generation, or if it was considered a standard, acceptable practice to reproduce training data as "new" generations.
> I would be more convinced if AI used a fixed database during generation
Wow, I didn’t know that model weights, an elaborately compressed form of their training data, rewrote themselves every time they were invoked. Or that it’s only theft if I stole data from a fixed database to build my own service.
If objective facts are "my own narrative", then no rational discussion can occur.
https://arxiv.org/html/2309.10668v2
Maybe apply for a job there too, since you’re obviously so far ahead of everyone in understanding this problem space.
You can use whatever weasel words you want, but bits go in and fewer derivative bits come out in both cases.
The purpose of video codecs is to reproduce the original video. If you do that, it's copyright infringement.
AI models should not reproduce the original images. The output will not be something that already exists.
Purpose and intent matters.
Though I also think there’s an argument to be made that images need to be properly licensed to even be “analyzed” in this way, because it’s ultimately an unauthorized copy even if it involves picking the image apart and obfuscation. They were published with the intent of being viewed by the public, not for being reproduced in any shape or form.
Like your respondant, I find the artists more sympathetic despite finding the argument itself bad.
That said, the intellectually dishonest arguments irk me to no end and I'm simply tired of them. The artists upset over AI are more sympathetic than the RIAA (It's really quite hard not to be), but this stuff really wears at my sympathy.
And, unfortunately, it's impossible to actually tackle any issues unless without moving past the bad arguments.
I, too, get annoyed by People Who Are Wrong On The Internet; I'm trying to become more stoic, as I don't want to end up like my father.
I don't know if this will pass, or if the pro/anti AI split is going to be as permanent as the economic left/right split, or the libertarian/authoratarian split.
So yeah, if we're going by the (idealized version of) intent of copyright, it stands strongly on the side of AI.
EDIT:
And before someone complains that SOTA models are trained and owned by private parties -- copyright is "promoting the progress of useful arts and sciences" by literally giving private parties a monopoly to make money off art as an incentive.
The difference with AI is that AI takes a 100% bit for bit copy and uses it, rather than humans who just use their impression to be inspired.
> By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself. [audience laughs and claps] ... there's no rationalization for what you do and you are Satan's little helpers, okay? Kill yourself, seriously. You're the ruiner of all things good, seriously. ...
> I know all the marketing people are going, "he's doing a joke..." there's no joke here whatsoever. ... I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too, "Oh, you know what Bill's doing, he's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market, he's very smart." [audience laughs] Oh man, I am not doing that, you fucking evil scumbags.
> "Ooh, you know what Bill's doing now, he's going for the righteous indignation dollar. That's a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We've done research. Huge market. He's doing a good thing." Goddammit, I'm not doing that, you scumbags. Quit putting a goddamn dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!
> "Ooh, the anger dollar. Huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market. Bill's very bright to do that." God, I'm just caught in a fucking web.
I wish their redo and undo shortcuts were used everywhere
It’s a good rule of thumb that the profit motive will make everything worse, but it’s not like it happens 100% of the time with no exceptions (unless publicly traded)
But the people who use a tool like this aren't doing "slop" in the fist place, any more than they're importing the first stock art matching a keyword and calling it a day.
The stuff that gets the flak — I've seen some on posters in the U-bahn here, with a man exiting an airport luggage scanner while a robot scans his belly to reveal he's pregnant with a cat — are done by people with IMO no artistic standards to understand why editing is needed.
The prompt here sounds like something a generative AI tool would struggle to make look poster-worthy, while also being something I'd expect flesh-and-blood artists in marketing to come up with, draw, and think it's a good idea.
This is to say, I can tell (bad) AI art from human art by a type of technical mistakes made, but not by absurdity of the depicted concept.
I know this because they've all reached out to me at one point or another and asked about tools/hardware/services/etc, and I've done my best to point them in the right direction. One that I'm particularly proud of bought himself a 3090 and is running his own models and doing inpainting stuff to great effect.
That's why I was clear about "my" friends, which necessarily limits the scope of what I'm saying.
This post:
>I don't know a single artist that's doing commercial work that isn't using AI to speed up their delivery times. They're all using AI tooling because it's useful. I know this because they've all reached out to me at one point or another and asked about tools/hardware/services/etc, and I've done my best to point them in the right direction. One that I'm particularly proud of bought himself a 3090 and is running his own models and doing inpainting stuff to great effect.
Does not include the phrase “my friends”. The first sentence could be interpreted as a broad statement as well.
It’s just a tool, adapt or get left behind. I wonder if this is how painters felt when photography became accessible to the massess.
Not really. Sociologically, I think it's a bad thing to want so desperately to remove stuff. That desperation was already borne from previous technologies, so it's just technology making things worse by apparently solving a previous problem that was already created by technology that ushered in a spirit paving the way for AI.
"Creatives" so strongly against AI art I suspect are not creative at all. They are the same class of people who are so uncreative that the entire internet looks almost exactly the same, even though you could basically do anything.
We don't call the person on the Ikea furniture assembly line "creative".
With that said, I am bored to tears with the output of generative AI art on its own. It is like taking a 4 bar beat sample generator for music and looping the output 100 times creates a pretty boring song. Someone actual creative though can see that the beat sample generator can be used for the base material for something interesting musically.
Of course the creative fraud is going to be afraid of something new and happy if things stay uncreative and the same.
100%
People just notice the shittiest ones where some marketdrone uses Dall-E to create the most stereotypical shit and puts it on a massive billboard or poster with zero thought for anything.
With local models + local learning, you can create stuff that looks like the company's IP and use it as a jumping off point or for inspiration.
I am a professional photographer and writer. I am 100% AI-free: I don't use any generative AI for my writing, photography, or graphic design (I do some of that as well). I absolutely hate AI and want no part of it.
I mean, it’s an app some people use to work with everyday and make money with and it only costs 15€.
A vacuous conditional, because AI goes fundamentally against the basic ethic of most artistis.
Image generating AI is a tool and like every tool you can be really creative with or just make crap. It's not inherently immoral or dishonest.
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.
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.
there seems to be a strong sentiment against ai among some artists. and so it's to be expected that some of these would publish posts on their social media displaying agreement.
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.
May have worked if it wasn't a paid add-on.
It seems likely that acceptance of AI technology will follow a similar pattern.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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?
Have we left the ability behind to make informed discussions?
Smart marketing move.
They absolutely could. They are choosing not to.
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.
I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that Apple doesn't allow this. There's overwhelming evidence that they do.
Blind decisionmaking is bad. It's perfectly fine if Procreate devs don't want to add AI features. I simply find it distasteful to present it as a moral position (as people are wont to do with so many things nowadays) or groundbreaking perspective. It's a preference - which should be respected - but just a preference.
But there are. And they're quite large. That's why it's so contentious, and why people directly impacted by it take issue with it.
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.
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.
When it uses your data to suggest other people — I think that’s what people are afraid of.
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.
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.
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.