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Why Procreate's Anti-AI Pledge Is Resonating With Its Creators
Creators face a lot of challenges in the current AI era. Illustration software company Procreate wants to help its users avoid them by pledging never to use generative AI.
Katelyn Chedraoui
Aug. 30, 2024 5:30 a.m. PT
5 min read
Procreate
In a video shared online, Procreate's CEO James Cuda put it simply: "I really fucking hate generative AI."
Procreate is an iOS graphic design software popular with illustrators and animators. It has over 30 million users, from professional designers to freelancers and amateur creators. Procreate made waves with those creators when the company announced, plainly and boldly, that it would never implement generative AI into its software. Generative AI is "built on a foundation of theft," its AI policy reads, and is "ripping the humanity out of things."
At a time when seemingly every company is exploring AI in one form or another, Procreate's pledge was surprising. Other industry giants like Adobe have been developing and rolling out different AI-powered features and tools for the past few years, touting the tech's ability to enhance workflows and creation. For some Procreate users, its anti-AI stance was a welcome dissent.
Charlie Arpie is a digital illustrator who has been using Procreate for five years. She works with authors to design book covers, and she runs a popular Instagram account where she shares her original graphics inspired by those books. She was thrilled to learn Procreate wouldn't dive into generative AI.
"I didn't think I could love them any more, but I absolutely do," Arpie said over email.
René Ramos, a digital artist for 20 years, cheered out loud when Cuda's post came across her social media feed. "It's rare to see a CEO take an anti-AI stance so publicly," she said via email, adding she had "immense respect for the Procreate team" to voice similar sentiments to what she and her social circle had been feeling.
The keyword in Procreate's AI policy is "generative," Tom Froese, a long-time illustrator, said over email. Procreate's statement doesn't address whether the company will ever consider using non-generative kinds of AI, like the kinds that power algorithms in your social media feeds. Still, Froese was surprised by the finality of Procreate's statement.
"While I am a bit skeptical about Procreate's declaration, I do see it as a hopeful sign — that maybe there are more leaders and CEOs who are willing to take a stand against the bad aspects of AI, or at least provide a way for people to exist without it," said Froese.
The advance of generative AI art has been challenging for creators, to put it mildly. AI image generator models use a database of content or scrape the open web for text and image references to create images based on a text prompt. Artists who create that original imagery tend to have little control over how their work is used (or not used) to train AI image models.
"Art theft and plagiarism is already an annoyance for artists the moment we decide to share anything online," said Ramos. "Generative AI made it so much easier for anyone with internet access to just hit a button and steal a style you may have worked your whole life to hone."
It's not just individual creators. Getty Images sued Stable Diffusion, a company whose models are used for several AI art services, including Midjourney, for allegedly training its system on over 12 million of its photos without the proper license. Artists, writers and tech companies duke it out in court over copyright and fair use concerns, but AI services are free to continue operating in the meantime.
Consequently, a barrage of AI-generated content has flooded the internet, from detailed images to memes and political deepfakes. Anyone with an account (and potentially some cash) can create entire images and videos quickly -- even if they're not that good or labeled as such. For some professional creators, this has led to anxiety over getting laid off by AI-enthusiastic executives, Ramos said. For custom content creators like Arpie, it means trying to fight in an increasingly crowded market.
"It feels like every major company is going out of its way right now to introduce generative AI features, while friends and colleagues of mine are losing work and sales to AI-generated garbage posted for pennies on Etsy," said Arpie.
Bigger industry players like Adobe and Canva have been moving full steam ahead on AI, each with an image generator and suite of AI-powered tools. Adobe upset some of its users earlier this year when it updated its terms of service to say it "may access your content through both automated and manual methods" as well as restrict and remove content that violated its terms. The update left users wondering if it gave Adobe unchecked power to review their content. Adobe later clarified that it only scans content stored on its cloud servers, not those stored locally on users' devices, and its image generator, Firefly, is not trained on files in Adobe Cloud. The motivation behind the changes, Adobe wrote, was generative AI and the potential for it to be misused to create illegal content.
Tack on a lawsuit over Adobe's allegedly convoluted cancellation process, and it might have seemed like the right time for Procreate to "differentiate themselves from Adobe in a powerful way," said Froese. While Froese has used Procreate for years and uses it as a teaching tool, Photoshop is his primary illustration tool.
"I still think [Procreate] lacks the power and features many artists need and can only get on their desktop," said Froese. "As much as I'm disappointed in Adobe's practices lately, and as much as I would love to not have to pay their huge subscription, I'm not going to be changing tools anytime soon." Procreate, notably, is only available for Apple's iOS, a long-time user complaint.
It's not hard to see why a company like Procreate might want to save itself AI-induced headaches and score some points with its users, too. Even if it ends up being not much more than a marketing tactic, it seems to have struck a chord with its users and the art community.
"My hope," said Arpie, "is that Procreate will lead the way toward respecting human art and human creativity, which I firmly believe cannot and should not be replaced, or even augmented, by machine learning."
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