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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

I think this is the wrong promise. Photoshop has had "generative AI" in it for many years and no one really had a problem with it, and there are many similar features that would make sense in Procreate. I would imagine there will be customer demand for them to go back on this, which puts them in an awkward position of either reneging on a promise or losing customers.

What I imagine Procreate really want to express is their dedication to art and artists, which are certainly threatened by aspects of the current generative AI wave. I think they could have done this without promising no generative AI features. Promising to focus on artists, to not use creations for training, not partnering with companies who aren't respecting artists rights, all would have gone some way towards this.

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Why should procreate be obliged to put generative models in? If they don’t want to, and their customers evidently agree, isn’t that sufficient?

Your argument seems to frame it as them “fundamentally needing” , or are in some way obliged to have that feature, when no such evidence exists for that.

My point is not that they fundamentally need it, but more that they are over-reacting to the current hype cycle. 5 years ago no one considered Photoshop's generative fill to be problematic, and I would have expected it to be on the long term roadmap of any similar piece of software. It was a widely appreciated feature that no one really felt was changing art.

Even if the whole current generative AI trend disappears entirely, that's still a feature customers wanted before, and there's no reason to think they wouldn't still want it.

And that's assuming nothing comes of the current trend. I would imagine the opposite, that at least one or two limited use-cases will be found for things similar to generative fill, that in years time will be regarded as normal, not as problematic.

Now if Procreate wants to position themselves as "low tech", that's a different thing, and they're free to do so, but looking at their product it doesn't seem that they're going for "low tech" in any other way.

I think "no one" is overstating it, there are some who object to this sort of thing, the same way some people object to the use of autotune in popular music. But agreed, most people don't know/don't care, especially on the consumer side of the equation.

If it helps think about AI as meat (or sugar). You put "only locally grown beef^W AI", or "does not contain any meat^W genAI" not because you are low tech, but because these are your customer preferences

Nowhere do they talk of shunning all maachine learning. Current generative models are not exactly a technological product.

Their customers won't agree though, probably. When other artists are using useful features and being more productive with other tools, why would you stick with a tool that commits to not having those features? I'm not surprised if they say they don't like the tools, but when push comes to shove...

Listen to what people do, not what they say.

The pushback is a rebuttal to the with us or against us moral nature of their pledge. The feature set was clearly contentious enough to publish a manifesto which expects a fracture of userbase. If they've misjudged the numbers I'm sure some minimum of missing creature comforts will creep back in. If only because Art can be more than what the commercial tool makers claim.

Spot healing and content aware patch is not generative fill, its just cloning adjacent pixels - what AI are you referring to that's been there for years?

generative AI

Considering that Procreate is overwhelmingly loved by artists while Adobe is at best seen as a necessary evil (and at worst bloatware owned by malevolent rentiers), I think the former has a better handle on their audience.

And yet:

> "Now thats the way to send a message. Now if only you guys could get a full power competitor to [Photoshop] on desktop with plugin support. Until someone can build a real competitor to high level [Photoshop] use, I'm stuck with it."

I think Photoshop will do just fine.

Sure. Just as McDonald’s will do just fine.

No one argued otherwise? This is irrelevant. My point was that Procreate is still in phase where they need to know their users and deliver what they want, vs. Adobe, who has used all kinds of lock-in and underhanded tactics to back users into a corner and say, “what the fuck you gonna do about it?” The latter is certainly a way a lot of people make money, but is not especially laudable or, as the parent argued, a contrasting route that Procreate could go down and be successful.

That comment would seem to illustrate GP's point.

You're using a different definition of AI than Procreate is. You can tell because no one has ever said generative fill was "founded on theft" (a statement you don't have to agree with to acknowledge the point). So you and Procreate are talking across purposes.

Generative AI has a very specific meaning, it's not something that's "up for debate." That the general public has taken a trade term and abused it is not a reason to abandon the actual meaning among practitioners.

Generative AI is AI that can generate examples from learned models. This is opposed to discriminating AI which given an answer can tell you if it's correct. This actually matters because in fact there are many types of gen AI, the vast majority not being image nor large language models.

"Founded on theft" is nonsensical moralizing that doesn't help anyone with anything, and definitely doesn't help define any sort of sensible AI regulation.

Sometimes people use terms in a way we don't agree with, but it doesn't give us license to misinterpret their meaning in doing so.

(Please note I made no claim here about whether or not AI is "founded on theft" and only that Procreate used that turn of phrase.)

If they have license to misrepresent and abuse a term, users of that term absolutely have license to correct them. Being ignorant does not somehow put you above criticism or correction.

I'm not saying there's no license to correct them, but that the substance of a disagreement is unlikely to be about definitions (and wasn't in this case). I think arguing about what terms mean is largely a distraction. All words are made up, the right definition is the one that serves the discussion you're having at any given moment. Letting your interlocutor pick their own terms is a free way to extend charity and aid mutual understanding.

If you're talking to someone, that means meeting in the middle because it goes both ways. If you're reading or discussing a document and the author isn't around, that means adopting the author's terminology, because there isn't really an alternative.

That may be it, but I'd be interested in exactly what definition of "generative AI" Procreate would commit to.

If the definition is anything that generates new art automatically, then features like generative fill would be included. If it's only AI that was "founded on theft", then they have a lot more scope for future features but have perhaps lost control of the narrative and might have users rebelling if they add AI features, after all there are multiple ways in which these features can be problematic, not just the use of training data.

I know professional artists who have made use of Photoshop's generative AI for years in photo retouching scenarios. They are great artists but find no reason to waste time and money doing tedious generative tasks themselves.

Isn't there a distinction here?

You can use AI models to help create content. What about something like object selection or object removal?

But generative AI would base the art itself on AI training on someone's work on learning their style.

The “generative AI” that has been in PS for years is nothing like today’s LLM based gen AI tools such as sending Midjourney or Firefly.

I agree 100%. Ai is just a New amazing tool.

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